Somnambule - Writing About Music

Scorn ~ Plan B

Heavy, heavy bass worries my abdomen. Worry is the operative word here from the get go (as in anxious, wired, troubled, agonized). Bass comes on like a big voracious worm intent on snaffling your innards.

I don’t know what plan a was, but it evidently failed. Badly. Result appears to have been some kind of cataclysm. plan b is here to sort things out. It’s not at all clear whether it can, but it has enough strength and a seriousness of intent to have the best hope.

This is the soundworld of Tekken, Tetsui, Terminator. Bass comes on like it wants to invade your place, irresistible like a tsunami caught in slow-mo. Give yourself up to it, let it drown you in its liquid plasticity, maybe you’ll get reborn as something else, something that can fly up above the tidal wave and spy an island to light upon. Feels like there won’t be much land left though. Scorn give you a taxonomy of bad bass (as in dread, trepidation, alarm).

This is absolutely lovely stuff, when it comes on, it comes on and makes you smile for the sheer power of it. Scorn are evidently in Control. Scorn deliver changes frugally to achieve maximum effect, to elicit just the right reaction. The pace is predominantly slow to medium, the pace of an advancing army. No compromise here, little likelihood of defeat. Listen to this in your tank.

plan b is in full effect.
Colin Buttimer
October 2002
Published by the BBC