album Waiting has been released in 1998

    The very first encounter with "The Scarsouls" debut album is bound to puzzle you. You'll try to define musical style, place into on of your "predefined stylistic categories". The second time around, that is not going to matter any more, you will be totally absorbed by the music, you will be free, completely surrenders to the pleasure. On the wave of those wonderful melodies, longing, melancholy, occasionally psychedelic sound, subsequent listening will take you on a journey through the magical world, uncompromisingly thrown at your feet by The Scarsouls. Their album Waiting offers approx. 60 minutes of music. It is a seamlessly crafted piece, a continuous story that will keep atracting your attention until the very end. There is no usual division here between the and the rest of the songs; it is a copact, accomplished album, consisting of twelve beautiful songs. The atmospheric miniature presents a well-measured story and the listener's attention is never in question. Still, it is possible to drift away while listening The Scarsouls, to fly into a new and unknown cyberspace this group wants to take you through. It is the very reason why the whole album is somewhat meditative. Their stories are a sincere result of inner dilemmas facing people constantly in search oh a happier life, but also a reflectiuring the entire war period, a stone's throw away from the front lines. That is how they got to know well the life in shelters, the whizz of granades and the destruction brought about by the war. Two songs ("It Looks Familiar" and "The War Horse") remind us of its ravages. Today, this provincial Croatian town offers nothing but comprehensive hopelessness, record-high unemployment, lethargy and escapism. It can all be felt and heard throughout the album. Although in creating their music The Scarsouls have had no direct model, critics invariably like to label every new band (or artist), allot it to one stylistic compartment or the other, and compare it to other names.
    The Scarsouls' music reminded some critics of the brooding melancholy in the work of The Tindersticks, on of the world we live in.
    The band members lived in Karlovac dor the anxious songs by the Americans Wilco, Red House Painters, Walkabouts or the American Music Club. Furthermore, some drew parallels to certain songs by legends Neil Young, Nick Drake or even Emerson, Lake & Plamer.But the comparison are misplaced and misguiding, since The Scarsouls are, in all liking, a powerful and stylistically original band with a fairly unconventional lineup.

excepts from album "Waiting" reviews

    album Down the Drain has been released in september 2002

    Having attained the new hopefuls status with their first album, and after every honest lover of the Tindersticks, Walkabouts, the Doors and Joy Division bought his copy of the Scarsouls' first album, the time has come for them to try and prove themselves or even become "stars".
    Had the Scarsouls been lucky enough to work and record in England, the U.S. or any other country with a less declining pop or, if you really want, rock culture, the reviewers would now throw in the "second difficult album" theories. Unfortunately, in Croatia, each album is equally "difficult".
    The covers of this album already suggest the basic difference between the first and the second album. The first one is somewhat more melodic, more open, more "easy to listen", more "widescreen", as is the landscape on its cover.. The second album is much more confined, dense, hermetic, much like the cloister on the cover.
    A microphone in the desolate courtyard of a military barracks, or a cloister, it does not matter. After the first album with the murmuring vocals a la Stewart Staples and the Walkaboutsy scores, this album turns into the psychedelic rock waters.
    The first album has unequivocally shown what the Scarsouls can offer, and this is really just one logical step further in the same vein.
    The album opens with the track titled "Lovers", which will be repeated at the end of the album in a slower, more melancholy, wistful version. And that is the very range in which we find the other tracks, finely balancing between the faster, more melodic songs not unlike the Walkabouts' "sub-pop" label phase and the Joy Division on the "Unknown Pleasure" album, and the wistful or psychedelic, slow ones which put one in mind of the Mercury Rev, the Lambchop or, else, a somewhat less gospel-colored songs by the Spiritualized. Of course, all of these associations are by definition purely personal and, in fact, very arbitrary and not quite accurate, so that this review is more of a personal interpretation than something absolute.
    The next track is "Lonesome is the River", and represents the melodic Scarsouls we've come to know on their first album. Things change with the third song, "Stay Awhile", based on the psychedelic keyboards. This is the beginning of the new Scarsouls.
    One of the pinnacles of this album, at least in my view, is undoubtedly the beautiful "Stillness of the Sea", which sounds like an integral part of the Mercury Rev's "Desert Songs". I can only imagine how beautiful it would be had it been played on an oboe or a clarinet, that the keyboards remind of so conspicuously.
    My next favorite is "The Music has just Begun", the track that would open the second side of the hypothetical vinyl album. This is where the Scarsouls have introduced another novelty in their usual sound, giving the base a more leading role, and reminding us somewhat of the early New Order songs.
    When it comes to this broadening of the Scarsouls sound, what is also interesting in the "Tainted Child" is the basic duet of the accordion and the saxophone, i. e. Miroslav Petrak and Mirjana Tomaševia.
It is almost as if the basic element of all the songs has become the relationship, or, more specifically, the dialog, between different, often contrasting elements, as well as their mutual internal relationships. The guitar solo within the duet with the base in "The Music has*?* just begun", the acoustic guitar and the cello in "I Left" or the duets in the very fabric of the composition, brought about by the tempo changes, slower and more melancholic to faster and more dynamic, or the changes in the mood - warm-cold. If we were to speak of the, conditionally taken, "orchestration, the skills are just indisputable, beautifully illustrated by the charming "The World I Know", with the dramatic piano introduction, followed by a great duet, or, maybe even better, the dueling male and female vocals, and the final drumming (evocative of the timpani) and the trumpet, emulating the end-of-the-world orchestra. 
    We can only imagine the sound of the same material in case the production could have matched the conditions in which the Spiritualized usually work, having a whole philharmonic at their disposal. That is why we are left to feel sorry because we cannot see the Scarsouls in the Technicolor Cinemascope version, which is maybe the only real objection: they're simply creating something that cannot be justly recorded within the modest confines of the financially attainable studio, so that the list of additional musicians, which is long as it is, almost surpassing the number the Tindersticks or the Lambchop use, just cannot fully cover their musical ideas.
    In the end, I cannot help but lament over the fate of Croatian musicians: If Karlovac were in England, it would be their new Sheffield or Bristol, since this small, but mighty group of people connected in one way or another with the Scarsouls' orbit, like the Galax 54 or the Time Crew, definitely makes for the most brilliant moments of the Croatian alternative musical scene.

    Alan Kostrenčić, art critic
    August 2002
 

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