Vae Solis

Official Review

Vae Solis is Scorn’s debut album, released in 1992 by Earache in the UK and Relativity in the US, with the same lineup as side A of Napalm Death’s Scum. The group formed in 1991 around Mick Harris and Nicholas Bullen, both Napalm Death alumni, as an industrial metal band. Trouser Press reads it as the natural outcome of calculated grindcore, picking up threads left by Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten, and finds it less imposing than Justin Broadrick’s Godflesh. Harris had already played with Bill Laswell and John Zorn in Painkiller. The tracks run long: in the original version, five of the nine pieces exceed six minutes, from “Hit” (7:36) to “Deep In - Eaten Over and Over” (8:28). The total length is 55 minutes on the double LP. The cover is said to be a collage of two superimposed medical photographs: an open, probably diseased throat and a cancerous cell seen through a microscope. A video was also made for “Lick Forever Dog.” The clinical iconography points the listening toward the body and illness. The record belongs to the site’s Industrial/Post-Industrial scene, at the point of passage between extreme metal and industrial music. The medical imagery and the coldness of the design also link it, more indirectly, to the J.G. Ballard dossier, which deals with body, technology and violence. Scorn’s subsequent path, combining dub basslines, sparse heavy beats and post-industrial dread, helped pave the way for illbient and With 2007’s Stealth the project embraced the dubstep it had helped generate. In that trajectory, from the industrial metal of the beginnings to bass music, Vae Solis is the starting point.