Design Your Fate

Despite the silly band name, Scars of Tomorrow is yet another punk band from the Thorp Records stable offering something that appears, on the surface, to be by-the-numbers punk-metal fusion, but reveals unexpected complexity when examined more closely. The band's labelmates in How It Ends offer a single musical idea coupled with surprisingly interesting lyrical ideas; Scars of Tomorrow offers the opposite. Lyrically, the songs are predictable when they aren't either hackneyed ("Face to face with black/Face to face with death/Into a void of emptiness") or incoherent ("Follow your breath, it's so cold/Victim of circumstance/Resides in broken dreams"). But musically, there's a strange synergy at work: roaring vocals and dense, snarling guitars repeatedly give way to chord progressions and sonic textures that come straight out of the emo tradition — note in particular the remarkable "With Open Arms," which lasts almost five minutes and never seems to settle into a single stylistic groove, and the equally fine "TFTDC." "Arise" is another winner in a similar vein. If the lyrics are weak, it doesn't ultimately matter that much, since they're lost in the roar for the most part anyway. Recommended.