Scope Neglect

Album review

Not counting his extensive soundtrack work and field recordings, Scope Neglect is Ben Frost's first studio full-length since 2017's impressive The Centre Cannot Hold. Featuring Car Bomb guitarist Greg Kubacki and My Disco bassist Liam Andrews, the album deconstructs progressive metal, splintering riffs into jagged shards and reshaping them into suspenseful, cinematic pieces. Opener "Lamb Shift" consists of stark, compressed riffs and kick drums that sporadically stop and restart, leaving lengthy pauses of silence in between, gradually developing barely detectable electronic textures. This leads into "Chimera," a more full-scope piece where the stop-start riffs collide into explosions, and the drama is elevated by the expansive sound design. "The River of Light and Radiation" has a jittery rhythmic framework, but it becomes digitally fragmented and stretched into a jarring buzz. This effect is repeated with such a frequency that one comes to expect it, but there are still other effects and noisy developments that throw the listener for a loop. "Turning the Prism" also has erratic, pounding riffs and bracing waves of distorted synths. The afterglow of the heavier tracks bleeds into the ambient drifting of the album's few calm moments, like "_1993." "Unreal in the Eyes of the Dead" has soft synth ebb-and-flow and a patient pulse that seems informed by Frost's previous collaborations with Swans, except this piece ends before it can build up into an all-consuming maelstrom. Scope Neglect is a disorienting, sometimes deceptive work, but it's thrilling in the way it dismantles genre tropes.

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