"Scratch the Surface / Borstal Breakout" Released: January 23, 1995
Scratch the Surface is the third studio album by American hardcore punk band Sick of It All, released on October 18, 1994, by East West Records. It was the band's first album with bassist Craig Setari, who joined the band in 1992; their lineup has remained unchanged since.
Sick of It All promoted Scratch the Surface for over two years, including tours with Helmet, Korn, Orange 9MM, Quicksand, Strife, CIV and a stint on the inaugural Warped Tour in 1995. The album's title track was released as a double A-side single with "Borstal Breakout", reaching number 95 on the UK Singles Chart, whilst the music video for "Step Down" entered rotation on MTV. By 1997, it had sold 250,000 copies worldwide, becoming the band's best-selling album. Despite failing to break Sick of It All into the mainstream, it helped expose hardcore to a wider audience whilst expanding the band's fanbase, especially in Europe.
Background and recording
Scratch the Surface was the first Sick of It All album with bassist Craig Setari (pictured).
In 1992, Sick of It All released their second album, Just Look Around, through Relativity Records. Selling over 100,000 copies, it "catapulted the band to the top of the [hardcore] scene", according to Rock Hard.[1] Following its release, bassist Rich Cipriano left Sick of it All and was replaced by former Straight Ahead and Agnostic Front bassist Craig Setari.[2] A longtime friend of the band, Setari had known the members of Sick of It All since 1982; he booked the band's first ever show, and assisted them during the recording of their debut album Blood, Sweat and No Tears (1989), where he contributed lyrics to the songs "Bullshit Justice" and "The Blood and the Sweat".[3] Setari said that when drummer Armand Majidi informed him of Cipriano's departure and asked him to join during Agnostic Front's final tour, "I just jumped in, no two ways about it, I was the guy."[4]
Sick of It All were unhappy with Relativity's lack of advertising and promotion of Just Look Around, even in its hometown New York City, and after playing a large show at the Palladium with Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law and the Lunachicks—which they had to promote themselves—the band asked to leave the label.[5] Relativity subsequently attempted to sell the band's contract to other record labels for $20,000.[6]Roadrunner Records, who distributed Just Look Around in Europe, was interested in signing the band at one point.[7] Relativity eventually agreed to sell their contract to East West Records for $200,000. "As soon as they heard it was a major label, they added another zero!", vocalist Lou Koller said.[8] According to guitarist Pete Koller, East West signed both Sick of It All and Orange 9MM with the belief that they would be the "next big thing",[9] and that hardcore music would emerge as "the next trend in heavier music".[4] The band's contract guaranteed them complete creative control over its work and East West did not interfere with the band's songwriting.[10] Lou believed that accusations of the band selling out following its signing with East West "unconsciously" [...] pushed [them] toward a darker sound",[4] stating in a 2011 interview with Terrorizer:
Before we'd even started writing, even our friends were like, 'oh, you guys are gonna have to come out witha big commercial record now' and we're like 'what are you talking about?' [...] in our minds we wrote as heavy and as dark as we could be at the time, just to show everybody we didn't change.[8]
Sick of It All wrote Scratch the Surface in four months,[11] rehearsing together six days a week in an open loft on Canal Street, Chinatown, which they shared with Rollins Band.[12] Returning from its third tour of Europe and performances at festival shows, Majidi said that going into writing, the band "were pretty gung ho on how to make the most of the opportunity unfolding before [them]".[12] The addition of Setari resulted in the album's writing process becoming the band's first in which all of its members collaborated on songwriting, as opposed to Lou writing lyrics and Pete writing music on their previous two albums.[13] According to Lou, Sick of It All "looked back at our previous records, [...] picked out what we liked and what we didn’t like and made the heaviest and angriest record we could".[9] In an 1995 interview with The Pit, Lou said that the band aimed to display both their influences from heavy metal, speed metal and hardcore bands on Scratch the Surface, from Agnostic Front, Discharge and GBH to early Venom, Motörhead, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest.[14] Majidi also cited the contemporary music scene around New York City as an influence, with bands such as Helmet, Chavez and Unsane "doing maybe a little bit artier stuff in an ugly, brutal way, expanding people's ideas of what heavy music could be."[12] "Free Spirit" was the last song ever written by Straight Ahead. Setari said that although the song stayed the same musically, its lyrics and ending were reworked by Sick of It All.[14] Parts of "Maladjusted" were originally written by Setari for Agnostic Front, but "didn't work out".[14]
Sick of It All recorded Scratch the Surface at Normandy Sound in Rhode Island with engineer Tom Soares, whom had worked on all of the band's album's up to that point.[15] Setari said that Soares got the band to record with greater precision than they had before and credited his advice with turning him into a professional musician.[16] Although Sick of It All were happy with their performances,[17] the band were disappointed with Soares' "slick" and "clean" mixes of the album,[16] which made them sound "like 80's hair metal".[18] "We were trying to explain to him, 'This is us, we gotta sound like us', and he though he was gonna push us into the realm of Metallica," Lou said.[7] The band subsequently enlisted Billy Anderson to remix the album and "dirty it up".[19] Pete said that where Soares would spend hours choosing sounds and effects, Anderson would "just crank shit".[16][N 1] Lou believed that Soares was insulted by their enlistment of Anderson,[16] whilst Pete said he was hurt by the decision.[20] Despite this, the Koller brothers both considered "Consume", the sole track which Soares and Anderson mixed together, to be one of the strongest tracks on Scratch the Surface,[19] with Lou believing that the album could have been "even better" had they had both mixed it together from the beginning.[7] Anderson would later go on tour with Sick of It All as its live sound engineer.[17]
Lyrics
Lou and Majidi worked together on the lyrics of Scratch the Surface.[7] In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Lou summarized the lyrics as "Don't be ignorant, because that's the basis of all evil."[21] Majidi said that the lyrics do not explore any particular themes, but are generally more introspective than on their previous releases.[22] "Who Sets The Rules" is about people who have a "super judgemental mentality of looking down on other people because they aren't the way you think they should be".[4] "Goatless" was inspired by the media controversy surrounding Sick of It All following the 1992 Bard College at Simon's Rock shooting, due to perpetrator Wayne Lo wearing one of the band's t-shirts.[23] Lou said the song was "written from the point of view of authority figures that contribute to or ignore this kind of problem, but don't want to deal with it when it blows up in their faces."[24] "Maladjusted" concerns "personal frustration" in how one interacts with others.[22] "Step Down" and "Farm Team" both address hardcore bands whom are "not true to their fans", inauthentic, or have returned to the scene for financial motivations.[14] Regarding the former song, Lou told Seconds in 1994 that Sick of It All were "trying to tell the audience to wake up and realize who's who".[25] According to Majidi, the album's title track is about how hardcore becomes trendified if one doesn't try to "find out what the music is really trying to tell you", and "superficial people who lead superficial lives".[26]
Release
Promotion
Scratch the Surface was released through East West in the United States on October 18, 1994,[27] and in the United Kingdom on November 14, 1994.[28] For the album cover, Sick of It All hired a photographer to carve the band's dragon logo into a block of wood before setting it aflame with lighter fluid and taking pictures of the whole process.[29] "Somehow he managed to catch that perfect one we used", Lou said.[22] The image featured on the CD presented the same block of wood after being hosed down.[22] Regarding the album's back cover, Setari stated:
[T]he back cover happened after we'd been taking pictures at five different locations for an hour each. Finally I was like, "Yo, I've been fucking standing around for hours—enough already," and I took a left hook at the camera. Last picture of the day, and that's the one we end up going with. It had a little character. The rest were kinda stiff.[22]
"Scratch the Surface" was serviced as the album's first single to metal and college radio stations.[30] On January 23, 1995, the song was released as a double A-sided single with a cover of "Borstal Breakout" by Sham 69.[31] "Step Down" and "Maladjusted" were also issued as promotional singles.[32] East West financed music videos for the album's title track and "Step Down".[16] The video for the title track was filmed in Sick of It All 's practice space and stars the band's friends. In an interview with Decibel, Lou said that the band wanted to present a performance video that wasn't "just pure aggression, because when we play shows everyone is having a good time", whilst also showing "that there are girls into heavier music."[16] The video for "Step Down" starred Sandor Weisberger—a voice actor known for his work on radio dramas with Judson Fountain in the 1960s and 1970s—as a reporter investigating hardcore music, and includes various parodies various styles of popular hardcore dancing styles.[33] Lou credited Pete with coming up with the video's concept, which he described as a "hardcore version" of the Soul Train line dance.[7] The "Step Down" video debuted on MTV's 120 Minutes in early 1995,[21] and was featured in the Beavis and Butt-Head episode "Premature Evacuation".[34]
Touring
Sick of It All embarked on a worldwide tour in support for Scratch the Surface, touring North and South America, Europe and Japan.[7] In October 1994, the band toured with Strife for two weeks.[35] In November, they supported with Helmet and Quicksand across the United States,[30] before playing ten shows with Black Train Jack in December.[36] In January 1995, Sick of It All toured Europe and played four shows in the United Kingdom supported by Strife and Understand,[37] before returning to the United States for a headlining tour with Korn, Orange 9mm and Trial that lasted until March 1995.[38] Korn began to overshadow Sick of It All in popularity and media coverage during the tour, which Lou attributed to differences in label support and finances. Initially frustrated, he came to accept that the band were "simply not made for big success" following a conversation with Pete.[6] The band then embarked on a seven week tour of Europe with CIV, followed by a two-week tour of the United States with Quicksand an Orange 9MM.[39] From August to September 1995,[citation needed] the band participated in the inaugural edition of Warped Tour.[40][bettersourceneeded] On November 22, 1995, the band performed an unannounced show with the Beastie Boys at St. Mark's Place.[41] After two years of touring in support of the album, East West told the band they were ready to begin work on a new album.[7]
Scratch the Surface received generally favourable reviews upon its release.[21] In his perfect-score review for Kerrang!, Steffan Chirazi called it a "classic album" that "gives you nothing other than energy, entertainment and exciting, shifting volleys of aural aggro."[45] James Cooper of Raw described the album as both "punk as f**k" and a compulsory purchase.[49] Jan Jaedike of Rock Hard felt that the album's songs were individually stronger and catchier than they had been on Just Look Around.[50]AllMusic critic John Franck selected "Step Down" as "Scratch the Surface" as the album's highlights, describing both tracks as "incredible band anthems".[42] Less favourably, The Hartford Courant criticized the album's songs as "unrelentingly samey",[52] whilst Clark Collis of Select described it as "[revolving] around incomprehensible, shouting, tuneless thrashings."[51]
In The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock (1997), Ira Robbins described Scratch the Surface as "a blast of unreconstructed hardcore in a time and a place where such a thing was once impossible to imagine".[53] Brian Ives, writing in the 1999 MusicHound Rock album guide, called the album proof that "major labels don't always force bands to mellow out; but why Atlantic would sign such a raw band remains a mystery."[47] In a 2006 retrospective for Rock Sound, Alexander Kelham called the album the "high point of [Sick of it All]'s career and the ultimate silencer to those who doubted the integrity" of the band following their signing to East West.[54] Alistar Lawrence, writing for Kerrang! in 2011, similarly commented that it "proved that hardcore bands could poke their heads up above the parapet of the toilet circuit without selling out or diluting their sound one bit."[55]
Commercial
Scratch the Surface peaked at number 67 on the German Offizielle Top 100 Albums chart,[56] whilst the double A-side "Scratch the Surface / Borstal Breakout" single reached number 95 on the UK Singles Chart.[57] In an 1997 interview with Metal Hammer UK, Lou Koller said that the album had sold 250,000 copies worldwide; journalist Ian Winwood described its sales figures as "respectable, considering Sick of It All are nowhere near as accesible as Green Day or Rancid."[58]Equal Vision Records, whom handled its release on vinyl, sold around 4,000 copies of the album.[59] As of 2011, it is the band's best selling album.[18] Despite the greater attention surrounding its release, the album failed to launch Sick of It All into the mainstream.[60] Although the European division of East West Records promoted Scratch the Surface heavily with posters, billboards and advertisements,[22] the lacklustre promotion of the album in the United States contributed to frustrations in Sick of It All's relationship with the label.[61] The band parted ways with the label following the release of its fourth album Built to Last (1997), which Mörat of Terrorizer considered representative of the limited "commercial viability of hardcore".[18]
Legacy
Over time, Scratch the Surface has come to be regarded as a classic hardcore album.[62] The album was inducted into the Decibel "Hall of Fame" in 2012, with writer Shawn Macomber calling it a "hardcore magnum opus" that transcended "the standards of any and all subsets of extreme music", as evidenced by covers of its songs by Napalm Death and Sepultura on the Sick of It All tribute album Our Impact Will Be Felt (2006).[63] In 2014, Stephen Hill of Metal Hammer said that the album had a lasting impact on hardcore, helping popularise the genre and leading it to its eventual mainstream acceptance.[61] In 2015, Mike Hill of Vice said that the album "took NYHC worldwide" and turned Sick of It All into "the closest the hardcore scene has to a household name."[9]Raw listed it as one of the 90 essential albums of the 1990s,[49] whilst Terrorizer considered it one of the 100 most important of the decade.[64]Kerrang! also included it in its list of "666 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".[55] The "Step Down" video has also been credited with giving greater exposure to hardcore,[65] with journalist Shane Mehling calling it "the video that in three and a half minutes was able to turn every Midwest Headbangers Ball teenager into a seasoned hardcore expert".[66]
Musicians including Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory, and Frank Turner have credited Scratch the Surface with introducing them to hardcore music.[67]Walls of Jericho guitarist Chris Rawson cited it as an album that changed his life.[68] Alan Williamson of LostAlone listed it as one of his favourite albums,[69] whilst Igor Cavalera considers it to be "one of the best albums of all time".[18]Al Barr of Dropkick Murphys and Ben Koller of Converge and Mutoid Man both consider Scratch the Surface to be one of the best hardcore albums of all time.[70] In a 2010 interview with Big Cheese, Gallows bassist Stuart Gili-Ross called it the "best hardcore record to come out post 1990 and [...] the best NYHC of all time" and cited "Maladjusted" as the reason he "[wanted] to play bass in a hardcore band."[71] In 2011, Davey Havok of AFI described the album an "unparraleled classic" whose influence "reaches far beyond the hardcore scene".[18] In 2024, readers of Revolver voted the album as the second-greatest NYHC album of all time, behind Cro-Mags' The Age of Quarrel.[72]
In an 2012 interview with Decibel, Pete Koller said that he considered Scratch the Surface to be Sick of It All's most important album as it "pushed [the band] up into the higher realm" of songwriting and popularity, whilst Majidi saw it as the band's "quintissential album [...] that we are always forced to try to top."[73] The album helped expand Sick of It All's fanbase, especially in Europe, where people "came and checked it out and stayed with us forever," according to Lou.[8] Pete said the album was the reason "we can play a Monday night show in Colonge, Germany and there'll be 900 people [there]."[73] "Step Down" became a staple of Sick of It All's concerts,[12] and has remained in the band's setlists for over 25 years.[65] In 2011, the band re-recorded the title track for their tenth album XXV Nonstop. In 2014, Sick of It All performed the album and Blood, Sweat and No Tears in their entireties at the Fun Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, Texas.[74] The band received several festival offers to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Scratch the Surface in 2024,[75] and were due to perform a set dedicated to the album at Wacken Open Air in August of that year,[76] which was cancelled following Lou's cancer diagnosis in June.[77]
↑ For example: "When Billy [Anderson] came in, we were doing 'Maladjusted' and were looking for an effect for Lou's voice. Tom [Soares] was like, 'We have this computer here and there's thousands of different distortions. Let's start with this one.' Billy goes, 'How about we do this?' and just grabs this knob on the giant fucking board and turns it to ten, and we're like, "YEAH, it sounds great!"[7]
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Anon. (October 21, 1994). "Re-Enter the Dragon"(PDF). Gavin Report (Advertisement). No.2027. p.53. OCLC34039542. Archived(PDF) from the original on May 19, 2024. Retrieved October 12, 2024– via worldradiohistory.com.
Anon. (December 9, 1994). "Hard Tour Guide"(PDF). The Hard Report. No.404. The Hard Report, Inc. p.68. Archived(PDF) from the original on May 19, 2024. Retrieved November 9, 2024– via worldradiohistory.com.
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Koller, Lou; Koller, Pete; Abrams, Howie (2020). The Blood and the Sweat: The Story of Sick of It All's Koller Brothers. Post Hill Press. ISBN9781642932263.
Lawrence, Alistar (November 2011). "Sick of it All: Scratch the Surface". Kerrang!: 666 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die!. Bauer Media Group. p.103.
Macomber, Shawn (October 2012). "Dragons Awake: The Making of Sick of It All's 'Scratch the Surface'". Decibel. No.92. Red Flag Media, Inc. pp.63–72. ISSN1557-2137.
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