On a gray, overcast winter Friday in Austin – Super Bowl weekend and still 70 degrees easy – trucks encircle the Crow’s Nest like Stephen King filming Maximum Overdrive. Scorpion Child himself, frontman Aryn Jonathan Black, pulls up near 10 a.m. in a flurry of hair, tattoos, and a bar owner’s exhaustion and anxiety. I Saw the End as it Passed Right Through Me (pre-order here), the locals’ third full-length and Valentine’s to atomizing the winter in any life, manifests in everything the singer says and does over the next 90 minutes.
Noize in the Attic Records debut following an LP twofer on Nuclear Blast, 2013 debut Scorpion Child and Acid Roulette three years later, I Saw the End as it Passed Right Through Me arrives alive and shrieking nine years after its now middle sibling. If dramaturgy only really offers theatre that ends in either a wedding or funeral, then music sings either love or break-up. Black lost a fiancé, birth mother, and first iteration of the Crow’s Nest to arson leading up to his band’s third album, an absolute heart attack of redemptive, resurrectionist resilience in the face of life’s torture tactics.
Sidewinder riff, reptilian clean delivery, and a predatory tempo that culminates in a sizzling OG solo that sticks a 3:16 landing, “Be the Snake” kills as the adreno-crush opener. “Actress” pulls off a Tears for Fears tingler, but metallic, fast and steely, with a stainless ’80s patina. “Outliers” circles urban metallurgy analogous to Empire-grade Queensrÿche: tensile, underlying balladry detonating a big city banger – gleaming glass and steel malevolence.
All-in and balls out, the exultant “The Starker” skyrockets from Cinderella to Mastodon, Deftones to At the Drive-In.
“This record is painful – lyrically,” says Black, presently down to his “last dollar” in trying to get the Texas state capitol to sign off on a bigger and better bar and live music haven lovingly done up by Black himself in Dracula chic. “Musically, it’s the darkest for sure. It’s got this post-punk, almost darkwave quality to it.
“I write industrial noise on my own, harsh stuff. I have a project in Norway with some of the guys in Gorgoroth called The Ritual. It’s a lot heavier.
“Asa [Savage] and I who started the band, there’s some groups we really like. One is Fields of the Nephilim. How do you describe them? It’s not goth, it’s not rock, it’s not industrial. We also love The Sound and The Chameleons; our previous albums were a little more psychedelic.
“So we’ve had old fans say, ‘Yeah, this is really good,’ and others like, ‘What is this, HIM and Sisters of Mercy trying to play Judas Priest?’
“I’m like, ‘That’s actually pretty good!’ Dark, esoteric rock.”
Watch the video for “Be the Snake” below and sit tight because the full I Saw the End As It Passed Right Through Me LP premiere directly follows it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries