The Only Place

Despite its cover image — a dandelion held up in a beam of sunlight — The Only Place is as dark and forbidding as any other Scorn album. Mick Harris’s music uses only a few sounds per track, but it’s still almost impossibly dense, the bass as thick as concrete and the snares ringing sharply as creepy and atmospheric synths float past like undersea monsters, all awash in echo and reverb. This is dub as sonic virus, dub as menace, the sound of your nightmares intruding on waking life. As with Harris’s previous Scorn album, Café Mor, there’s one track with vocals; rapper Kool Keith pops up on “Distortion,” and drum ’n’ bass terrorist Submerged helps out with the mix.