Artist: Nefarious Scorn
Country: Canada
Label: Pain Chain Productions
Formats: CD
Year: 2025
The Canadian Raw Black Metal act Nefarious Scorn is born out of the minds of two musicians who are also active in some other bands and projects, together forming quite an interesting circle of musical activities. While most of them sound rather different from each other, they seem to share a certain penchant for unpleasant and downright harsh soundscapes. Drummer/vocalist Tormented Victimizer has her own impressive musical resume of which Starcave Nebula by far is the best known, while Sodomized Executioner (guitars/vocals) has Pillagery as his other outlet.
If you’ve heard any of Nefarious Scorn’s material before, you may have noticed this too. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that Nefarious Scorn is something of a bastard son, born of precisely those two spirits. Admittedly, the improvised character of the music might lean mostly towards that of T.V.’s Starcave Nebula. Especially when she’s adding some of her recognizable icy howls and that overall eerie quirkiness that so typifies anything that’s she’s done with Starcave Nebula. Yet, S.E.’s more beefy riffs definitely gives Nefarious Scorn an identity of its own and it is not just a second Starcave Nebula.
Although the band has been around only for a couple of years now, initiated around the Covid pandemic, there’s already a considerable discography to delve into. But as you go along, you also learn that every release actually sounds slightly different. Not so much in terms of the musical formula, which is actually surprisingly steady, but more in the overarching cosmetics. If you were to compare ‘Warriorization Of The Black Pentagram’ to ‘The Rogue Of Satan’ or, in particular, the extremely raw demo ‘Unholy Passion – The Devil’s Purist’, which was released shortly thereafter, this latest work is a lot easier to digest. That is not to say that they’ve U-turned it into a much cleaner production, this is just sounding more balanced and with lot less background noise. But, those who love their old school Raw Black Metal are still in for a treat as this is pretty much a rehearsal recording.
That brings me to the overall feeling that ‘Warriorization Of The Black Pentagram’ conveys. The scarce online reactions and comments about this band all revolve around their sense of 90s Black Metal authenticity. That is difficult to deny, but although there is a clear dependence, whether conscious or not, on the musical legacy of Les Légions Noires, who did not shy away from experimentalism and improvisation either, Nefarious Scorn also fits perfectly into the contemporary Raw Black Metal constellation. Especially in the years leading up to the turn of the 2020s, there was a huge surge of (mostly one-man) bands that more than embraced the lo-fi aesthetic of the Black Metal genre and turned it into a real underground hype. That baggage can also be heard in the overall sound of Nefarious Scorn, which comes to fruition in a completely unique way on this latest album, which is undoubtedly the duo’s strongest material to date.
