17:53 // July 25th, 2025 // Closed Casket Activities
Beneath any illusion that there’s meaning to be found at the bottom of suffering, Scalp are a band with no intention of seeking transcendence, instead, they just dig deeper. Whatever the genre taxonomy, the California quartet draws inspiration only from the grimiest corners of the underground: borrowing grindcore’s speed, death metal’s density, and hardcore’s stranglehold aggression for a destructive concoction of aural violence, fueled by clear incentives of no patience and no mercy. Since 2020’s debut album Domestic Extremity, the band has kept sharpening its blade without dulling its rage as we come head to head with third full length Not Worthy of Human Compassion, a wall of maddened fury straight out of the OC gutters.
The record features a chunky, metallic sound of highly compressed hostility that juggles grind and death metal with a considerable amount of hardcore punk, while deploying mid-tempo breakdowns like sinkholes between jets of speed. Nails inevitably comes to mind, especially during the volatile tempo changes, yet those appreciative of the raw, urban-city angst of bands like Gulch or Ingrown will find much to admire in every fissure of this album. In the opener “TARMLAC”, it all starts with an unsettling sample recording taken from “The Hippie Temptation” (a ‘60s film trying to terrorize you to not indulge in psychedelics) on top of a middle-paced sludgy garniture, yet it’s just the introduction of what’s pretty much a maelstrom of torn-apart songcraft in a short, convulsive burst of a total of almost 18 minutes.
Every instrument sounds like it’s about to fail, and Scalp’s knack for anti-accessibility is commendable. The band excels at discharging an unrelenting groove galore in tracks like “CROWSFOOT” and “EGODEATH”, or frenzied microdoses of agony in the grindcore slashers “LOATHER” and “SURROGATEVICTIM”, while the heaviest, most gravity-bending breakdowns can be found at the album highlight “SHACKLEROT”. I was delighted to hear John Hoffman’s guest vocals on “80ACRESOFHELL”, even if only briefly, who I had missed since the disbanding of the leading powerviolence act Weekend Nachos almost 10 years ago. As with the album’s introduction and the very first moments of this track, Scalp add salt to the skin peeling process by employing disturbing spoken word samples, most notably with the interlude “UNTITLED”, that contains snippets easily found online if one searches “interview with a catatonic schizophrenic”.
For the most part, Not Worthy of Human Compassion is exceptionally tight and finely structured (as evidenced by how seamlessly it flows, e.g. from the seventh to the tenth track), until right about the end. From “RIGORVIVUS” onward and especially on “DRAG”, the band seemed slightly unsure of how to move forward compositionally, but still that doesn’t spoil the band’s overall massive presence. The very last track “BOTTOMLESS” offers the most exaggerated slowdown moment in the album for maximum impact, and includes a surprise cover of Nirvana’s “Tourette’s” as a secret track a few seconds after what would otherwise be closure. I have always appreciated Cobain’s vocal intensity in this particular piece, and it sounds just about right executed by this kind of band.
With Not Worthy of Human Compassion, Scalp delivers another bruisy entry of scorched-earth grindcore / death metal, stripped of any lingering humanity and hateful to its cracked bones. It hits hard, it ends fast, and thankfully doesn’t blur its own outlines from the sheer relentlessness. Punk cadences with the sporadic sludge seep churn beneath the reverberating guitar rubble, vocals from a severed larynx trying to form words, a wrecking heft in the stomach, and bile bubbling up through bloodied teeth on the floor. Human compassion is dead, and this is its eulogy.
8.5/10
this sounds precisely up my alley, stoked to check it out.
Interesting review!