SCARSICK

According to Daniel Gildenlöw's own words cited on Inside Out's website for understanding concept, message and direction of their latest work it's essential to put it into the context of all their previous releases. Daniel said that he'd known all the time that this album will come one day . and sociocritical topics, songs about psychological aspects and general questions about human life have been always an important feature of their albums. 'Scarsick' is a direct reaction to that. - Well it's not that easy to follow those trains of thoughts but Daniel wouldn't be Daniel if this would be the case. For sure after the critically acclaimed love-it-or-hate-it 'BE' which had been blamed by many people for being too pretentious this one is a very surprising work and almost the opposite to it. Never before had PoS sounded that modern, accessible and versatile.

Being an admittedly dedicated fan of this band and having all their previous releases in my collection I must say that 'Scarsick' fails to hit my attraction and obviously I'm not the only one. I loved all their previous albums, especially their earlier heavier ones and 'BE' but this one here - I dunna know - sounds to me like kinda PoS vs. Linkin Park vs. Metallica vs. Kim Wilde vs. Abba. As far I can get the message of this work it's against America and against modern materialistic, selfish and superficial society. But I'm really wondering which audience Daniel intends to transpose it to. At least to me it doesn't appeal the way it's packaged because for me the crucial point for liking an album is always that the music appeals to me and if this is the case then it's a nice extra feature if the content and message is an interesting one as well. I can follow Daniel's critics and kinda agree to them, just I don't like that much the way he's expressing them, just too many repeats of the f-word and moreover I hate rap. But actually the first two songs are by far not the worst ones here, I couldn't tell that I find them enjoyable but at least they're okay for one or two spins, the same applies to 'Mrs. Modern Mother Mary'. Now the really low bottom of this disk is 'America' and 'Disco Queen' (at least placed one behind the other). Those two songs are just awful - I mean, I love mixes of multiple styles when they're well-done as by Subterranean Masquerade but that's not the case here, this just sounds unbearable to my ears after repeated listening. The most striking fact for a complete failure of this work (at least for the standards of a band like PoS) is that there isn't any song I could call excellent or even very good since the rest of the tracks are just from mediocre to fairly good but anything outstanding. I would say for any standard modern alt rock band this album would be a decent or even good work, for PoS it's even not a run-of-the-mill one but rather a disaster. Nonetheless they'll stay one of my fav bands and I'm looking forward to see them live in Germany in March hoping they won't play too many songs from this album. Try better next time, Daniel!

Finally my ratings for the individual tracks:

Scarsick 3/10 - Spitfall 4/10 - Cribcaged 6/10 - America 2/10 - Disco Queen 1/10 - Kingdom Of Loss 5/10 - Mrs. Modern Mother Mary 3/10 - Idiocracy 5/10 - Flame To The Moth 6/10 - Enter Rain 5/10

Total: 40 % = 2 stars. I wouldn't have thought that I'd ever give such a low rating to a PoS album, but honestly I don't have a better choice! I can just advice any newbie to get first all their previous ones before giving this one a try!