Scope Neglect

A friend mentioned, almost in passing, that there was a copy of Ben Frost’s Scope Neglect sitting at Real Groovy Records and that I should probably go and get it. So once again I braved the filth and clamour of the city centre, stopping at the same taco place I’d discovered the last time I was there visiting Marbecks during their final bricks and mortar days, dodging chemically enhanced homeless folk, religious nutters and general hoardes, before making the walk to the racks. Some rituals repeat themselves for a reason maybe. I have to admit I’m a little uncertain about Real Groovy these days. It doesn’t feel like it used to back when it was up the road from Mayoral Drive. I still lament that spaces demise. Then the store had focus, character, a sense that you might stumble onto something unexpected but cool. Now it feels a bit scattered, all the random stuff on the racks diluting the experience, like it’s lost a little of the mojo it once had. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and I am grateful it still exists at all. I did appreciate the $20 discount I received due to my long standing VIP Club membership, I did buy a few things that day so that was nice.

It’s been seven years since Ben Frost released a studio album under his own name, 2017’s The Centre Cannot Hold, though calling it a wait feels slightly absurd given how little he’s actually stopped. Soundtracks for film, television and games. Collaborations. Installations. A second opera. Three albums deep inside Swans’ vast and punishing ecosystem, touring with the band, becoming genuinely embedded in it. His relocation to Reykjavík fits the same pattern: an artist who seems more comfortable inside a process than standing at a distance from one, periodically announcing results. By the time an album does arrive it feels less like a scheduled release and more like something that surfaced when it was ready.

So when Scope Neglect finally arrived, anticipation had curdled into something closer to hunger. Frost’s run from By The Throat through The Centre Cannot Hold, including his operatic adaptation of Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, remains one of the more remarkable bodies of work in recent heavy music, somehow holding industrial force, contemporary classical discipline and genuine weight in the same space without any of it feeling like a genre exercise, these are records that felt necessary rather than merely heavy.
Scope Neglect earns that, at least some of the time.

Frost leans more overtly into metal here than on any previous record, built around guitarist Greg Kubacki of Car Bomb and bassist Liam Andrews of My Disco. Both were reportedly given full orchestrations to guide the emotional shape of their performances, structures Frost then stripped away entirely in the finished mix. What’s left resists easy emotional access.

Opener “Lamb Shift” makes this clear straight away. It takes familiar metal gestures and pulls them apart like a cadaver laid out for study, time feels unstable, silence becomes a source of tension rather than relief, the guitar is present but denatured, stretched until function gives way to texture. There’s a rare sense that you genuinely don’t know what’s coming next, and Frost doesn’t seem interested in reassuring you.

That feeling peaks again on “Tritium Bath,” the album’s other undeniable high point. Deceptively calm keyboard swells get torn open by feral, eviscerating guitar. Something almost melodic tries to surface, almost humane, before being swallowed by the surrounding noise. It’s not easy listening and makes no pretence of being, but there’s an otherworldly pull to it that’s hard to shake.

Frost’s sound design remains formidable throughout. On “Chimera” and “The River of Light and Radiation,” vast hammer blows of processed sound land with a cold science fiction weight. The latter centres around a pulse that feels less like rhythm than physiology, closer to imagined tinnitus than beat, while Kubacki’s guitar rears and whinnies like something that hasn’t been fully domesticated. Even when the music slows, the threat doesn’t dissipate so much as redistribute, reverberating through the quieter passages like a residual charge.

“Chimera” itself drifts in and out of focus, recalling long-form ambient structures but animated by something warmer than decay. The beauty here isn’t fragile or nostalgic, it exists inside the chaos rather than offering relief from it, which turns out to be a more durable kind.

“Turning the Prism,” the longest piece on the record, doesn’t explode or climax so much as persist. Arrhythmic impacts and circling guitar figures build a space you have to inhabit rather than consume. It asks for patience rather than attention, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Closer “Unreal in the Eyes of the Dead” pushes this further. A muted guitar figure loops endlessly, accruing only microscopic changes until it takes on a kosmische quality, movement so gradual it barely registers as movement at all, duration becoming the point rather than the problem.

Scope Neglect is a slow burn, and an uneven one, but its unevenness stops feeling like a flaw somewhere around the third or fourth listen. It doesn’t cohere so much as accumulate. Some of it is violent, some of it is strangely tender, and it doesn’t seem especially interested in explaining which is which or why.

It also needs to be said that this album sounds exceptional on vinyl. The presentation feels markedly more organic than the digital version, bass has real mass and shape rather than just extension, moving air in the room rather than merely registering. Imaging is superb, layers of distortion and ambience coexisting without smearing into each other. But texture is where the format really earns its keep. Guitars feel fibrous and granular, synths bloom and decay with genuine authority, and the negative space becomes as expressive as the sounds themselves. This is music that benefits from being embodied, from existing as pressure and vibration as much as signal.

Through the DeVore O/Bronzes, driven by the Kondo amp, fed by the newly installed Ortofon RF-297 with the SPU-A into the Kondo SUT and phono stage, it takes on an almost physical presence. The system steps aside in the way good systems do, and the record simply occupies the room. Bass is deep and textured rather than blunt, the midrange carries an uncanny solidity that makes Frost’s layered brutality feel carved rather than assembled, and the grain of distortion resolves into something richly tactile. The album reveals a scale and menace through this setup that the digital version only hints at.

Scope Neglect doesn’t hit with the brute inevitability of Frost’s earlier records, but it doesn’t seem to want to. It’s the work of someone still pushing outward, and it gets better the more time you give it. I like it.