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Sweet Heart Dealer

Scarling

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Album Review

One look at Scarling might suggest that they're a new batch of goth-inclined neo-hipsters ready to sell themselves to America's disaffected youth in the wake of the breakthrough of Evanescence. However, while a spin of their debut full-length, Sweet Heart Dealer, confirms that legions of mopey kids should go for this big-time, it's also clear that this band has an awful lot more going for them than the surfaces might suggest. While dominated by the massive guitar sounds of Christian Hejnal and Rickey Lime, Scarling's songs display a canny pop sensibility that bobs just beneath their aural surface, and former Jack Off Jill vocalist Jessicka's voice seems to have gained some welcome depth and texture in the context of her new band. Hejnal and Jessicka have cited Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine as key influences on Scarling's approach, and it shows — rather than going for standard-issue Marshall-stack crunch, Hejnal and Lime utilize feedback, drones, and floating masses of overtones to give these seven songs an attack that could be described as a loving pummel that embraces as it bruises. And you can actually sing along with "Band Aid Covers the Bullet Hole" without hurting yourself, which is no small feat. Sweet Heart Dealer is a remarkably accomplished debut from a band with very real potential.

Customer Reviews

Sweet Heart Dealer certainly has my heart.

Sweet Heart Dealer by noise-rock outfit Scarling. LOVE!!! A honey jar of a record filled with seven tracks and seven ditty sins juxtaposed with the more composite sound of surging textures, distorted guitars and vocals that teeter from the serene to the schizophrenic. It doesn’t aim to hook you with a simplistic melody or steal your heart with a single kiss. The sound of Scarling. slays you with a thousand kisses over fastened eyelids. The sensation renders your organs weightless to float and crash with the waves of guitars as the distortion and viscid rhythms seep into your ears and work their way under your skin. The emotion that is bound to this record is so beautiful and overwhelming that you almost feel drained of anything real. They portray their influences and inspirations (MY BLOODY VALENTINE, SONIC YOUTH, LUSH, THE CURE- and maybe a bit of BIKINI KILL) from artistic creations that range from aura to canvas whilst painting their own unique picture. The album begins with my fav, The Last Day I Was Happy, our first taste of the expected feedback that bleeds into all familiar chugging guitars and teasing of the cymbals. The vocals creep in sexy but sullen, distinct yet melded to the coil of hypnotic distortion. The guitars and drumbeat grows, thick, weighty and brooding, bordering on bludgeoning. In this track alone Jessicka’s voice stirs comparisons in my head, likening her to PJ Harvey circa ‘To Bring You My Love’ (ever, ever-so-slightly). It is unconsciously erotic, a deep purple and blue running down your throat like liqueur before bursting into hot screams and a catchy chorus that owns your lips and gives you vertigo. Following, is the previous single release Band Aid Covers The Bullet Hole, a dreamy skip through surreal fields of bloated riffs and kids with broken teeth from a sweet melody. It’s got a chorus that sticks in your mind like a fly caught in a web. Full of intellect contrasted with a seemingly perverse childlike innocence. Crispin Glover swirls severe melancholy in to a dense 3 minutes and eighteen seconds of powerful lyricism and percussive airiness. Intention absent, the way it makes me feel is being heartbroken on a breezy summer’s day. Alexander The Burn Victim resides in the same melancholia. The guitars soar and dive with such grandeur, that along with Jessicka’s melting voice and incisive whispers, it almost chokes a tear from your eye. The gravity of this song pulls me down to a place where I haven’t been since the nineties, alone in my room, washed with a heavy gaze. It is definitely one of the standout tracks, notably due to its beautiful raining chorus. It ends with the convulsion of guitars and a searing silence. I’m in love. Baby Dracula (being another personal favourite) is up next, beginning with a potent and darkening guitar rhythm that slithers higher and lower with a lightly sinister effect before jumping into yet another aural vortex that finds itself to be upbeat and melodic. The song revels in more texture, crawling between Jessicka’s vocals and leery rhythm, the thriving chorus and the uttering of the title that is gravely seductive. Black Horse Riding Star gallops in like a bolt out of the blue, with its menacing intro and rage in its eyes. A standout track on Sweet Heart Dealer but for a completely different reason altogether. Jessicka teases your ears with a number of ‘fuck you’-s, over a driving heavy pouncing bass line and pounding drums as well as auralgasmic repetition of “so high and you can’t feel it” that deserves to be sweated out along with the band. If you hadn’t heard this song before then getting this track on the record really would have struck you down. It is a fever and “there is no recovery”. Boiling from spoken-word and ethereal backdrops to piercing no-holds-barred screams. Lastly but by no means least, Can’t (Halloween Valentine) is the album’s final reverie of beauty. Both the tide of the music and Jessicka’s glass singing conjures something that I can only call over seven minutes of graceful nausea. There’s no disgust only butterflies. “No I’m not this crazy/ And I Can’t have fun/ Makes me feel like nothing/ Am I just that dumb”… You will feel anything but nothing. Plato once said “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back”. Scarling. should feel accomplished as Sweet Heart Dealer certainly has my heart.

A crushing debut.

Welcome to the goth prom, 21st century style. Scarling is the band, but you probably wish lead singer Jessicka was your date, dressed in ripped vintage black lace. Once voted most likely to tear apart "Love Song" by the Cure, the former Jack Off Jill singer has since graduated to a new class of hard rock. Seven pretty poisonous sores. ‘Sweet Heart Dealer’, Scarling’s debut long-player is all at once cruel and beautiful, angelic and demonic. The latest in a long line of ensembles fusing atmospheric goth / shoegaze noise textures to curdling melodies, except in Scarlings case a heavy quotient of mischief, menace and bitterness enter the fray to devastating effect. Reminiscent of Curve’s darker edges, like Halliday former Jack off Jill starlet Jessicka torments with her alluring sweetly desperate vocals to slowly hook you in to be trounced within an inch of your life by her bruised and wounded inner demons. At just past the 30 minute mark ‘SHD’ serves as a short sharp shock housed in a sleeve depicting the work of artist Mark Ryden it’s brooding, benign and beautiful ‘Can’t (Halloween Valentine)’, swathed in Cathedral-esque stealth like droning feedback and backward vocals loops closes the set with a sense of mournful aftertaste it’s overpowering tenderness is only outweighed by its overbearing sense of detachment, epic as though the word was readily made for it, it serves as a pristine example of dark dream pop at its most woefully scarred. Elsewhere the twisting wrath of the densely choking ‘The last day I was happy’, stalking industrial riffs spontaneously combust to zero in menacingly upon your listening space, imagine the claustrophobic encroaching darkness of Nine Inch Nails ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ warping and picking holes out of Sonic Youth’s mid career crisis ‘Dirty’, elegantly wounding stuff. ‘Band aid covers the bullet hole’ with its Lush-like playground chimes reveals the bands ability to sharpen their claws and yet still remain sleekly poppy enough to hook in the curiosity of the passing crowd, unrelentingly brutal yet adoringly cool. Both ‘Baby Dracula’ and ‘Alexander the burn victim’ recall the Skeletal Family and the March Violets, the latter stings and woos in equal measures with the foreboding chiming chords hanging poised like vultures eying their pray, akin to being out in the wide open in an electrical storm, that sense of unknown wild abandon and naked submission at the hands of some unforgiving force while the latter digs deep below the skin and relentlessly burrows its way to lay its eggs within your fragile psyche. A crushing debut.

</3 lovely.

I love this album. Especially "Can't". I think its first reveresed then forward. But anyways. This album is just darling.

Biography

Formed: Los Angeles, CA

Genre: Alternative

Years Active: '00s

Combining elements of pop and goth with a massive guitar-based sound, Scarling is the brainchild of guitarist Christian Hejnal, a former member of the Drummed, and vocalist Jessicka, who was the frontwoman of Jack Off Jill. The two met at a Los Angeles rock club, and a few weeks later they began writing songs together; their writing sessions led them to form a band to perform their new material. Joining Hejnal and Jessicka in the project are guitarist Rickey Lime, bassist Kyle Lime, and drummer Garey...
Full Bio

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