Hey, everyone. T Swift here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Scarcity album, The Promise of Rain.

Yes, here we have the second full-length LP from experimental black metal outfit, Scarcity, their latest offering on the Flenser. I was pretty excited for this one because it seemed like based on the teasers, the band was doing something adventurous for the genre with bright, searing, dense layers of guitar, sometimes mathematical grooves, some nods toward death metal, and all of that and more I was excited to see play out creatively across this project.

The entire record kicks off with the very thrilling but also unforgiving "In the Basin of Alkaline Grief", which is this electrifying combination of sounds starting with furious blast beats, topped with these offset, dueling dissonant guitar lines that sound like two different sirens going off at once. And also swelling up in the background occasionally, what sounds like the strings that you would hear out of a horror film soundtrack. It's a pretty varied performance in terms of pacing and dynamics as well. A lot of switch-ups. So while it is grating, it's also a lot of different kinds of grating that keeps things interesting and lights my brain on fire and makes me feel as if I am trapped on a stranded spaceship that is being slowly infiltrated by blood-sucking aliens. And the lyrics, if you read into them, are pretty tortured and disturbing as well.

From here, the heat gets turned up even further on the longer and more versatile "Scorched Vision", where the guitar work is actually even mathier and more dissonant, bringing just more intense emergency vibes. This builds up and quickly transitions eventually into these thrilling riff passages. Then from there, more outright dissonance, some thunderous doomy death metal sections, too. Then topping things off with this total wall of dissonant guitars that makes me feel like I'm just in an endless vertigo spiral, falling at top speed to infinity. Things circle back to those heavier riff passages that I said were so cathartic earlier. Despite the song being as long as it is, there's a lot of focus and cohesion to it.

So I mean, these two tracks, in my opinion, are just an amazing way to kick this record off. Some of the most thrilling black metal I have heard in a minute it. But my main issue with the record is that it starts off with a lot more piss and vinegar than it ends with. Because from here we go into the track "Subduction", which is a slower, spacier, shorter offering in the tracklist, which I could see the overall function of in that it is a breather moment after two long, very intense tracks. But even if it is slower, that doesn't mean it needs to be forgettable per se, because it's not really a lot about the droning walls of guitar on this one that sticks with me.

Then from there, we have the track "Undertow", which to its credit, it does bring the intensity back up, but it goes about it in a way that incorporates pretty much the same repeating, dueling, siren guitar thing. It does that over again without much in the way of any major change to actually make circling back around on it worth it, even if the two different vocal styles coalescing at certain points on the song was a sick idea.

The band gets more ambitious again on the song length side with the track "Venom and Cadmium". But sadly, this track, while also being one of the meatier cuts here, is also one of the more tedious listens too, as all of the mid-paced root note riffs and very steady double bass grooves just don't really bring as much flavor as the first two tracks on the record. Even the third track on the record, in my opinion, though, I do respect the increasing heaviness that the song brings to the table as it progresses.

The only other major promising moment on the album, in my opinion, is the closing title track, which brings things back into speedy, intense, experimental, varied, atmospheric black metal territory. The whole piece is an intense roller coaster of blast beats, tremolo picked guitars, vein-popping screams, too, and the strings seem to be back. There are some pretty righteous rift sections on the song as well. I just wish every pocket of the album was this exciting and eventful.

So I mean, overall, with this record, I think half the tracks were pretty great. The other half were just okay, but at least the tracks that I really favored made up more than half of the album's run time. And the lowest moments, while they are a little drab, they're still very much listenable and don't necessarily completely throw off the momentum of the album.

But yeah, there's some great, unique and intense experiments and ideas on this record that are performed really well. I just feel like overall, the record could have pushed it a little bit further at some points because on some songs, it really feels like the band is firing on all cylinders. On others, they're just pulling back a bit too much.

Still, feeling a light to decent 7 on this one.

Anthony Fantano. Scarcity. Forever.