Album Graveyard: Scar Culture - “Inscribe”

Taking a trip back to 2001, you’ll see that there are very few new death metal bands. Nearing the millennium the world of extreme music needed a fresh new view on all things heavy in general. Stirring in the underground were modern hardcore bands such as Hatebreed. The newly forged emocore band Poison The Well was working their way up. Melodic death metals influence was being found on North American shores with bands like Shai Hulud and Prayer For Cleansing. The artistic styling of Converge was about to hit us. It was about time for the brutal style of death metal to finally leave it’s mark. This is where Scar Culture and Lamb Of God/Burn The Priest come in. The first and only album by Scar Culture provides us with a potent focused mixture of death metal, grind and hardcore. The Lamb Of God/Burn The Priest releases certainly had all the elements of death metal, grind and hardcore, but they were mixed with many other elements. Lamb Of God’s strength would come from their culmination of eclectic mixes and song writing rather than an all out sonic assault.

The first song is an onslaught by Scar Culture, generally pretty blazing and has a lot of low end heaviness. Quite often, they’ll throw in an unexpected twist, like some artificial harmonics, some dissonant tones, the odd melody hidden in a song or two, and old school thrash riff, and there’s even some clean singing hidden underneath one of the songs.

Vocalist Pheroze rips out a lot of mid ranged to high screaming, and very nice contrast to a lot of death metal related bands who portray their message through ultra low death burps.

The trip can be fun while you’re there, but overall, the song writing lacks a little depth. What this band does that earns a small place in history is to focus on the main points on a creature that will ultimately become the genre of “deathcore”.

If you manage to find this album, it’ll probably be found in the used section of a CD store. One song worth mentioning I found was “Dead Alone” if you can find some mp3s, I would suggest that one, although “Keep It To Myself” another one of the better songs on the album used to be available for download, and would probably be the easiest to find.

After getting a new vocalist and doing a small portion of touring, (Scar Culture did a tour with Killswitch Engage with Jesse Leach on vocals, Hypocrisy and Soilwork) they eventually broke up, citing not enough time, and that the songs had become too much like metalcore.

6/10