S.C.A.L.P. ("Sense's Calming At Dead's Lament Places") are a Russian band that has been around for like 20 years, but with the weird name and being from Russia and all, nobody has ever heard of them. This is a reissue of their 1997 debut album Through Eternity, and while there are some good things about it, it has some big, glaring flaws.
Billed as Doom/Death, musically this is much more interesting, with a trad metal riff-style and a lot of mood and shading to the music. The riffs and guitar work are really good on this, atypical and often haunting, with some lovely acoustic breaks. The drawbacks include meandering songwriting that lacks cohesion and vocals that are really aggressively terrible. The vocals are done by former bass player Evgeny Rizhenock, who has apparently passed away since this was recorded, so I feel bad singling him out, but still. In the places here where he sings he sounds okay, as he has a thin but not unpleasant voice. But when he tries to sing more forcefully his rather weak vocal cords cannot take it, and he breaks into this halfway point where he is neither singing nor really growling – he's pretty much sucking.
This is an interesting album of gloomy metal with a lot of talent on display in the instrumental department, but the nonstop vocal awfulness makes it really impossible to listen to for anything a human would call 'pleasure'.
