Reviews – Slime Of The Times

Mat McNerney is a tricky man to pin down. Best known for his current bands GRAVE PLEASURES and HEXVESSEL, but also formerly with CODE, DØDHEIMSGARD and many more, the Finland-based Brit has become one of the underground’s most intriguing figures. Largely based in the worlds of black metal and post-punk, his recent output has been of a uniformly high quality, and his voice — which ranges from barbarous, blackened screams through to a sonorous, shadowy gothic bellow — is one of heavy music’s most unmistakable. Fans of his work with GRAVE PLEASURES will be particularly delighted by SCORPION MILK; a solo project that draws from the same gloomy well of inspiration, but with all the polish and big label sonics stripped away.

“Slime Of The Times” is therefore exactly what we might expect from this restless soul, but also a significant enough diversion to rattle a few cages along the way. Raw and brittle-sounding, but brimming with (post-)punk energy, these songs sound like the work of a man with too much on his mind funneling his darkest thoughts into a new, brutalist vehicle. The grim clank of the early industrial scene hovers in the air, and the stripped-down vitriol spray of anarcho-punk and the spindly menace of early gothic rock are all conspicuous by their presence here, too. “All The Fear” even has the thudding tribal drums of SOUTHERN DEATH CULT, but here the momentum is harder and faster, and McNerney‘s intuitive knack for hooks whips everything into a sharply accessible rush of discontent. Less accessible than anything on GRAVE PLEASURE‘s big label blowouts, it has him screaming into the void, resigned to his furious fate, and ends abruptly, in a crumpled, bruised heap. “The Will to Live” takes off at a more purposeful, grinding pace, with inevitable shades of KILLING JOKE in the guitars, but McNerney‘s Jekyll and Hyde vocal delivery emerging entwined and eerily edifying.

Just as HEXVESSEL‘s sound has succumbed to the lure of the left-hand path in recent times, SCORPION MILK makes like its creator’s long dark night of the soul. “She Wolf of London” is a knowingly goofy horror story but set to motoring shards of bloody steel. McNerney plays narrator, but no one is safe from the cryptid’s jaws here, and the nervy terror in his voice adds to the thrill. In contrast, “Another Day Another Abyss” is brisk and funky like GANG OF FOUR circa “Songs of the Free”, which is never a bad thing. Speed-guzzling goths will dance themselves to death over it. Meanwhile, the tone darkens for “Wall To Wall”; a claustrophobic swirl of doomed psych that revels in profanity and cherishes the robust thud of fist on face. McNerney‘s howls echo the song’s pitch-black gait, emerging from the noise like the desperate cries of a nefarious polemicist. Sinking ever further into heaviness, the title track is a stealthy stomp with a lust for dissonance, its jarring guitar work bubbling and festering like the Devil’s hate syrup. Whether or not McNerney has personally abandoned all hope is a moot point: SCORPION MILK are simply mirroring the darkness back at us, and cackling amid stupefying melancholy, as we all circle the plughole together.

The final strait is positively demonic. “Silver Pigs” is a nasty, post-punk-as-pugilism burner, with jagged riffs and sardonic demands to “Be happy!” that acknowledge that it’s far too late in the day for any such thing. “All Snakes No Ladders” has a tangible air of SISTERS OF MERCY‘s early material, but once again McNerney dominates the foreground with an urgent, blank-eyed vocal that weaves in and out of the spidery riffs with chilling persistence. The closing “Children are Dust” allows the melancholy floodgates to open, dropping the pace to a subzero, glacial drift, but injecting some last-ditch humanity into SCORPION MILK‘s faithless slither into the abyss. Wherever this journey takes him, McNerney has kicked off his latest project with his usual, classy intensity.