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Seven pretty poisonous sores. ‘Sweet Heart Dealer’, Scarling’s debut long-player is all at once cruel and beautiful, angelic and demonic. The latest in a long line of ensembles fusing atmospheric goth / shoegaze noise textures to curdling melodies, except in Scarlings case a heavy quotient of mischief, menace and bitterness enter the fray to devastating effect.
Reminiscent of Curve’s darker edges, like Halliday former Jack off Jill starlet Jessicka torments with her alluring sweetly desperate vocals to slowly hook you in to be trounced within an inch of your life by her bruised and wounded inner demons. At just past the 30 minute mark ‘SHD’ serves as a short sharp shock housed in a sleeve depicting the work of artist Mark Ryden it’s brooding, benign and beautiful ‘Can’t (Halloween Valentine)’, swathed in Cathedral-esque stealth like droning feedback and backward vocals loops closes the set with a sense of mournful aftertaste it’s overpowering tenderness is only outweighed by its overbearing sense of detachment, epic as though the word was readily made for it, it serves as a pristine example of dark dream pop at its most woefully scarred. Elsewhere the twisting wrath of the densely choking ‘The last day I was happy’, stalking industrial riffs spontaneously combust to zero in menacingly upon your listening space, imagine the claustrophobic encroaching darkness of Nine Inch Nails ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ warping and picking holes out of Sonic Youth’s mid career crisis ‘Dirty’, elegantly wounding stuff.
‘Band aid covers the bullet hole’ with its Lush-like playground chimes reveals the bands ability to sharpen their claws and yet still remain sleekly poppy enough to hook in the curiosity of the passing crowd, unrelentingly brutal yet adoringly cool. Both ‘Baby Dracula’ and ‘Alexander the burn victim’ recall the Skeletal Family and the March Violets, the latter stings and woos in equal measures with the foreboding chiming chords hanging poised like vultures eying their pray, akin to being out in the wide open in an electrical storm, that sense of unknown wild abandon and naked submission at the hands of some unforgiving force while the latter digs deep below the skin and relentlessly burrows its way to lay its eggs within your fragile psyche. A crushing debut.
MARK BARTON
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