Saddle up, it’s time to depart our campsite and make way yonder for the desert beyond these savage blood-stained hills. Remember to keep a revolver close to hand, things can get pretty hairy around these wild parts. Galloping out of the sandy expanses of the US state of Arizona is Sunscorched, a new duo of Atmospheric Black Metal outlaws. Pictured on this most-wanted criminal bill is the band’s debut studio album ‘Blood of the Badlands’. Centring their musical thematic approach around the violent historical wilderness of an emerging North America, the band looks to burn their distinctive brand onto the hinds of us Black Metal chewing cattle herds.
The genre is no stranger to acts focusing on American history from this time period. Take, for instance, the waves made by the likes of Denver’s Wayfarer and how the often ruthlessly violent nature of the socio-political events of this time period played out. The old American West is a natural fit alongside the raw and unashamed nature of Black Metal subject matter. The album’s stage is set by the opening instrumental ‘Whiskey and Oak’, featuring the sounds of a crackling campfire and coyotes howling under the gothic folk tone of an acoustic guitar progression. This is then followed by ‘Stranger’s Land’ which opens with a somewhat righteous and very western sounding guitar riff. The more typical Blackened assault of the band soon takes centre stage, and I quite enjoy how this aspect interplays with the swagger of the song’s central guitar sections. I don’t exactly find the core performances to be anything exceptional and they are actually quite basic relative to the genre, but there is enough of a ‘wild west’ flavour to the track for it to feel like a suitable introduction. ‘Slaughter at Camp Grant’ opens with some cool atmospheric soundplay, but the core material of this song often sounds so routine that it feels uninspired. The cascading tremolo-picked lead guitars sound so indistinct and homogenous for the style that I wouldn’t even be surprised if they happened to be fully AI generated (I must add, there is no evidence to suggest they are, however).
The record’s strongest moment arrives via the lead slide-guitar performance that graces the track ‘The Gallows Tree’. I actually find this to be quite a cleverly implemented element that fits in nicely with the album’s overall theme, but this aspect alone doesn’t redeem the song’s otherwise flavourless composition and painfully basic drum patterns. An eight-minute runtime for this cut also seems quite preposterous given its lone entertaining instrumental factor. The final two tracks do little to rouse any more excitement from the listening experience. ‘Thousand Year Drought’, is a song with a rather fitting title, given its sterile, lifeless lack of creative substance to any of the performances contained here. The album rounds out with the title track, which features six and a half minutes of a vaguely sombre Americana instrumental that is about as exciting as sitting down to enjoy a plate of unseasoned boiled potatoes.
In theory, the primitive American West approach on this record could be quite interesting… were it not used as a half-baked form of window dressing to cover up the album’s impressively bad and forgetful core instrumentation and non-existent writing. It only takes one initial listen to appreciate the record’s blatantly shallow merits before any subsequent listens feel like you’re trudging your exhausted and half-dead dehydrated carcass through the wilderness of an Arizona desert during your hopeless last-ditch search for some water.
