Scars on Broadway - Scars on Broadway (Album)
Scars on Broadway is the new project-band featuring the guitarist and the drummer of the still-on-hiatus System of a Down, Daron Malakian and John Dolmayan. The self-titled album has been highly anticipated by SOAD fans around the world, but it is clear from the very beginning that the album is missing something; namely, Serj Tankian.
The album covers a variety of different styles and is made from cuts that Malkian had not yet been able to use with System of a Down. While some of the tracks are catchy, the vocals are generally not strong enough, leaving the front-man sounding more like one of the Beatles than the singer of a modern rock band. To be fair though, it is an experimental album and with it they have taken a more rock over metal approach than they would have with System of a Down.
Getting past the vocals, the songs themselves are very repetitive having little more than one verse and a chorus that is repeated 6 or more times in a single song. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that there is a formula in place here; in fact, you probably don’t even need to know maths. Furthermore, the repetition is not limited to the structure of the songs themselves but also in the rhyming. The most notable instance is in the song Babylon where, for the most part, every verse line ends in the word “Babylon”.
A few of the songs have some shock value in their lyrics, but I generally found these to feel forced as if the shock was put there by plan rather than as what came out creatively. Most obvious here are the lyrics in Chemicals and Exploding/Reloading. The songs most reminiscent of SOAD on this album would have to be Stoner-Hate for its wackiness and Enemy for the political messages it contains. Enemy is almost like a Serj-less extension of SOAD’s Science. Try saying that 5 times fast.
In conclusion, the debut self-titled album from Scars on Broadway has an experimental feel. If you liked Daron’s vocals in the last few SOAD albums then you will probably like this one; however, if you are an older-school SOAD fan you’d probably be better off listening to Serj Tankian’s Elect the Dead.
