Worthless Music is the tenth album by English rock group the Scaramanga Six.
Background
In a news post on the Scaramanga Six homepage on 3 December 2021, the band described the upcoming Worthless Music as being different to their last two more conceptual albums. "This time, we lack a central theme – instead a myriad of subjects: wrestles with conscience, domestic frustration, awake-dreams, drudgery and even fishing drowning dogs out of canals." Other influences on the album included "an enlightening trip to Cuba" (from which the Morricone brothers brought back a set of latin instruments including maracas, guiro and claves) and the realisation that "there’s no getting round the fact that we are a middle-aged band. We are always going to write songs from a more world-weary point of view."
On the release date for Worthless Music, Paul and Steven Morricone conducted an interview with Backstreet Media in which they provided a track-by-track breakdown of the album and commented further on the influences and factors around it. Paul Morricone noted that he had "wanted to make our sound big and deliberate on this record, so we’ve dispensed with some of the subtleties and doubled-up beats on tracks..." Regarding the album's name, he stated "the album title has its own meaning. We figured that no-one really values the craft of music-makers anymore and like most things, expect your body of work to be free to access for nothing. Convenience is killing music and we are constantly surprised at how worthless it actually is to some people, even though they want all of it all the time. If you value it, buy it."
The brothers revealed that some album tracks had been recorded on "a shit iPhone on Garageband", with Steven Morricone confessing "I’m a complete Luddite when it comes to technology mainly because I have zero patience for any recording software/process. I want to be able to capture things as quick as humanly possible – sometimes the result of that rapid capture, no matter how crude, is where the real magic lies. We’ve done a lot of leaving large elements of demos in on this album." Adding to this, Paul remarked "due to the restrictions of lockdown, we just couldn’t get together. So we had to do a lot of working by proxy... Throughout this album, many of the poorly-recorded and weird scratchy bits are directly from the bad demos we were playing to and decided to keep in."
Paul admitted that they "still feel compelled to create noisy cinematic punk the older we get. Even though we are old dogs, I still think we have plenty of new tricks. I think this album shows that – we will willingly go off in an unexpected direction and find a fresh approach." Steven added "I’m so pleased with the way this one has turned out. Sequencing an album is a really tricky task – getting the flow just right. We struggled to find a place for this one initially, but it seems to work perfectly as melodic and frank tonic after the dramatic epic before. It’s got the steady pace of someone attempting to trek across a wintery wilderness in snow shoes, scaling a few lofty musical mountains en route."
In a separate interview with Joyzine, Paul commented "I’d written and recorded my solo album Cruel Designs at the same time as we did this bunch of songs. To me it’s all the same, but in the two records there’s a marked difference in sound from a more orchestral croonfest of the solo record to the more abrasive punk sound of Worthless Music."
Reception
In Classic Rock, Julian Marszalek observed "thanks to a hermetically sealed approach that's seen The Scaramanga Six release their own albums, handle their own PR, shoot their own videos and book their own tours for well over two decades, the Huddersfield art-rockers are a band that’s easy. But are they one to fall in love with? With Worthless Music - their tenth album, no less – The Scaramanga Six (all four of ’em) make a convincing case for your affections. Their template of twisted punk rock remains in place, but here the results are harder and firmer. The skew-whiff madness of "Horse with No Face" hits hard, "Death Mask of the Unknown Lady of the Seine" rocks and rollicks while pausing to take a detour into '60s spy-theme-music territory. The squelchy "Ipso Facto" overstays its welcome, the glam balladry of "Boy" tempers the pace. Music to quite fancy, then."