Holy Vacants [CD]

Holy Vacants, the fourth album from New Jerseys Trophy Scars, sees them deliver their magnum opus as they continue to evolve their sound. Holy Va-cants uses as its springboard a bizarre cocktail of mythology, ancient reli-gion, and conspiracy theory surrounding the Nephilitic gene. The narrative may be conceptually out-there, but it doesnt fence the album in and stands as a metaphor for far simpler and more widely recognized issues " the ide-alization of youth, loss of identity and corrupted innocence. Listening to the likes of opener Archangel and Qeres, with its free-wheeling but complex and cathartic, psychedelic blues, its obvious the band have moved light years away from their post-hardcore early years. They reveal their admira-tion for Springsteen with Crystallophobia, Everything Disappearing and Extant, and for Jimi Hendrix via Hagiophobia, while elsewhere there are echoes of GN Rand The Mars Volta. But what might sound like an unwork-able agglomeration of disparate parts is an intense and cohesive, hugely compelling whole, with contrasts that make for a visceral immediacy.

• Format Detail: Digipak
• Format: CD
• Genre: Rock