Escalpo - .I.

Born in São Paulo in 2020, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, the quartet Escalpo was born with the aim of producing raw, intense punk metal. With this in mind, they have an EP in their discography and have now announced their first studio album. Entitled .I., the material follows Retrocedendo, their debut extended play.

The high-pitched, almost shrill sound of the distortion fills the space with an artificial, manipulative sweetness, like warm sunlight rising from behind the mountains, offering an illusory sense of peace in the midst of armed conflict. Between sudden explosions of penetrating acidity coming from the guitars of Allisson Big Bull and Thiago Franzin, the tinkling of the dome of Jean Novaes' cymbal rings out like bells sounding out a funeral event. Without delay, what could be tasted gradually becomes a single sound. Fast, acidic, raw. Desperate. So desperate that it's not possible to clearly understand what Neri Orleone is saying, just letting the listener identify his guttural, rasping tone, but which, deep down, has a soft essence. Between his roars, Orleone makes Onda De Estupidez into a song that portrays the victory of an umbraline ruler in a country that was falsely seen to be following the path of equality and respect. Vocalizing that, when the conscience of the choices made arrives, there will be no salvation, Onda De Estupidez is a message that, in the midst of hypocrisy, justice will come. It's all in the garb of a virile and purposefully stunning hardcore-stoner-noise.

The base guitar emerges in cynical howls, with clenched eyes bathed in trampled blood. When the lead guitar comes in, however, the melody reveals the silhouette of what was once figurative aggression. Metallized, but still retaining the strident lo-fi hiss, Olhando Pro Chão escapes that deafening noise and rejecting character to take on a curiously more commercial form. However, the 4x4 beat fades away like a breeze at dusk. Reassuming the speed, the melody is perceived among trotting sounds that present a mixture of thrash metal and metal in Olhando Pro Chão, a short track, but which brings even more intensity with the abusive use of double kick drums and an Orleone taking on lacerating and lancinating tones that effortlessly communicate their tone of urgency in a storyline that drinks from the same source as Onda De Estupidez. Bringing the context of life in the third world as an abandoned scenario, forgotten by economic development, but also moral, Olhando Pro Chão is submission. It's manipulation. It's the stupidity of, amidst the hypnotism of a false religion, believing you're making a difference, but actually promoting the same mistake and the same government actions to spread for longer.

With a hardcore punk base, the new dawn presents itself with a curious drama in the midst of its minimized harshness and rawness. Sounding even more melodic, it could be said that Eviscerando O Opressor has this very purpose. With a lyricism that is more decipherable from the lower timbre offered by Bruno Santana in his turn with Orleone, the track brings melodic lines that, as well as reminding the listener of the aesthetics of names like Rise Against, reuses urgency in verses of order and desires for justice. Inciting anarchism like burning flames and deafening thunder, Eviscerando O Opressor is simply resistance to an authoritarian government, intolerant and condescendingly immersed in a senile state of power hunger as a way of hiding the denial of its own congressional rejection.

With a beginning similar to that of Onda De Estupidez, the new dawn manages to be even more raw, acidic, strident and with extra hints of bitterness. With these ingredients, a more mass appeal is added to the recipe. Curiously, the song has a penetrating dark air that refreshes the listener's mind with Marilyn Manson's songwriting style, a factor that is maintained throughout Desconstrução / Destruição, even as it tangles acidity, rawness and harshness in such a way as to bring in slight influences from Inocentes. Like an aesthetic uprising that calls the audience to itself, the song has a structure that is perfectly suited to being performed live to create an atmosphere of revolution and popular rebellion. Not least, its plot deals with a social state with no horizon of hope, change or support, which adds even more to the nocturnal and anguished character that exudes from the sum of alternative rock, alternative metal and shavings of avant-garde metal.

Amongst the thunder, the sound of which echoes across the plains, birdsong adds lightness and a touch of sweetness to what seems to be a numbing prelude to chaos. The guitar that follows, with its low strumming, immerses the listener in a Celtic folk atmosphere that, for just over a minute, offers the opportunity to remember that there is beauty in the midst of social disharmony. It is true that it is hidden among the rubble, but it is there to remind you that there is always something to fight for. And Unnus is, in the form of an interlude, that reminder that warms the heart and gives even more strength to the conquest of freedom, justice and respect.

After the bonanza, chaos is reinstated. With the same brutality, speed and ruthlessness, Escalpo reaffirm their hardcore-punk-stoner with a dirty and visceral base. With a burning brutality between the guttural grunts and a voice with a clean tone, but adorned with bitterness, A Dor Do Açoite brings an incandescent desperation that exudes from every sound like a pleading cry for help to free themselves from the manipulation exercised by the strongest, here referred to as those with the most power. Infiltrating the listener into a scenario that lacks freedom of expression, A Dor Do Açoite is also a critique of consumerism, while at the same time portraying purity as fragility in an environment dominated by the hunger for command.

Brutal, dark and cutting like a razor opening cracks in the skin, Escravidão Auto Imposta is another .I. song that, like Unnus, is short-lived. However, unlike the latter, the former comes with the group's standard recipe: urgency and rejection. And in its recipe there are immediate warnings for the listener to come out of their comfortable trance and see the practices exercised by a capitalist offspring afraid of profit and power that imposes greed and judges its subordinates.

Between the harshness and the dirty hiss coming from the drums, once again the bass, with its full-bodied stridency, is perfectly audible in the melodic base, providing a foundation and consistency to the instrumentation. Curiously, as was the case with the tracks Olhando Pro Chão and Desconstrução / Destruição, the rhythmic structure here offers a softer aspect, even if it is shrouded in rigidity, giving a better taste of its sonar. With dark notes, the hardcore offered in Retrocedendo is harsh and narrated by a timbre so hoarse that all that stands out is the rasp of the verbal pronunciations. This is how Escalpo chose to describe their gloating nonconformity towards the figure of an individual whose conscience is limited, but whose manipulative power has allowed him to denigrate the indigenous people, belittle the Amazon and make a mockery of a global public health crisis.

Dramatic and tearful, but also piercing and sparkling, A Queda Do Céu, right from the start, presents an apocalyptic, chaotic scenario with no turning back. While the acid rain burns the ground bathed in a gloomy darkness, Orleone appears as an omnipresent narrator, with his deep, breathy voice. With this structure, A Queda Do Céu is like reading a religious passage. The cut of an irrevocable present moment that is adorned by a linear soundtrack, but capable of providing the stabbing and the suffering in the midst of a real story of discovery. A discovery that, together, brought pain, death and suffering. A Queda Do Céu is a mere dissection of the exploitation of Europeans in Brazilian lands. It shows torture, slavery, impunity, religious intolerance and personalism. Despite being a glimpse into a not-so-distant past, the exploitation of the earth's children still persists. And that's the big warning in A Queda Do Céu.

With a sonar bass so shrill that it becomes incendiary, the introduction brings scorching bursts amidst the trotting beat of the drums until, after the punches, a hoarse, ripping, bravado scream starts the chaos. Rough, sour, fast and stabbing, Desumanização comes with the last breath of unhappiness at another social context. Drenched in a desperate and hallucinatory instrumental, with a solo so electric that it sounds out of tune, Desumanização is like a linear continuation of A Queda Do Céu, as it continues with a plot that rejects the practices of a dominant people over a dominated people. It's the force of intelligence and resources against the force of respect, adoration, gratitude and kindness.

Unappealing, rejoicing, nauseating, .I. is a product so severe, brazen, intense and urgently repulsive that it causes great and purposeful discomfort to the most sensitive listeners. And no wonder. The album exudes an acid, harsh, strident and incandescent rawness that, as well as sounding dissonant, is desperate, claustrophobic and maddening.

That was Escalpo's promise from the day it was founded: to bring a raw and intense sound to life. From this base, the quartet from São Paulo used and abused experimentation with textures, energies and aesthetic fusions in order to make the noise the vociferation of dissatisfaction and a deafening cry of enough is enough.

Expressing the group's stance on politics and social and humanitarian contexts, the album bleeds, burns and melts with every harsh riff, explosive beat or strident groove. It expresses all the absurdity that exists in a country with great potential for greatness, but which has been governed by an individual so weak-minded, yet so shrewd in the art of manipulation, that he has made the scum of the population take the impulse to reveal themselves and live freely without reprisals.

This was the point at which Brazilian social development stagnated and fell. The exclusion of the growth of empathy, positivism and assertiveness. And that's what encouraged Escalpo to write this restless album, drunk on a deep sadness, a disappointment that can't be expressed in words, but can be expressed through melodies.

In this respect, .I. relied on Franco Torrezam for the mixing. With the professional's dexterity, the album conveyed all its aggression, intensity, virility and insanity through subgenres such as hardcore, stoner rock, noise rock, avant-garde metal, punk, lo-fi and thrash metal. Even so, even though the album called for an intense and impulsive tone, which was duly respected, there are few tracks in which the listener clearly understands what is being said by the vocalist, making it difficult to understand the lyrical plot.

Rounding off the technical scope is the cover art. Signed by CVSPE, it is morbid, butchery. It features an individual in a situation as if he had just been bathed in acid rain, his eyes covered by a cloth that communicates a practice of torture. Open-mouthed and screaming so loudly as to be mute, this same undead character cries, suffers and pleads for an end to a chaos that is far from over.

Released on 10/03/2023 via Thrash Out Records, .I. is raw, incandescent, flaming, bloody, brutal and acidic. Exploring truths that, for many, are a hypocritical secret, the album is intense in its anguished and urgent desperation in the face of scenarios so purely absurd as to be unreal. It's no coincidence that Escalpo even used the album's name to point the middle finger at all the injustice and governmental unhealthiness that overflows Brazil with sludge so thick that it will take a lot of arm wrestling to be completely discarded.