Label: Moonlee Records
Release date: 11/20/2020
Production: Milan Bjelica
Album length: 22.15 min
Genre: Alternative Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
Repetitor are Serbian alternative rockers who, in no time at all, have become something of a cult act in Slovenia’s club alternative-rock underground. Their gigs are, simply put, total madness. In those jam-packed rooms where sweat drips from every direction and the stuffy, stale, piercingly electrified air of the club tears at your sweaty body, Repetitor blow their audience away after just a few bars and pull them into their world. The rest of an encounter with the band is of course a first-class movie script of unbelievably honest, devastating rock, with the band wearing their hearts on their sleeves. This trio is seriously, phenomenally tight. The chemistry is outstanding. It’s clear that the new album was played like a club gig. Just in the studio. The energy it spews out is incredible and razor-sharp. That brilliant chemistry, which drives the trio on without restraint, is shown especially vividly on the new album in the song Sa izvora. But let’s take it slow.
The band made their name with an unadulterated, truthful and free-spirited dose of destructively wound-up thundering, droning and roaring that walks its own homegrown musical path, where garage-punk sharpness shakes hands with stoner haze, and the trio love to drift off into trippy repetition of glassy-eyed bass lines that add a fun dash of post-punk. It’s all topped off with bitter lyrics of the new generation, radiating its hopelessness and lack of prospects. A cry of rebellion. The rage of the suffering. Will you fall and give in, or lift your head and keep biting until the one who’s oppressing you goes down? Repetitor march somewhere down the middle. More than once straight into the flames of self-destruction.
However banal it may all seem, the thing is far from one-dimensional. The band’s new, fourth album overall, with the very interesting title “Prazan prostor među nama koji može i da ne postoji”, again released on Moonlee Records, shows that the band is paying more attention than ever to arranging their compositions. In other words, they’re approaching arrangements in a more concise way. More maturely. The album also shows more finesse in building its sonic landscape, and Repetitor surprise already with the second track, Kroz vetar. Here the female vocal is actually set into the soundscape of the song as if it were carried by the wind on the layered rattling of thick bass lines. The closing stretch of the album, with Danima followed by Noćima, confirms that the band has brought a more refined approach to shaping its arrangements. Each is a contrast to the other in what it expresses, yet together they form a whole. It’s about longing for love. But wrapped in a personal gnawing at the tormenting gloom that radiates from the most hidden and remote black hollows and reefs of the soul.
The album title is a kind of response by the band to the current state of the world, where the rules of the game are being set by the (more and more suspicious) pandemic. A band that can’t play live and share its energy with the crowd has summed it up in the album title, while the cover symbolically captures some better times that we all miss so much. With Repetitor front and center.
A good twenty minutes of a “comedy” that is anything but funny, yet is perhaps even the most vivid and varied collection of original songs the band has put together so far. The high dynamics, especially in the sharpened-up tracks, feel great too. It’s that mood-swinging alternation between riff hyperplasia and sections where the phrases step aside and leave room for the bass lines to take over. Gorim is like that, and it will surely grow into one of the live favorites. Repetitor are a band that, and this is no new discovery, ignites at full blood at gigs. They will surely play the album “Prazan prostor među nama koji može i da ne postoji” in full live. It’s a short and incredibly compact document showing that, in their direction, the band still doesn’t skimp one bit on loads of unleashed decibels, yet an artistic growth in the arranging is noticeable. Don’t worry. The homegrown, self-grown character is held back in everything. It’s just richer, having leapt up to a new rung of development.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Džungla (02:12)
2. Kroz vetar (03:17)
3. Gorim (02:32)
4. Kost i koža (02:26)
5. Sa izvora (02:23)
6. Roba s greškom (03:30)
7. Danima (03:44)
8. Noćima (02:18)
Lineup:
Boris Vlastelica – guitar, vocals, synthesizers, bass guitar
Ana-Marija Ćupin – bass guitar, vocals
Milena Milutinović – drums, bass guitar, vocals
