Trophy Scars, it’s fair to say, don’t believe in doing things by halves. In fact, they’re more inclined to do things in doubles. The upcoming album from the Morristown, New Jersey quartet, Holy Vacants (via Monotreme Records), was initially worked up as a 35-page screenplay treatment by vocalist and lyricist Jerry Jones and is conceptually even more ambitious than 2011’s Never Born, Never Dead EP, which took reincarnation as its theme.

Listening to the Holy Vacants openers “Archangel” and “Qeres”, whose free-wheeling but complex and cathartic, psychedelic blues, it’s obvious the band have moved light years away from their post-hardcore early years, but the album still features good friend Adam Fisher ofFear Before The March of Flames.

Trophy Scars reveal their admiration for fellow New Jersey son Springsteen, circa Darkness on the Edge of Town with “Crystallophobia”, “Everything Disappearing” and “Extant”, and for Jimi Hendrix via “Hagiophobia” while elsewhere there are echoes of The Mars Volta. But what might sound like an unworkable agglomeration of disparate parts, is intense and cohesive.

https://soundcloud.com/monotreme-records/06-trophy-scars-hagiophobia