Review by Rocky on September 27, 2020.

The Scottish death metal band Scordatura will release their new album, Mass Failure on September 25th. The LP is the third studio album by the quartet and will be released under the Gore House Productions label. Initially, those who might be unaware of it should know that their drummer, Tam Moran, is possibly the main conductor of this band and their butchering death metal insanity. Further, Moran, with his style, shows that he isn’t only a drummer, but always makes a strong contribution with other instruments for the overall song structures. As with many other technical or trigger-sounding drums by many other acts, the drummer, most of the time, takes up the whole song with drumming, rather than being a significant part of the whole process. Here, Moran's incorporation of funk influences with traditional groove, all while balancing speed, groove and technique, gets the necessary depth. These butchers of Scordatura play their brutal death metal as a coherent force, being able to successfully create releases like six demos, one EP, and three full-lengths since their inception in 2005.

Whereas most brutal death metal bands in these modern times tend to release many full-lengths and engage in heavy tours, Scordatura takes the classic and traditional path of releasing lots of demos and keeps engaging their followers with full, livelier, and rawer atmospheric songs; they don't white-wash their followers with synthetics or over-produced sounds, which all sound similar. This also explains how they sound so powerful, imposing, and yet coherent. Across nine tracks, in less than 35 minutes, these traits will be evident with tracks like ‘Disease Of Mind’, ‘Nothing But Dust’, ‘Contorted Existence’, ‘The Flesh That Hates’, and ‘Collapse Of Humanity’. Even though the press termed it as ‘brutal death metal,’ in reality, it’s very hard to put them in any specific genre, and it would not be too much to say that the Scots play death, black, thrash, groove, funk, and jazz - where everything crammed into one becomes 34 minutes of sheer blasting, maddening brutality. There is no doubt that Mass Failure was built over the strongest elements from the group’s sophomore album, Self-Created Abyss. The outcome is best defined where you’re pissed off or enraged enough to cause destruction, and, with the imposing vocal delivery (or gut wrenching!) by Daryl Boyce and flesh ripping guitar tonality from Owen McKendrick guitar, there is something for everybody within this release.

With album art by Mark Erskine of Erskine Designs (Display of Decay, Hideous Divinity, Irreversible Mechanism), Mass Failure was recorded, mixed and mastered by Samuel Turbitt at Ritual Studios (Inebrious Incarnate, Ageless Oblivion, Unfathomable Ruination). Despite most of their contemporaries who are littered their lyrics about gore and rape, the Scots seem to be inspired by real-life chaos, corruption, disorder and existential crisis, which can be played in the cramped venues in Glasgow, and whose death metal onslaught will managed to get a respectable pit going early on. If genre staples like, "Liege of Inveracity", "Effigy of the Forgotten", "None So Vile', "Informis Infinitas Inhumanitas", 'A Skeletal Domain", "King of All Kings", "The Vile Conception" and "Sedition" make you sweat drenched and always pleased, then Scordatura shall take their place in your death metal playlist for a long while.

Rating: 8 out of 10