Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Coma Stereo
Label: Kapa Records
Released: 2012
Length: 39:16
Rating: 4.9/5
What’s left for a band to offer a nation of dreamy absentees after a binary ending and a launch into transgalactic spheres? Youth has kneaded and squeezed the energy of its revolt against the rotten system into a form of total apathy, and the perfect contours of a world soaked in the apocalyptic smell of impending doom are followed by the musical expression of a millennial generation of bands defending the colors of the rebellious and forever alternative garage in the year of our Lord 2012. Part of this post-rock soldiery are the atypical rhapsodes of dreamy sound Coma Stereo, who just three years after the outstanding Transgalaktika managed to create ten full-blooded songs that can confidently coexist even within the confines of the formalist universe of a shared record, while 1000 mest is an extraordinary journey through the fragmentary neighborhoods of a city in a galaxy I-don’t-know-where.
And this universe of sound, ideas and solid rhythms weaves itself together once more, as if a single heart were pumping it out into the world through a four-piece body. In a good eight years of cohabiting the same coordinates of space and time, Coma stereo have created a perfect climate for the symbiotic pouring of their creative juices into the same cup, a chalice of musical offering that is anything but a pale copy of what’s already been heard and made. On 1000 Mest, Coma Stereo managed to burst past their previous frames and hung considerably more analog, warm flesh onto the digital binary skeletons of beeps and communication chirps, because the record sounds as if it had been cut onto the reels of an old studio, and the nostalgia is cranked up even further by the fact that the record’s main carrier is good old vinyl, so often wrongly cast into oblivion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UmouiaHsYQ
It’s a revolt against the system, and one more reason to give it a listen is that there’s no shortage of hunger for creating and sonic experiments. The core of the sonic atypicality rests above all on a fusion of 1970s piano sound, where keyboardist Sašo Stamatovski has evidently filled his mental spectrum with Miha Kralj’s piano work too, with an antipode in Tomaž Kurež, who probes the limits of minimalism and is always partial to effects, while the strong, danceable, punkoid bassline of Marko Širec, looking back to the eighties, and the tight interplay of drummer Domen Repnik give the album the perfect sheen of timeless schizophrenia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsPp7SZZSX4
Right after the first dive into the opener, the melancholic Črna jutra, it’s clear that the sound, as if Nintendo toys had been wired through a mixing desk, has been replaced by a heavier, psyched-up sound of more organic instruments, while Bogomila, with the wordless narration of an accelerated post-punk dictate of a simple riff and rhythms effectively charged and infused with the freshness of positivity, carry the band’s expression out of its usual dark vagueness into more concrete waters. The title track, Tisoč mest, doesn’t betray this lucid outpouring of playful post-rock fluency either; here we even get Tomaž’s vocals, as if he’d torn them out of a collage of some Joy Division dirge and made it glow in the glass goblets of an alternative modification, which on top of that has even gained a comprehensible string of words describing the state of mind of a modern intellectual with no real prospects. “I sing in the desert. I draw horizons. A thousand cities” is a haiku that says a lot, you just have to read it between the lines, and the riders from Maribor are critics of this mundane apathy, with a sound that’s atypical for Slovenia today. What follows is even sweeter and even more heartbreaking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_10wEmGiPU
“You can hear the music of fools and the two of us are dancing a tango. One … Two … Three … Four ...” is the verbal countdown of a perfect dirge that squeezes even the most bitterly suppressed tears out of a person, while Slepe hiše vojn is the backdrop to the perfect musical articulation of farewell and the transience of the moment. Kristalni voz heads in the direction of Miha Kralj’s Andromeda, and for a moment I check whether I haven’t accidentally swapped the record I put under the caressing gramophone needle, but after the eruption of a guitar chorus and the fat, impulsive stabbing of bass and drums I forget about the technicalities of comparison and surrender to the beautiful surpassing of imaginary milestones of the permissible, set long ago. Coma Stereo managed to upgrade and step beyond themselves; the record feels weighty, compact, and, despite all its hermeticism, airy and alive. The perfect atmosphere is elegantly filled out, the lengths of previously noticeably overlong songs have adapted to the usual (im)patience of Slovenian listeners, and it enchants even more than its predecessors, and Coma Stereo, despite everything, keep their own integrity and remain inscribed in the charming dreaminess of a psychogenic disconnect. Empirical proof that it’s perfectly natural to cohabit in both the energetic and the dreamy sphere is the song Harakiri, which in its rudimentary form is an outstanding example of the more than inspired poetics of the Podravje rhapsodes of boundless ideas. The mounting eruptiveness of pure heartfelt emotion foams the sky and rivals the explosions of the hellishly active Sun, while Coma Stereo breathe into our ears a complete trip of original, music-inscribed artistry. Uspavanka za tigre is an intermezzo leading to the door of the demonically beautiful Drakula. “In this world the lights from the direction of the clouds are an open sea. / We strangers came to the Golden Tower, full of memories. Almost taller than the sky. The paper sound of the walls, the silent air of the night and the breaths of moaning are faces without eyes. I know they’re all just shadows and that their world dances in infinity. But only time is forever, from tomorrow on it flows with the wind” is the verbal enigma that Tomaž sings, giving the musical build-up the chance to step up to a higher level of transcendence. The words of an inspired poet and the impressions of mental catharsis complete each other in the Tool-esque song Vse Misli so odveč, and the oratorio of the whole is closed by the static-laden Mrk, after which everything has been said and offered on the altars of musical perfection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aNkdGy-KiQ
1000 Mest is an outstanding eclectic edict on impermanence, and with that it becomes just the right soundtrack for a year of mental transformation. Interesting how in recent years it’s precisely the local volcanoes of creativity that are waking up, anything but extinct, and that’s just as it should be! Part of this truly outstanding soldiery, crowding around the epicenter of musical creativity impersonated in the form of the label Kapa, are Coma Stereo too. Sadly, the level of ever-higher musical quality is inversely proportional to the financial benefits the youngsters will get, which is why, for their courage and for successfully overcoming their hitherto transparent reservations about the Slovenian word, they deserve standing ovations, recognition from the wider Slovenian community, and more than fleeting airplay on the radio at a time when everyone’s already asleep. As I once wrote, and precisely in connection with this collective of four minds in one. The lads have more than successfully satisfied expectations, and the appetite for more is, of course, more than a given, isn’t it?
Line-up
Domen Repnik – drums
Marko Širec – bass guitar
Sašo Stamatovski – synthesizer, Moog, keyboards
Tomaž Kurež – vocals, electric guitar
Production
Hrvoje Nikšić
Tracklist
1. Črna jutra
2. Bogomila
3. 1000 Mest
4. Slepe hiše vojn
5. Kristalni voz
6. Harakiri
7. Uspavanka za tigre
8. Drakula
9. Vse misli so odveč
10. Mrk
