Artist: Repetitor
Label: Moonlee Records
Released: 2012
Length: 26:21
Rating: 4.1/5
It’s rough knowing you don’t have to introduce a band like Repetitor to people anymore. Or, well, the Repetitors, to be precise. The Belgrade punk rockers (with a tendency to crank the feedback up to frequencies and volumes that even noise rock wouldn’t be ashamed of) have been playing Slovenia a couple of times a year for about five years now, and they even opened for Deerhoof at Kino Šiška back in 2010. This band is practically always on a stage somewhere, which maybe leaves less time for actually making music, but more time for seriously honing the live show. And you can’t argue with that. Repetitor are a band of stages, a band of energy, a band of jumping into the crowd in front of the stage, a band of slightly rebellious lyrics with just the right dose of another typical punk rock theme – finding yourself. And those lyrics, typical as they are, are so brilliantly written and especially delivered that they don’t just pull in every listener, but thanks to just the right amount of topicality and championing of being different, most of the band’s peers see themselves in them. That surely makes them one of the best bands of this kind on the ex-Yu scene, though I could say without much objection that they’re one of the best beyond it, too. Anyway, one guy and two girls finally took a break from endless gigging in (always the same) clubs to record their second album – Dobrodošli na okean.
The vast majority of the album had already been heard at gigs – the band’s material tops out at a good hour at most. The second album is short, in true punk fashion – just over 26 minutes. But that in no way hurts the album’s message or its explosive charge of energy. In fact, that’s the very essence of the album – its shortness. A kind of compression (not in the production sense) of the band’s live energy, which really comes through this way. That surplus of energy relative to length, that inverse proportion, has been the band’s emblem since the very beginning, and that’s why Dobrodošli na okean can be an even more heavily charged album than the band’s debut Sve što vidim je prvi put. That’s not all that sets the two albums apart, of course, but it’s the first thing that strikes me as so obvious, mostly because the band’s (distinct) character is so well known.
Sound-wise, the band has definitely moved forward – mostly thanks to a wider range of stylistic approaches. They’ve kept their sound while becoming harder to classify, which isn’t important or even necessary in the end, but the very fact that they’re hard to pin down says a lot about the band’s direction and approach to making music. If I said they’ve managed to make the riffs, melodies and lines even simpler this time, yet they sound more complex than, say, on the debut, I’d maybe capture the essence of the band’s progress. Experience surely helped a lot here, along with that »old-school« approach to recording an album – you wear the songs in live first, let them take shape with the audience, and watch the crowd’s reaction to certain parts of a track, until the final form is the one that lands best with people. Of course, this is far from some commercial calculation where the band’s music bends to what the audience demands. It’s simply about testing different ideas on stage, especially because that’s always different from noodling around in a closed-off rehearsal room or studio.
The lyrics are actually even more direct than on the debut, yet wrapped in a kind of anti-aesthetic, an exceptional narrative, an outburst of honesty that’s so memorable and so easy to relate to precisely because it’s written by (our) peers, and because it’s not about quasi-intellectual ideas, concepts or some sort of critique, but simply experience and emotion. Here the song »Šteta« mirrors the mindset of the average listener, especially the jump between the lines »Pokvareni podli nisu oni / ružni prljavi glupi zli / to smo mi« and »Hteo sam da ti pokažem / da imam dobru stranu«; to my mind, that lyric contains one of the most brilliant, yet simple and unforced leaps in this kind of lyrical delivery.
There is one thing the band should watch out for, though – I noticed a syndrome of slipping into pretty similar intros and generally fairly »same« riffs. Building your own sound is one thing, being out of ideas is another. Repetitor are still the former for now, but more songs will have these similar openings, these distorted chorus-riffs, these single-line blends of guitar and bass, and they’ll have to wear them in live more often. Purely because live it doesn’t matter as much, since the band actually has a healthy amount of improvisation, which is quite surprising.
Dobrodošli na okean is therefore a logical continuation of the band’s development. It’s an album that keeps the best of the new and old punk rock/indie scene. That original indie approach that calls for hunting down new sounds, and that energetic punk rock way of delivering – music. It’s an incredibly simple formula, built from the typical traits that make these styles so appealing, but Repetitor are genuinely, naturally raw in them, while also being smart and honest. Welcome.
Lineup
Boris Vlastelica – vocals, guitar
Ana-Marija Cupin – bass, vocals
Milena Milutinović – drums
Production
Repetitor, Goran Crevar
Tracklist
1. Devojke idu u Minhen
2. Biću bolji
3. Šteta
4. U pravom trenutku
5. Dostupni i laki
6. Lica
7. Oktobarski salon
8. Laka zabava
9. Pripazi na ljude
