Scarcity is a collaboration of two significant musical talents. Brendon Randall-Myers is a multi-instrumentalist, a composer and the conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble. Doug Moore is also skilled with numerous instruments, but here he exclusively employs his voice, as he does for the proggy metal outfit Pyrrhon. In very different ways, Pyrrhon and the Glenn Branca Ensemble invite the descriptor “avant-garde”: Branca’s music had high modernist ideas that suit the phrase’s import in its strong artistic sense; in the case of Pyrrhon, writers have used the phrase for lack of any other, hoping to capture something of the band’s maniacally shifting structures and general stylistic wackiness (something like a death-metal Mr. Bungle, and way too wacky for this writer). Scarcity is equally invested in the conceptual rigor signalled by avant-garde ambitions, but the project’s metal intensities are considerably more focused. They play black metal, with very effective intensity.
Listeners familiar with Glenn Branca’s music will have some idea of Scarcity’s essential sonic method: lots of guitar tracks, in lots and lots of layers. But rather than the accumulated sheets of grating dissonance Branca frequently built, Scarcity seems primarily interested in movement: the implacable, grinding sway of the opening minutes of “II,” the keening rush of “III,” the subsequent song’s collapse into long, drawn-out exorcisms of agony. Pace stages the record’s shifts in mood, more than melodic gestures or clearly articulated themes. Moore’s contributions are less varied; he confines himself to harsh shrieks and growls, but he gets a fair amount of range within those vocal parameters. His voice grounds the record in black metal’s traditions, moreso than the guitars, which verge into industrial pulses or graceful undulations. None of it is pretty, but the sounds explore the semantic range of the term “moving.” Clearly there is a powerful array of emotions being expressed.
“Aveilut” is the Hebrew word for “mourning,” a staged spiritual and ritual process in Judaism. Jewish folk do mourning with real collective care—see the emphasis on community support during the period of shiva, and also shemira’s insistence that the body of the deceased not be alone. We needn’t linger on the obvious: that there has been too much death, and that during COVID’s awful peaks, too many deaths happened in miserable loneliness. Given the music’s severity, we might assume that Scarcity have engaged the desperations, deprivations and despair that accompany death. Randall-Myers’ playing is suggestive; it’s especially telling that the music seems most open to something akin to uplift in “V,” the closing track, which might track alongside a mode of transcendence. A soul’s escape? A mourner’s acceptance?
All that is a lot to hang on a single word, whatever’s the word’s metaphysical density. Moore’s howling and shrieking renders Aveilut’s lyrical content entirely obscure, a standard practice in black metal that has differing reasons, band by band: grandiose “mystery,” attached to a sense of cultic secrecy; misanthropic refusal to engage in collective meaning-making; general interest in the notion of aesthetic extremity. In Scarcity’s case, the words’ illegibility may be a matter of the sublime facts of mortality and mourning. The right words don’t exist, all speech will ultimately fail to meet the subjects’ terrible immensities. The music seems more successful in its grappling with grief and anger and wonder. The guitar tracks are non-representational, and they sing, after a fashion. Their news is not happy, but it’s quite vivid, and even sort of affirming. That may be the most we can ask of any serious music now.
