Review Summary: Purple Starfish and the Ravedeath Flavored Water
“In the sonic crucible of Ben Frost's
Scope Neglect, music undergoes a metamorphic alchemy.”
The bandcamp blurb is always an interesting, and often revealing element of the promotional circuit. A piece of verbal hype-building, where artists attempt to encapsulate their musical works enough to get people hooked into listening, then hopefully buying, their work. Trying to effectively build hype without turning into an exercise in eyeroll-inducing self-pleasure is a fine line to walk, and often a band has to stumble on either side of that line and risk either under- or over-selling an album. For Ben Frost’s latest release, his first in 6 years, one gets the sense that the sights are aimed almost impossibly high. Using language that might better befit one of the great artistic works of the century, Frost, along with a pair of collaborators, lays out the conceptual intent of his latest work of art.
“Where
Scope Neglect leans sonically into metal - fuelled by progressive metal outfit Car Bomb’s guitarist Greg Kubacki and bassist Liam Andrews of fellow Australians My Disco - its true form seems to draw more upon the transcendental reveries of the West Coast minimalists.”
Alright, on paper it’s at a minimum intriguing. Love Car Bomb, hate Car Bomb their distance from everything Ben Frost’s been doing before now makes a collaboration such an incongruous idea, the curiosity nerves just instantly start tingling at the back of your head. The idea of the sounds of metal as an element applied to the musical language of minimalism (think Reich, Adams, Part, etc.), is one that arouses even deeper interest, an idea that immediately sparks speculation as to what such a composition might sound like, and what it might say. Hecker's been doing similar work with a variety of sources for a while now, so who's to say Frost can't stake his own claim within that field? As the album continues, however, and continues, and continues, the nagging thought tickles, ever more insistently: “
this is what Ben’s putting out after 6 years?”. By the end of Chimera, only two tracks in, it’s already apparent that what’s being done here is going to be neither as bold, nor as interesting as what any of the collaborators have done in their respective projects before.
It should be made clear that I admire this album’s intent. A deconstruction of metal’s elements into the language of minimalism, in order to “reveal crystalline vulnerabilities” sounds like a refreshing experiment, if not a whole new artistic avenue for the genre to explore, one that would contribute to a discourse about some of the underlying elements of a genre as hypermasculine in its expression as metal is. It’s an audacious move for a producer of hard-edged atmospheric ambient to make a nu-metal riff the bedrock of his construction, and that fact alone gives the thing some panache. Ben’s cut-up/blow-up pulsations and ringing blares of sound give a sense of gargantuan space and menace to distorted audio blasts that already draw from that confrontational heart of metal. And, once the bare-bones riff into space that is the album’s opener concludes itself, we get to see that ability on full display once again. And there is a sense of promise to this beginning, as though this is in fact an avenue that Frost is methodically exploring. One gets the sense, or the hope, that the intent of the album is to continuously build upon itself throughout the running length, until we get to a full dive into the breakdown of the idea of the riff, of metal deconstructed and given a new scope and intention.
But, first of all, there is precious little of the West Coast minimalist composers to be found in this thing. The comparison doesn’t even make sense when listening to the album. Yes it pulses sometimes. Music can pulse without being minimalism and if Ben was jamming Steve Reich at the time and decided that that’s the direction he wanted his next album to go in, wonderful. If he decided that making a collection of soundscapes from a handful of nu-metal riffs was a way to incorporate the bare elements of repetition and layered tonal simplicity in a way that is unitive and patient in its development, well, this isn’t it. In context, the comparison feels like a cynical play to make a lack of real musical ideas seem like something intentional, something that has some real weight behind it, an accusation that the minimalists themselves were sometimes compelled to weather, but which fits
Scope Neglect like a glove.
“What at first appears confrontational, and ephemeral, is meditatively and methodically unfolded through time, revealing crystalline vulnerabilities.”
Scope Neglect, painfully, given the above purported methodical unfolding, doesn’t feel like that coherent of a project when all’s said and done. Track after track, we’re treated to either echoing, moody tones or ersatz Wes Borland, which eventually develop into either ersatz Wes Borland or, uh, echoing, moody tones. The chugging idiocy of Tritium Bath is a phenomenal example of just how hard this inherently interesting idea can become a pratfall, and thank god that it doesn’t ever get this superfluous again. But even if the album only hits that low once, how much higher does it ever rise above it? Sure, we still see Frost’s talent at bringing the absolute maximum effect out of a given sound, but is he really the first person to play around with ambient juxtaposed with metal? Every soggy interlude in every vaguely highminded prog-wank chug festival would beg to differ. Just because he made those soggy interludes the heart and soul of his first work in over half a decade doesn’t make this a substantively different animal, whatever the flowery self-aggrandizement of the bandcamp blurb would have you believe.
To draw the threads closed on this tepid, stitched-up mess: as “a dualistic game of obfuscation and obliteration”,
Scope Neglect does in fact live up to the promise of the bandcamp blurb, perhaps for the first time in the whole multi-paragraph autofellatio exercise, but only in the sense that the album is obfuscated behind layers of conceptual wank, and that any interest in this project is obliterated by the bare facts of the music itself. It's not entirely an exercise in futility; a talent like Ben Frost isn't able to totally obscure itself, but given that it took this many years to release what is probably the disappointment of his career, it isn't too far from it.
