Phil Diamond does whatever the fuck he wants as Scammers and that‘s why I love it. He’s skirts around electro-pop and metal with equal flair and a touch of the melodramatic that, without fail, engages those willing to lend ears and time.
On Deathly Hollow Scammers compacts the sweeping and saccharine sentimentality of a block-buster film score into a personal and private space. His nigh spoken-word delivery of lyrics ripped from wincingly honest diary entries demands the same kind of wary attention as a crying man at a bus-stop. It’s not light listening; if it was not obvious there is a lot of talk about death here. Death and endings; things not turning out quite right or being left in a nebulous, unfinished state. All of that heaviness is wrapped in a gauze of strings and airy piano, gilded around the edges with clean, electronic and percussive touches. Phil Diamond’s additions to the sampled music are intertwined so tightly that without foreknowledge of the orchestration’s origins it would be easy to assume it was cut from whole cloth. The finished product is an uncomfortably poignant and fascinating study in how popular fiction can be shaped and contoured to become part of our personal mythology.
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