Reviews: Pyrrhon/Scarcity
These blurbs originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market.
Scarcity – “The Promise Of Rain”
In “Tales From an Attic,” a piece published in the American Scholar on what to do with patients’ suitcases discovered at the shuttered Willard Asylum, writer Sierra Bellows grappled with empathy, particularly how to process such an intimate glimpse into strangers’ lives. “Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life,” Bellows wrote. “That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.”
Scarcity’s second album, The Promise of Rain, touches on that kind of consolation. One could say it’s what kickstarted its genesis. Because what is a band if not a partnership uniting many lives?
When it came time to play shows in support of its outstanding debut, Aveilut, Scarcity expanded into a full band. Joining Brendon Randall-Myers (guitars) and Doug Moore (vocals) were Dylan DiLella (guitars), Tristan Kasten-Krause (bass), and Lev Weinstein (drums). Reproducing Aveilut, an intense album with many sonic layers, became a test of the new quintet’s chops. “I think all of us enjoyed the sicko challenge of playing [Aveilut],” Randall-Myers said to fellow Stereogum frequenter Brad Sanders in a Decibel article. The well-received live shows became a testament to the talent of its players, turning a purposefully introspective work into something that meaningfully resonated with packed audiences.
When the sickos expressed interest in recording an album, Randall-Myers started writing new music. Where Aveilut looked inward, using its multivarious density to mirror the stages of grief, The Promise of Rain looks outward. The band had the stage in mind and carried that energy into the studio, producing an immediate-feeling record that sounds like you’re sitting in the room with the members. And Scarcity is playing more streamlined and stickier music, too, a commitment to hookiness that extends to Randall-Myers and DiLella’s riffs and leads, Kasten-Krause and Weinstein’s rhythms, or Moore’s singing. “This time, when I was composing the vocals,” Moore told Decibel, “it was meant to be catchier, more intelligible to the human ear, and therefore easier to perform.” (Doug used to write this column, which is why Scarcity is in the bonus section.)
Still, this is Scarcity. Abrasive riffs strobe like an alarm and pulse like a fear-flooded heart, creating a cacophonous call and response. Blast beats blow through like gales. Screams incinerate your eardrums. It might be catchier, but it’s no less powerful, flexing the same patient build and forceful kineticism as a high-category hurricane. But, like Aveilut, The Promise of Rain allows Scarcity to work stuff out below the maelstrom.
The incredible artwork by Christian Degn Petersen is based on a photo snapped by Caroline Harrison during a 2023 trip with Moore to the arid Mojave Desert in southern Utah, a wind-blown biome with mesas and spires jutting out from the ground like burrs on goathead seeds. “To thrive in the desert is an act of abnegation,” Moore noted in The Promise of Rain‘s promo copy, “you do right by the land and receive its gifts, or it does away with you.”
The Promise of Rain‘s title track explores whether to receive the gifts or be swept away. It’s definitely desert-y if you want it to be. Kasten-Krause and Weinstein’s ever-present undulating rhythms could represent the pervasive heat, forcing its way even into the shadows. Randall-Myers and DiLella’s guitars could represent various elements of erosion carving out the landscape. And Moore’s screams could represent the living beings that find themselves in this harsh environment.
But Scarcity’s strength is leaving the music open to interpretation. To my ears, “The Promise of Rain” feels so much like finding acceptance in one’s given situation. Unlike The Promise of Rain‘s opener, the thrillingly caustic “In The Basin Of Alkaline Grief,” Randall-Myers and DiLella’s riffs feel more in sync, giving the song a more assured, unified quality. Then, there are the lyrics, some of the best of Moore’s career. “For I, too, am marred and strange,” he sings. “By sun and wind and stars deplored/ A vagrant flood, a moth to flame,/ Adoring your unearthly forms.”
Life can feel like a desert in this modern age that prioritizes disconnection. Finding like-minded souls can feel few and far between when you’re navigating the various mesas and spires, the joys and sadness, on your path. But, like how a desert is full of life if you look for it, what if those souls are there and you’re not open to the gift? Acceptance and empathy, then, open you up to those other lives, those similarly marred and strange. Because when you live in a desert, isn’t the chance of another day with another life the same as the promise of rain?
Pyrrhon – “Not Going To Mars”
My favorite riff of the year kicks in at 1:43. That part of “Not Going To Mars” is Malignancy practicing in a tour van with serious transmission issues, a herky-jerky, neck-snapping, magically swinging storm of guitar wees and woos. It’s preceded by a section with the sky-rending qualities of a meteor shower destroying Today is the Day’s In The Eyes Of God. It’s followed by a comparatively contemplative section that could be Converge and Deadguy talking each other into starting a bar fight. The whole song is noise rock meets death metal, like if Cherubs and Suffocation were the main characters in Face/Off. Then again, it’s really none of those things. “Not Going To Mars” is pure Pyrrhon through and through.
“I’m not sure we really introduced many new ingredients on this album, though we perhaps arranged them a little differently,” singer and former Black Market column leader Doug Moore told Lelahel Metal about Exhaust, Pyrrhon’s fifth full-length. “For me, the defining quality of Exhaust relative to our prior albums is its focus and concision. There might be a bit more noise rock in there than before as well, but who’s counting?”
Well, Exhaust does a lot of counting. It’s keeping the score. The album is about getting older and the eroding external forces, the wave after wave of near-invisible indignities, that turn a boulder into a grain of sand. It’s about counting the days while the flames of burnout grow ever higher. And yes, as the would’ve-killed-on-Car-Talk double-entendre album title makes clear, it’s counting the miles between the beginning and the end of this long, lonesome journey, because if there’s one thing for certain, there’s going to be an end. “Gonna go, gonna go ’til I’m totaled,” Moore sings on “Out Of Gas,” the builds-to-a-blowout, no-wavey midpoint of Exhaust that is anything but a rest stop. “No respite at the end of this tunnel/ Just glare from a pair of headlights.”
Then again, for all of its downers, for all of its examinations of the lonelier side of life, from the curtain call for hopes and dreams of “Strange Pains” to the chewed-up-by-CTE Chuck Bednarik obit of “Concrete Charlie” to the self-medicating oneself to death of “Hell Medicine,” Exhaust is about the New York quartet coming together, too. Composed during a band-building sojourn to the beautiful, untouched Eden of [checks notes] northeastern Pennsylvania, Pyrrhon reconvened to find itself once more. The closeness kicked up a static-charge-esque spark that relit the band’s creativity. What came out of the togetherness is the most immediate and concentrated album of Pyrrhon’s career.
“Exhaust sounds like a band playing together, which is tough for a technical experimental death metal band,” guitarist Dylan DiLella explained to Justin Norton in a great writeup for the album’s liner notes. “That’s always been our goal, but we haven’t achieved it until this record. It’s our tightest record, but in some ways, it’s also the loosest. It’s easy to forget about the burning passion we all had when we started this band. We are all passionate music fans, and that is channeled into this band. We just have recently realized how lucky we are to have Pyrrhon.”
We’re lucky to have Pyrrhon, too. Listening to bassist Erik Malave’s dirty-as-a-city-rat buzz, guitarist Dylan DiLella’s lemon-juice-in-the-wound chaos engine squalls, singer Doug Moore’s stalked-by-a-psychotic-break layered screams, and drummer Steve Schwegler’s muscularly multifaceted carpet-bombing rhythms is like hearing this kind of metal’s past and future in one package. Everyone turns in career-best performances, which is no small feat considering that some members feature on two or three other records that should be shortlisted at the end of the year. Even Pyrrhon’s fifth member, artist Caroline Harrison, adorns Exhaust with one of her finest album covers, a simultaneously stunning and appalling memento mori of city life. It just is Pyrrhon.
So yes, Exhaust is Pyrrhon through and through. It’s a band flexing its singular ability to channel the too-real rot of reality into the music that possesses the same clarifying effects of a near-fatal car crash. Same as it ever was. But no, like how time changes us all, this is a different Pyrrhon, too. “I like to think that we also have a clearer sense of who we are, and how to get the most out of our efforts when we make them,” Moore explained to Lelahel Metal regarding the band’s trajectory. “Beyond that, we wake up earlier and have more joint pain than we did in 2008.” Sure. But if I may, let me float this idea: If Pyrrhon can rage against the dying of the light this hard, finding its best self in midlife when so many other facets of culture believe you already have one foot six feet deep when you cross the age of 25, then Exhaust is a compelling reason to keep waking up. Can I prove it? Yeah. My favorite riff is right there. And I want to hear it again tomorrow and the day after that until I can’t anymore.