Scars On Broadway
Scars On Broadway
Interscope Records

by Hugh Platt

Daron Malakian desperately wants you to listen to Scars on Broadway’s debut album without thinking, ‘it’s that band with some of System of A Down in it’. He’s even grown a giant beard and found some enormous sunglasses to hide behind, like one of those Groucho Marx disguise kits.

But is it such a bad thing to be compared to System of a Down? From the moment the record tears open with a boxy chug of ‘Serious’, to the choppy riffs that ‘Stoner-Hate’ flits between like an indecisive moth stuck in a strobe light factory, comparisons are inevitable.

Malakian’s distinctive guitar lines, so familiar from a decade of System, are off the leash and better for it.

Malakian seems lyrically torn between being a wild-eyed vagrant prophet, through to a nihilistic Tourette’s sufferer under the influence of too much Red Bull. For each doom-mongering sermon such as ‘Universe’, there’s a ‘Chemicals’ set to shit you up, like an ice cream cone with a stick of TNT instead of a flake.

You can almost feel his spit dribbling down the side of your face when Malakian’s barking “When I say ‘Fuck the world!’ / let’s get ready to rock / as I piss on your face while you suck on my cock”.

Watch the video to ‘They Say’ by Scars On Broadway

Only occasionally does the album stumble over its own ambition – the earnester-than-thou ‘Enemy’ sounds dangerously close to a calypso band trying to score a Sergio Leone Western.

Wisely closing the album with the sloganistic sneers of ‘They Say’, it’s clear that in amongst the chunky guitar lines and flippant lyricism, Scars on Broadway’s debut is crafted from equal parts brains and balls. And it’s almost enough to make you forget that this is the band with some of System of a Down in it.

4.5/6

Scars On Broadway’s eponymous release is out now on Interscope Records