It’s been a long time since I heard an art-rock/art-punk record as fascinating as Full Scrotal Scorpio. Much of the magic comes from something that might sound limiting on paper: building an entire rock album around the piano rather than the electric guitar. The astonishing thing is that across these twelve tracks, you don’t miss the guitar for a second. If anything, it’s hard to imagine these songs sounding better any other way.
Behind this glorious racket is Kristeen Young, a New York-based artist who has spent decades pushing against rock’s boundaries with a fiercely individual sound. Her impressive CV includes collaborations with David Bowie, Morrissey and Dave Grohl, alongside a long-standing creative partnership with legendary producer Tony Visconti. Together with drummer Jefferson Wayne “Baby Jef” White, she forms a self-described no-genre art-punk duo built around piano, drums and theatricality by the bucketload. This time, Young also took charge of production and mixing herself, spending almost a year working on the mix while learning Logic and Pro Tools to get the album sounding exactly as she wanted.
And what a result. Full Scrotal Scorpio moves effortlessly between the darkest corners of alternative rock, post-punk and art-rock, even throwing some experimental hip-hop into the mix. At times, there are flashes of Peter Hammill’s drama, Cardiacs’ wild exuberance, PJ Harvey’s rawness, Nick Cave’s brooding intensity or Tori Amos’s piano-driven sound. Yet the duo have such a distinctive identity that, however wildly the music shifts, it always sounds unmistakably like Kristeen Young.
The piano does just about everything here: it pounds, scratches, drives the riffs and builds massive walls of sound, while White attacks the drums with a force that has to be heard to be believed. And then there’s Young’s extraordinary voice, effortlessly switching from delicate to ferocious, from biting sarcasm to full-blown operatic drama. Almost every track catches you off guard, yet somehow they all get under your skin. And with songs this unconventional, that’s quite an achievement.
The lyrics deserve a whole chapter of their own. Young takes aim at a humanity obsessed with numbers, hierarchies and technology, convinced of its superiority over every other species. She tears into exploitation, our collective passivity and the labels society forces upon us, but also ventures into far more personal territory: growing up without a family, rootlessness, the uneasy relationship with our own bodies and the desperate need to belong somewhere. All of it comes wrapped in pitch-black humour, grotesque imagery and an imagination with no off switch. The most incredible thing is that such a catalogue of human misery can produce songs this irresistible. It’s as if Young has decided to fight the absurdity of the world with an absurdity of her own, and a much more dazzling one at that.
Full Scrotal Scorpio is a ridiculously exciting record that brings art-rock roaring back in all its glory: daring, visceral, unpredictable and theatrical to the core, without ever sacrificing melody. And if piano, drums and vocals can sound this explosive on record, I can only imagine the absolute madness of seeing them live. One of those albums that reminds you why rock can still blow your mind.
Listen to Full Scrotal Scorpio here.
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