Have listened to this album no end of times lately and am still trying to make up my mind about it. On a purely sonic level, Scapegoat have pounded together a hearty enough LP that improves on their 2008 7″ immeasurably: it’s louder, leaner, and sounds altogether more ferocious, the band blitzing through 20 intentionally lumpen songs that’re all about blown-out guitar lunges, granular, mortar-and-pestle bass runs and prolapse-inducing roars of discontent. On the other hand, though, it’s derivative. Not just slightly, either, but thunderously fucking derivative, the band maintaining such a white-knuckled grip on their Crossed Out / Infest influences that it’s pretty much impossible to tease out any individual sense of self or venture a guess as to what the band might’ve been like if those two great progenitors hadn’t graced the world with their fiery presence. The degree to which you might enjoy this, then, lies not so much in your sense of quality control but in how much tolerance you may have built up – or have left – for nth-generation copyists, albeit in this case ones who’ve not just got their chops down pat but at least seem to be driven by the same sense of world-hating fury that drove their forefathers to such brilliance in the first place.
