Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Gala hala / Slovenia
Concert date: 25.04.2013
Attendance: 80
The Puzzled is yet another »off-the-wall« project. It’s an alliance of four musicians from home bands devoted to strict musical experimentation and free-spirited exploration. You could call it a fusion of the »not-yet-fused«. The driving engine of The Puzzled is bassist Tibor Mihelič Syed, a regular member of Katalena, and joining him in The Puzzled are his longtime sidekick, accordionist Marko Brdnik (Miusow Quartet, with occasional guest spots in Katalena), drummer Marko Lasič, who recently kicked off the band Trus!, and guitarist Mario Babojelič, the last of the bunch to join The Puzzled, since he didn’t play on the studio release. Four masters of their musical crafts in one pile, then.
Gala hala. The classic hideout. When you get there, nobody can tell you exactly when the show starts. Any show. This time was no different, even though it’s almost ten at night. Could there be any more »alternative« revelation in the mecca of alternative life in Slovenia’s capital? Hardly.
Killing time with a can of beer, the minutes crawled by at a snail’s pace, and a little past half past ten the stage was finally taken, first by Marko Brdnik and then Mario Babojelič next to him. A hazy scene; in the back, at the other end of the club, where the silhouettes of the crowd lazily thickened, you could hear Gala hala’s very own house fixture Jani Mujič, the legendary bassist of the even more legendary 2.2.2.7., telling the techs: »Blow a bit more smoke onto the stage!« The atmosphere was greeted by dimly flickering spotlights, and a good 70 curious cats had gathered in the room, mostly the band’s buddies and partners in the music business, plus a few gourmets who like to treat themselves to »eclectic« musical brews. In fact, they’re the only ones cheering wholeheartedly for this stuff. A visit to a The Puzzled gig couldn’t have poked any better at the heart of the homegrown artistic character of the musical craft.
For an intro, the band treated itself to a longer instrumental, which they used mostly to warm up their fingers. An Apple on stage meant the sound would be further enriched with sonic manipulation of spontaneously branching shades. Babojelič seemed like a perfectly natural pick for the band in this respect. In just under an hour, the band played their studio debut »Bad Times for Bedtime Stories« (April 2013, Celinka label) in its entirety – RockLine review HERE.
Considering this was the band’s first gig, you could tell they were still »feeling out« the room, looking for feedback, for the surroundings’ reaction to the fact of a new musical essence in that very space. Hence the show carried a sense that the band had to pay a bit more attention to calibrating its parts, lest the whole system fall apart. Even though the dynamic flow of events was slightly held back as a result, the quartet bridged its initial stage shuffling with the remarkable experience of long-lived stubbornness on the scene across various projects and bands, and of course with top-notch command of their playing.
Most of the show revolved around The Puzzled’s central figure, bassist and vocalist Syed, who is also the main author of the music and poetry on The Puzzled’s debut. The guy (and Jew’s harp lover) is a proven oddball in his musical vision. So the move to bring his very own combo to life isn’t just excellent, it’s somehow necessary, or rather the only logical one. With his highly pronounced musical intelligence, he decisively adds to the colorfulness of what the Slovenian scene’s musical amusement park has on offer today. Let’s hope there will be more of this kind of linking up between musicians with similarly multilayered, finely chiseled musical profiles in Slovenia in the future.
The band is developing a homegrown musical character with a strictly eclectic stance, fusing a multitude of genre starting points, and in places it even touches on the logic of shaping musical drama that would be perfect for a film backdrop. If Rootless is the herald of exceptional jazz rock fusion with the occasional integration of ethno-melodic elements, mostly courtesy of Brdnik’s accordion (doubled by Babojelič’s guitar lines), then the more demanding Time Withouth Her Is Wasted is the track where the whole substantive core of the combo is embraced in the most felicitous use of the musical branching that the band generates from the basic cues of its artistic approach.
Syed put his vocal approach to excellent use and implemented it in The Puzzled’s musical vocabulary. Lower-pitched, manly growling, at times hollowly dark, with the dramatic character of the clearly crafted charisma of his performance, he could be described, in the most banal terms, as an inspired stroll through the vocal interpretations of Nick Cave, Jim Morrison, and also Johnny Cash. Syed’s voice is the biggest bringer of the pronounced darkness carried by The Puzzled’s vibe. Hence it’s clear that the figure of alternative rock is plainly perceptible in the otherwise fragmented, progressive outcome of constant unexpected twists, through the merging of elements of jazz, ethno, blues and psychedelia.
So let’s hope it won’t stay at just one gig, which served to present the band’s studio debut. The fact that you couldn’t buy the CD at Gala hala during the show confirmed that many bands in Slovenia still think too »artistically« or »bohemian« about promotion alone, which is a great shame. I remember a Miusow Quartet gig long ago at the Sax Pub in Trnovo. We had to chase the band members around the room after the show and practically force them to dig copies of their CD out of their worn-out bags. A CD so powerful in expression that in plenty of other countries it would’ve been reprinted twice over long ago. The story of The Puzzled is similar, and let’s hope it doesn’t go unnoticed. It must not go unnoticed! From the bottom of my heart, I wish the band as much artistic inspiration and creative charge as possible in their continued music-making.
The band closed the show with the track In The Name Of G(o)ods! This is the band’s »famous«, colorfully branching composition, which moves through a lazy opening rhythmic ride and Syed’s brokenly soulful vocal into a later psychedelic-bluesy eroticism of pure drama that wouldn’t let even the little devil himself sleep. And the goosebumps just keep coming, proof that the musical essence of The Puzzled is kneaded from true artistic dough. It’s gorgeous both in its brutally jagged chaos and in the softly cushioned melodiousness of its tunes. Avant-garde, and irresistibly seductive for it!
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