Album Review: Scars of The Flesh – In Darkness Alone (Self Released)

Melodic/blackened death metal crew Scars of The Flesh will release their third album album ‘In Darkness Alone’ on November 18th, 2022.

Featuring five brand new original tracks plus four cover songs, In Darkness Alone finds Scars of The Flesh at their most visceral sounding. Notable from the scathing approach they take with Only I. The dichotomy between epic guitar melodies, pounding drumbeats and guttural vocals is both interesting and exciting.

Matching epic sounds with epic lengths, the group start to really flex their musical muscles with The Hooded One. The darkness doesn’t so much as creep as it does flood, a great example of how Scars of The Flesh combine black and death metal while sounding suitably grand.

The same goes for the title track and Memory Unknown, but here melody plays a much bigger part. Scars of The Flesh showcasing a bit more drama and spreading their metal tendrils into darker and doomier territories. Both tracks are elaborately detailed and with plenty of exciting twists and turns to the blackened death make-up.

The final original track is Mors Aeterna and it’s the shortest, more of a melodic extended outro that serves to bridge the gap between original music and the covers. Speaking of which…

Behemoth, Dimension Zero, Amon Amarth and Metallica get the cover treatment here. Quite a mix of bands but showing the diversity in Scars of The Flesh’s style.

Like all covers, how you feel about the original will affect how you feel about the covers. Love or hate the tracks and bands they focus on, there’s no arguing with how Scars of The Flesh inject their own style into these well-known listens. They do these songs justice and make enough changes to the formulas to make them feel fresh. Of the four, it’s Metallica’s The God That Failed that might turn the most heads.

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