Review: Posset – SCUM (Index Clean, Jan 27)

Is the tribute album a lost art? Was it ever an art to begin with? If it wasn’t, it is now. This deconstructed love letter to Napalm Death’s cornerstone grind record redefines what it means to pay tribute to a work of art: to celebrate the reasons it’s so important to you while also injecting your own ideas, to tease out subtle undercurrents and extrapolate them into full-fledged reimaginings. Foreshadowed by “Reading the track list for Napalm Death’s ‘Scum’ into a broken tape recorder” off 2018’s Totally Corporate!, SCUM is perhaps what Joe Murray’s decades-spanning work as Posset has always been leading toward. The Newcastle dictaphone wizard details his “forensic” approach to this massive undertaking in the release notes: “…considered listening, pen in hand, marking up file cards for each of the twenty-eight songs. What was I hearing here? What stood out? Was it dynamic tension and release, sharp changes in velocity, a rare disembodied guitar solo or a grumpy mammoth hum? The more I listened, the more I imagined I heard the band’s hidden structures and intentions; small cells of ideas moving from song to song.” He then stitched the tracks together from their dissected pieces, each one a miniature sonic Frankenstein’s monster, a self-contained universe of free-associative antilogic. The eclecticism at work is immediately apparent from the first few tracks: “Multinational Corporations” is classic Posset, complete with lip smacking and hissing analogy humidity; “Instinct of Survival” is a straightforward (albeit ramshackle) rendition with vocals and acoustic guitar; and “The Kill” is somewhere in between. The curious are likely to jump straight to “You Suffer,” and will be surprised to learn that it’s the longest track on the whole disc. Because this is not a collection of covers, but rather the blackened remnants left behind if Scum were boiled on a greasy stovetop—a reverse distillation, a makeshift magnifying glass put to what Murray cites as the essence of the iconic LP: “a moment of existential terror bathed in the weak Midlands sunlight.”