Lividus Scarabaeus Review
Lividus
Scarabaeus
Nameless Grave Records
2026
For those of you who remember the early days of Witch Mountain, you might be shocked to discover that former vocalist Uta Plotkin has resurfaced in the band Lividus. I sure as hell was. Last I knew, Plotkin left Witch Mountain and I mentally checked out afterwards. Turns out she didn’t disappear; she dove headfirst into a swirling nuclear bomb of every extreme genre known to mankind and came back grinning with blood in her teeth.
Lividus has unleashed “Scarabaeus” through Nameless Graves Records, and I’m warning you now: strap every loose object in your house to the floor before pressing play. If you don’t, this album is liable to blast you through drywall and deposit your twitching carcass in the neighbor’s hydrangeas in .3 seconds. This thing is 33 minutes of pure schizophrenic violence - Death Metal, Black Metal, Grindcore, noise-ridden nightmare fuel - all stitched together like a deranged occult experiment conducted in a sewer beneath a collapsing cathedral.
And somehow, standing in the middle of all this glorious sonic homicide is Plotkin.
Her clean vocals are still the hook for me. There’s something haunting about the tone of her voice, the way she annunciates words like she’s casting spells directly into your bloodstream. When she sings clean, she sounds untouchable, like some smoke-covered high priestess floating above the carnage while the world burns underneath her feet. I would absolutely walk barefoot through the furnaces of hell just to hear her hold one note for five seconds. Then, without warning, she flips into those monstrous growls and suddenly the cathedral collapses into a sinkhole filled with corpses and broken teeth.
And her viola playing? Absolutely fucking ridiculous. It doesn’t just add to the atmosphere, it feels like someone dragging a rusted blade across your nervous system while demons dance in the corner eating the bones of the unborn.
Musically, “Scarabaeus” is completely unhinged. The album jerks violently from tempo to tempo, genre to genre, like it’s trying to escape its own skin. At times it’s honestly difficult to follow because the band refuses to sit still long enough for your brain to catch up. But that chaos is also what makes it fascinating. Beneath all the madness is an absurd level of musicianship. This isn’t amateur hour at some dingy local bar where dudes in cargo shorts forget their riffs halfway through the set. These musicians are terrifyingly talented. The precision required to pull off this kind of insanity without it collapsing into meaningless noise is staggering.
What really blows my mind is that this album should absolutely repel me. On paper, it contains several things that normally send me running for the hills. But then Plotkin opens her mouth, hits one clean vocal line, and suddenly I’m trapped, willingly crawling deeper into the madness with a smile on my face like a lunatic in a straitjacket.
“Scarabaeus” is a killer release. It’s ugly, beautiful, violent, mesmerizing, exhausting, and completely out of its goddamn mind. Don’t miss this one. If you’ve got even a drop of Metal in your bloodstream, no matter what subgenre you worship, there’s something lurking in this nightmare waiting to grab you by the throat.
Standouts – “Sealing The Wound”, “Jettatori”, “The Empty Circle” and “Make No Mark”.