The Scarring Party
Audition with The Scarring Partyby Dan Vierck
August 2010
I met Isa Carini at a roller derby tournament. I immediately recognized her as the dress-wearing, tuba and trumpet and whatever else playing femme fatal of the Scarring Party. I tried to be coy. She was selling cigars, jewelry and PBR tallboys. I bought several pieces of jewelry. I asked her if I could watch the band rehearse sometime, she said No. She said though, that the band was looking to replace someone who’d just left, if I played. As it turns out, I didn’t.
This was a little after the Scarring Party had released Come Away From the Light, the follow up to their debut, A Concise Introduction. Their music is definitive, iconic and creepy - sounding like nothing except things that are scary. The sound is exclusively acoustic, arrangements consisting of banjo, guitar, bass, tuba, accordion, typewriter, xylophone and any number of odd things the band manages to scrape together. This is not for the sake of novelty - a band after anything so cheap would’ve bowed out by now.
