Scarcity’s 2022 debut, Aveilut, was a startling piece of work: both an immediate sonic gutpunch and a cerebral, strangely calming meditation on loss. Composer Brendon Randall-Myers described the record as a “grief ritual,” and for all its undeniable savagery you definitely got the sense that things were driven by a desperate quest for peace – natural enough for a record born of deep personal sorrow, and backdropped by the COVID era’s unremitting bleakness.
Given the debut’s role as a sort of curative purge, it’s perhaps unsurprising that The Promise Of Rain takes a different tack. It’s hewn from the same material in that Randall-Myers’ experiences conducting the Glenn Branca Ensemble have been refracted through the dark prism of black metal, but here the careful, considered orchestration of Aveilut gives way to coruscating chaos energy.
From the off, there’s a sense that you, the listener, are under attack. Needling, pointilist riffs explode like showers of blinding sparks, microtonal aberrations jar the senses and basslines shift with the gristly clunk of dislocated joints being roughly put back into place. Vocalist Doug Moore (also to be found fronting excellent avant-metal entities like Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores and Seputus) doesn’t so much try to stake out his space as go to war with the other elements, periodically succeeding but more often than not coming across like a giant, furious bat caught in a bead curtain.
Comparisons to the likes of Krallice, Thantifaxath and Imperial Triumphant are appropriate, but amid all the forward-thinking black metal there’s also something here that speaks to post-hardcore’s more dissonant reaches. Part of this is down to the full-band configuration and the album’s raw energy, and past interviews suggest Randall-Myers is certainly as au fait with the sweaty push-and-shove of basement punk gigs as loftier locales like the Barbican. But sonically, too, there are indicators. ‘Scorched Vision’ opens like it could be a Botch song and, later, dives into a springy riff that wouldn’t sound wrong on the second Drive Like Jehu LP. ‘Venom & Cadmium’, meanwhile, begins with a melodic surge and deploys one of hardcore’s most recognisable vocal tropes: the gang back-up.
This said, neither these tendencies – nor the bouts of mysterious, textured ambience; or the borderline-industrial lurches – make The Promise Of Rain any less a black metal record. It’s just one that is less concerned with being a vehicle for accepted orthodoxy than a leaping off point for stranger, more esoteric explorations – and deep, wrenching, genuinely affecting ones at that.
