Label: Celinka
Release year: 2013
Production: Blaž Celarec & Tibor Mihelič Syed
Album length: 55.51 min
Genre: Alternative Rock / Fusion / Experimental / Folk
Members of Katalena, Kombo Zlatka Kaučiča, Trus!, Miusow Quartet, Avtomobili and a few more are bringing a record to the scene that even the most demanding music gourmets will sink their teeth into: the kind of listeners who can barely surprise themselves anymore as they trawl through undiscovered musical horizons, assuming there are any left undiscovered for them. The Puzzled are a vivid new foldout of the Slovenian musical landscape, utterly unique in substance.
Picture the urban bustle of one of Slovenia’s bigger cities, say Ljubljana or Maribor. The euphoria of everyday life, the eternal pattern of getting through day after day, hermetically sealed off from the world around it, predictable and controlled. The fate of the individual enslaved to the principles of liberal capitalism, the one Reagan and Thatcher made their fateful pact with in the eighties. This daily “time is money” mold is dosed out in short bursts of yearning for inner fulfillment, a desperate clinging to every last straw that might help you escape to the world you’ve been promised since birth but can never find. Then there’s her, your partner, whose love gives you a reason to keep searching for whatever your heart longs for. And still, nothing moves. You remain a prisoner of iron times in which a handful prosper by exploiting the majority. The rich are fewer, but because they’re rich (in the material sense) they can manipulate the herd that just quietly and humbly toils away. Lovely. Brave new world. The individual’s identity is smashed into a thousand tiny pieces, and its owner can’t put them back together to find any real meaning in existence.
In the glow of this guiding message hanging over the musical horizon, the album “Bad Times For Bedtime Stories” is fragmented in its expression too. And that’s exactly its greatest allure. Avant-garde experimentalism whose form always effectively works to capture the hero’s reactions as they make their way through their day. A perfect form that can’t stand form. The Puzzled’s music is played by top-class musicians who can play, at any given moment, whatever their imagination dictates.
“Bad Times For Bedtime Stories” is a decidedly dark album. The very first track, Time Without Her Is Wasted, sketches out in three acts, and remarkably well, the whole musical-artistic point of The Puzzled. Let’s start with the vocals. Imagine a fleeting Johnny Cash take on the Nine Inch Nails original Hurt. Add a bit more depth to the intonation, bring it closer to the Morrison–Cave principle; among Slovenian acts, the voice of The Tide’s singer Tomaž Štular might also ring a bell. That’s roughly how the gloomy, lower-pitched but deeply felt (and therefore convincing) voice of bassist Tibor Syed Mihelič works.
Slapping a genre label on this would be almost insulting to its artistic value. Around four minutes of alternative gloom in, the story starts to unravel. A harmonized chant, like a Native American sermon, rolls in, and underneath it the band literally smashes the track apart; from here on it’s a succession of seemingly hard-to-reconcile lead motifs. Soon comes total musical chaos of avant-garde experimentalism, nothing less than a bashed-out jazz variation on a variation. Those are relieved by interjected bursts of harmonized melodies. The touch of accordion is an important element that cranks up the charge of the darkly chaotic mood. The first track is also the most demanding one, the one the listener has to chew through.
Wrong Waltz For Ingorant People offers more compactness. The accordion creates the bulk of the backdrop for a vocal approach that would fit right into theater scoring. The rhythm lines are lively, in tune with the free-spirited logic of jazz.
Next comes a new self-contained entity, Black Cat With Bionic Legs, with a hugely listenable turn of events that still keeps things absolutely unpredictable. An extremely multilayered track, spiced with tango rhythms, the accordion melody igniting it, progressively broken rhythmic turns chasing each other stormily, the band carefully dosing out the soundscape note by note. First and foremost, it’s about creating atmospheres that hit. A subtle fusion of seemingly hard-to-reconcile motifs, which these masters bridge masterfully with no major trouble, serving up a one-of-a-kind musical treat that never stops thrilling with its unique energy. Parts of this track would make a great soundtrack for a spaghetti western drama.
In the Name Of Go(o)ds is one of the most dramatic tracks on the album. The rhythm of a lazily swaying cowboy ride and a broken vocal stance are only the beginning. Soon the drama gets a boost from a dialogue between keys and guitar with a generous dose of almost avant-garde-cut bluesy psychedelia, an environment where the artistic presence of Nick Cave’s dissonant vocal stance would fit perfectly too. There’s an undercurrent feeling as you listen that a gospel choir could join in on the chorus in the background with no trouble at all. It barely gets any blacker.
The tension is eased next by the instrumental Katharina Blum, which works far more subtly and paints the soundscape in softer sonic shades; again the sound of the accordion is pushed to the fore. The melancholic moment doesn’t let up in this track either.
If there were a healthy radio frequency somewhere on this planet playing music for mature (read: musically enlightened) listeners (which is of course a total illusion), World Of Nothing would be the ideal way to spice up its playlist. The most listenable track on the album, and the most compact. It sketches the contours of alternative rock with a dash of experimental artistic streak, which is really the guarantee of the unique sonic and expressive density of this excellent studio record. The dark chorus melody is masterfully loosened up in the outro with jazz guitar solos, which further builds on the unique content of this release.
You’re actually waiting for Rootless the whole time. You expect it somehow unconsciously, even though you don’t know where on the record it’s hiding. And right on cue, it’s the last track on the album. An instrumental with the most fragmentation of musical and expressive content. The most free-wheeling rhetoric of piercing musical visionarism à la The Puzzled. A progressive instrumental with the widest range of unpredictable twists and a fresh heavy dose of musical experimentation. On top of all that, there’s clearly some ethno melos too, coexisting beautifully in this outstanding climax of avant-garde fusion. The track runs almost ten minutes, yet it flies by the fastest. This is the track that gets you to automatically hit the button on the CD player with the command “play again”. The whole album, of course.
The Puzzled is an outstanding musical adventure that bridges the seemingly unbridgeable gaps between genres. The words in this review are nowhere near enough. Boundless free-spiritedness of a full-blooded musical experiment, ethno melos, shades of alternative rock, blues, even psychedelia of an almost Floydian saltiness, urges of jazz-rock fusion,… All of this creates the strong note of the band’s self-grown artistic expression, which comes across, of course, as avant-garde. Don’t go looking for some terrifying philosophy in all of it. Turn to the parent bands the musicians of The Puzzled come from and you get an approximation of what to expect on “Bad Times For Bedtime Stories”. Even if you used the all-encompassing label “avant-garde progressive jazz alternative” (brrrr….), you’d say almost nothing. It’s simply a record you have to bite into relaxed, open to unexpected twists, hunting for bashed-out originality in music culture. You’ll be uncovering the message of “Bad Times For Bedtime Stories” for a long time, peeling it back bit by bit. It’s a complex record, not meant for consumption by the average cerebral cortex, because it demands the highest degree of patience and attention from the listener. This is an album of brilliant communication between the members of The Puzzled, in which the musically perceptive stimulus of big talents fully sparks and feeds off each other. The musicians have known each other for a long time and have played many musical adventures together. That’s an important factor too in building the distinctly homegrown stance of this self-made record, which, let’s hope, will get an artistic successor in the future.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.5 / 10
Track list:
1. Time without Her is wasted
– The Quarrel
– He’s out
– He’s back, vomiting.
2.Wrong Waltz for Ignorant People
3. Black Cat with Bionic Legs
4. In the Name of G(o)ods
5. Katharina Blum
6. World of Nothing
7. Rootless
Lineup:
Tibor Mihelič Syed – bass guitar, vocals, guitar, saz, jaw harp
Marko Brdnik – concert and MIDI accordion, keyboards
Marko Lasič – drums, sound effects
Peter Šavli – guitar
Matevž Kolenc – guitar
Blaž Celarec – percussion
