In Memory Of Madness - The Early Years 1994 - 1995 (BadMoodMan Music)

  S.C.A.L.P. (Sense's Calming At Dead's Lament Places) is a veteran Russian band formed back in 1991; this band started its carrier as a primitive Death Metal act, which gradually incorporated several Doom Metal elements to finally became a sort of Doom/Goth hybrid… “In Memory Of Madness…” is, as the album title clearly suggest, an interesting compilation of the band’s first three demos, “CIA”, “Madness Cannibalism” and “Memory”, recorded between 1994 and 1995. As I’ve already mentioned, during these early years, the band showed a clear Death Metal tendency; moving between mid and fast paced structures where the brutal and blurry guitar riffs complemented by a primitive and vicious guttural vocal work, S.C.A.L.P creates crude and violent old-school sounding compositions… Even when this is definitely a straight Death Metal work, there’re some quite interesting Doom Metal insinuations along this album, reminding me at moments (only in a slight manner) the corrosive sound of the fastest passages of Asphyx… The whole album production is, as you probably expected, pretty raw and somewhat saturated, which is kinda obvious considering all these compositions belong to demo tapes recorded early past decade, I don’t know if were remastered or something, but sounds pretty decent, you can still notice we are hearing demos here, but there’s definitely nothing to complain about. Musically there’s actually nothing new or particularly noteworthy here… but is definitely an interesting piece of collectable material, especially for those who follows this band. “In Memory Of Madness…” is limited to 100 copies in Cd-r format, so if you’re looking for the older releases of this Russian band or just digging for old and rare material, this is definitely you chance. (AP)