It's going to sound silly, but in recent months, Scarling has taken on Moby Dick-like proportions in my life. They were that band that everyone told me I absolutely had to listen to, and each time I heard this, I grew a bit more reluctant to bother for no solid reason other than the fact that I hate to be told what to do. As per usual, though, I caved under pressure and gave So Long, Scarecrow, Scarling's latest offering, a try.
I won't say I wasn't skeptical. If song-titles are anything to judge by - and let's be honest, we all do this from time to time - all the visual cues were present for a tedious flashback to the worst moments of the rocking, radical feminist agendas of the 1990's. Being somewhat past those adolescent years of unadulterated and self-absorbed anxiety, I found myself wondering what songs called "Stapled to the Mattress" and "Manorexic" could possibly contribute to my life as a music fan. It all seemed a bit painfully obvious at first glance, and I found myself kind of willing the album to failure. I had to ask myself: is there anything left to add to a genre that, to my mind, kind of reached its pinnacle when L7 started flinging used tampons at the audience, and its nadir when Courtney Love made her debut on BadPlasticSurgery.com?
Well, duh. Of course there's stuff to add. And whole new chunks to be carved out. As it happens, I made all the wrong assumptions based on a half-assed first impression. We aren't in Seattle any more. And, baby, Scarling's Jessicka is not that kind of grrrrl.
Dark and sludgy in spots, like the muddy bits in an ultra-modern landscape, So Long, Scarecrow gives a bit more to the listener than some of us have come to expect from noise-driven droning albums that seem to compel navel-gazing. The challenge, to which Jessicka and bandmates Rickey Lime (guitar), Christian Hejnal (guitar), Beth Gordon (drums) and Derick Snell (bass) have so capably risen, seems to have been to steer us away from the one-dimensional self-indulgent winging that can plague albums seemingly fuelled by introspective musings, and give us a glimpse of a bigger picture in which emotional politics are played out in territories at once both familiar and strange.
It was a great choice to kick the album off with the wistful and compelling "Hello, London", a marvelously sweet and ethereal ode to environment and identity. "City Noise" blends in with the opening track seamlessly, pursuing themes of absence and presence. This track is echoed very effectively towards the album's completion in "We are the Music Makers."
The thirty seconds of "Teenage Party Letdown" are impressively awkward and painful (and you just know this is intentional rather than accidentally cringe worthy), and this quickly transitions into the effervescent "Bummer"- a well-placed bright and witty spot in the middle of the albums track list. It seems the album could really end with the rocking "We are the Music Makers", but by closing with the languid and bare "So Long, Scarecrow," Scarling effectively create a fairly structured experience, encouraging you to give the first track another listen and start the whole thing over again.
The focus here is on the isolation that breeds, even within close relationships, in a modern, urban world that teems with people and their average problems. The presentation of themes is expansive and inclusive, rather than isolating, and this is what gives this album a leg up amongst less carefully crafted peers. The thirteen tracks stretch and blur into each other at points, but this is purposefully executed, and works to create a kind of cyclical journey through a varied yet consistent soundscape. The noisy, poppy and chaotic music is completely in keeping with the themes, and Jessicka's plaintive, crystal clear vocals are at once mature and distant, but still painfully rooted in the human experience.
The songs have a wasted and anonymous feel, but also have intensely personal qualities that, at times, provide startlingly insightful windows into something larger. So Long, Scarecrow retains the clever edginess of Scarling's previous efforts, but expresses them in an entirely differently way. Pithy and brutal in its delicate fashion, this is an album for the grown-up shoe-gazer, who wants to contemplate the concepts at length and dwell on the details.
