That double disc re-issue of Evanescence/Ellipsis that Earache out out at the end of '09 compelled me to dig up the rest of Scorn's Earache output so I could get them in the bins here at C-Blast; the earlier, heavier Scorn stuff is some of my favorite music from Mick Harris's long-running industrial dub project, and we've had a lot of our customers asking about the hard-to-find Scorn stuff ever since the reissue set was listed. Much of Scorn's early 90's catalog is out-of-print now, but I was able to get several of their albums, including the amazing Colossus, the Deliverance reissue, a few copies of the rare Gyral album, and the debut album Vae Solis, which has seemed to have slipped into obscurity in recent years. I hardly ever hear anyone talk about this particular album, which is surprising seeing as how it not only features the entire lineup of Napalm Death's a-side of Scum (Nic Bullen, Mick Harris, Justin Broadrick), but is also a crushing slab of post-Godflesh industrial dub metal that newer fans of Godflesh, Swans and Pitch Shifter should be going apeshit over. The rest of these albums are equally rad, if you're into this kind of dark, doom-laden industrial dub/trip-hop; along with Painkiller/Bill Laswell, Techno Animal and Ice, Scorn was one of the most fearsome practitioners of post-industrial dub in the 90's, fusing grim electronic ambience with dub-heavy break beats and spacey effects. All of these discs are big favorites of mine.

1994's Colossus is an absolute must-have if you're a fan of Scorn's seminal industrial dub; this is the album where former Napalm Death members Mick Harris and Nic Bullen fully shook off the thrash elements of their Vae Solis debut and immersed themselves fully in their bleak, often nightmarish apocalyptic dub soundscapes, combining distorted guitar and hypnotic bass lines with skittering programmed beats, pounding industrial rhythms and sampled percussion slathered in reverb and delay, the crushing mechanical break beats and dubby snare hits slithering and snaking across the fields of dystopian ambience and dark electronic textures. You can still hear hints of Godflesh in Scorn's sound on the album, but the crushing riffage has been almost completely replaced by a thick bass-driven throb, the sound much more spacious and bleak than before. These eleven tracks are lumbering, monolithic slabs of pulsating darkness, massive slow motion break beats and glacial snares hammering out a trance inducing groove through super-heavy tracks like the guitar-strafed "Crimson Seed", the black acid dub of "Scorpionic" and the delirious doom of "Nights Ash Black". A few passages of beatless industrial ambience arise (the coruscating metallic shimmer of "Sunstroke", and the dark isolationist expanse of "Little Angel", which moves the album briefly into Lull/Lustmord territory), but Colossus is mostly a massive beat-driven experience, sludgy and druggy and mesmerizing. A personal favorite.