Habitus

Habitus is one of the relics of times that aren''t that far gone, but feel like eons ago.

It is difficult to describe to people who are not familiar with the music scene of Yugoslavia at the time, how different this album is from most of what was released in Yugoslavia. Simply put: a lot of things couldn't be said, or shouldn't be said, because communism, fraud, conspiracy against the great leader and so on... So the whole album exudes a mystery, so one wonders what the album might look like, or would it have seen the light of day at all, if it had been released at least a few years earlier.

Right away, at first we have a unique cover, which represents a man made of different sabers, bullets, grenades, rockets, scopes, with military emblems on his shoulder. For such things, I would already have one foot on Goli Otok, but it probably works in favor of the fact that the album was self-released, in only 200 to 500 copies at the end of an era, and that it went very unnoticed without any promotion or large sales. But I wander too much.

As for the musical composition (content) here, the template is the same throughout the album, but very well done. A few renditions of poetry, with self-penned singer-songwriter songs interspersed. Mustafa had (and still has) a gift for writing texts and poetry with various themes and themes. Although in some moments cryptic, and in others very cheeky and sometimes even humorous, they never manage to be too boring, to reveal too much, or to create the image that Mustafa is some misunderstood poet who laughs out loud when he writes lyrics under a candlelight. I would even dare to say that Mustafa Sirbic is one of the best songwriters in our area. Look at the song "Visegodisnjak" and its vulgar description and mockery of aging, reminiscent of some version of punk poetry like that of Dzoni Stulic, Patti Smith or Tom Verlaine before him, or "Ni Z od Zidina" which describes human sexual insecurities some 30 years ago. but that topic has become even slightly relevant.

Mustafa was not afraid to say what he thought on this album. Of course, there is also what we have already touched on above, that he had no one breathing down his neck and dictating what he would do and how he's going to put together the album (he touched on that in the last song), but again: vulgar, honest lyrics that are second only to the lyrics of those real, genuine top 3 to 5 songwriters of the former Yugoslavia.
Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit.

It may be difficult to put Mustafa on such a high pedestal with only one album, but in my humble opinion, the entire album, from the music to the lyrics and interpretations, deserves to be talked about as one of the bright spots of that end of the Yugoslavian musical era where every village had its own scene.

(This review was written in 2021, but for some reason it stayed in my Word documents and was never published until now)