Scar Symmetry is one of the most embraced bands in the metal scene today for such reasons as their 2nd generation melo-death approach combined with Alvstram’s vocals allegedly being a godsend to music. When you take some generic fool who listens to Lamb Of God and throw Scar Symmetry in their playlist they will think the band are geniuses because, like the common Tool fan, the lyrics are about mystical properties and other things simple-minded people can’t comprehend. However, anyone who’s seasoned in metal can and should tell you that melo-death is dead, punk is dead, tr00 black metal is dead, and Scar Symmetry needs to move the *** on.
Now, for this new album Alvstram has been kicked out of the band because he can’t perform his studio vocals live, even though his clean/death style is a dime a dozen, so the band gathered two vocalists as replacements, implying the band’s style isn’t changing at all. From the first two tracks you hear the same things you’ve heard on all their other releases: song arrangements with heavy verses and homo choruses, industrial elements for 5 seconds, and solos with arpeggios galore. The music has always been the main problem with this band because of how it tries so hard to be anthemic and heavy but utilizes the open chord syndrome all too often for anyone to give a ***. Noumenon And Phenomenon is a good example of this. Actually if you listen to Chainheart Machine by Soilwork, you’ve heard Scar Symmetry’s career.
Vocally, I didn’t think they could do any worse than Alvstram’s average abilities, but then I heard Mechanical Soul Cybernetics and realized that yes, they can and did. They got a clean vocalist…and then made him scream, and I just don’t see where they found that to be useful when they also hired a damn growling vocalist. Their trade-offs and performances throughout the album are so predictable and one-dimensional that the fact they aren’t any better or worse than Alvstram doesn’t even matter.
Non-Human Era does a good job at trying to sound like Behold…The Arctopus for 2 seconds before going back to chug chug chug, Sculptor Void tries something new for the intro before going back to chug chug chug, and A Parenthesis In Eternity rips off Edge Of Sanity so bad that I skipped it immediately, so it’s fairly obvious that: 1) Scar Symmetry still is generic as ever, 2) Their fans are deprived and they don’t even know it. Hopefully the band will have what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, and see that playing music from the mid 1990’s is not innovative and in their case underwhelming either way, therefore they are useless. They are wasting Sweden’s money every time they record. Someone do something before they slap their balls on another genre.
