Artist: En Face
Label: Dallas Records
Released: 2009
Running time: 40:44
Rating: 4.5/5
The seventh studio album from Rijeka rockers En Face is, let’s call it, easygoing and light on its feet. It would rather jump straight into pop than let anything dangerously distorted come roaring out of the speakers by accident, and it stays loyal throughout to the tradition of the band’s music.
En Face age like good old wine. Their music is written to be extremely friendly to the airwaves. The eighties airwaves, of course. We’re usually under a hailstorm of ultra-shallow rock/pop rock phrasebook from the new era, which is literally chasing us off the radio frequencies thanks to the wrong people in the wrong places. With En Face you’ve got nothing to fear. If radio editors were real fans and connoisseurs of good commercial music, they’d have to slot En Face into the rotation of highly listenable, quality, commercially minded pop rock. Even if, just to help you place them, it’s in a bouquet of company running from Eagles, Eric Clapton and Dire Straits to Chris Rea. En Face cultivate that old-school guitar-driven pop rock, or let’s just say rock. They’re sonic perfectionists and basically work like a little orchestra in the studio. With their long years of experience and a superb knack for putting the lead melody front and center in a motif, En Face cunningly stick to a mold of short, punchy moves, strung together into a compact musical blend.
What’s incredible about En Face is that they can’t really reach any higher than the “Croatian pop rock band” category. Yet the perfection and the equal expressive power of every building block of the music is so strong that “Afrodita” works with maximum conviction. It’s real, lived-in, colorfully shifting in emotion, and it easily touches the listener’s heart and creeps under their skin. Without a shred of Gibonni’s pathetic sobbing, which is the whole point. To help you get your bearings, here’s a thought. If the Scots have Simple Minds, the Croats have En Face. Taking that a step further, here’s a hypothesis: if En Face sounded even a tad “Simple Minds-y” (I picked them by chance, they were just the first that came to mind), they’d no longer be a Croatian band. So this is pop rock that can only be made in Croatia. We Slovenes had Hazard in their day as the representative Slovenian pop rock band, and whatever is left today of Avtomobili.
The “easygoing” thing is far from simple and innocent, though, if you don’t have an innate “musical ear” and talent. En Face rack up winning points as if for fun, with rich orchestral and keyboard arrangements and, of course, the warm, velvety, confidently sensual singing of Sandro Bastiančić, a strong vocal presence who gives En Face a special charm and spark. In the production the guitar is a sonically separate entity. It works like a seasoning, and its sound is typically rock but artfully controlled, kept at a distance, never dominating. Instead it works to tease, to stir up the craving: “We want more!”. The guitar has that recognizable, genuine rock sound, placed in the overall sonic picture like a big, welcome spice whose first job is to boost liveliness and dynamics and lift the mood.
If the opener Labirint (a cover of the original by Eva Braun from Novi Sad), carried along on Hammond breezes, might have come across as naively amateurish, trivially poppy, then Paranormalan instantly shows the greatness of the En Face quartet. That song is made from a totally different dough. Picture an entry for Eurovision in 1975, so before the age of synthesizers. In the chorus it’s fitted with an archaic yet majestic backdrop of wind arrangements, the guitar is held in check by the subdued reverb of an old-school tube amp, and Bastiančić comes across in it as a seductive chansonnier. A masterful trick. Just how intelligent this rock is gets confirmed right after by the title track Afrodita. This rock-accelerated song is the album’s punchier moment, hugely dramatic in character, with an extraordinary wash of richly arranged orchestral elements (strings especially) that build up the drama. Relaxed rock soloing bites into it, in contrast yet perfectly compatible. The harp of guest musician Diana Grubišić brings a special touch to the pre-chorus. As the dot on the “i” of it all, Bastiančić’s vocal is with us again, tackling this time’s verses in Old Slavic, that is, archaic Croatian. That breathes into the song a touch of Illyrian origin, which is where both the harp and the mythological figure of Aphrodite are supposed to hail from. A magical song, and an excellent choice by the label and the band to release it as the album’s second single.
The lads keep up the short, punchy tricks of building compact, melodic, sonically full polish into each song in the mid-tempo To sam ja. There a rich interweaving of wind and string arrangements converses delicately with the language of the guitar, and even mild blues-jazz rays shine through. Pusti me da spavam comes close to it in mood later on. New expressive turns follow one after another on the album. There’s Sreča, dominated by the sound of a “bottleneck” guitar, and the soothingly yearning Kad treba, ja sam tu, with the contrasting “virginal” vocal of guest singer Norna,… The band keeps a touch of organic sound going the whole way, often based on the natural communication of acoustics wrapped around the sensual vocal, and En Face conjure that up intensely, especially in the melancholic Tajni ključ. It’s hard to pick favorites, because as far as lead melodies go, these are maximally polished highlights of the album. If I had to pick the peaks, I’d put Tajni ključ alongside the title track and Paranormalan, and right before the end of the album the excellent Pusti me da spavam, the latter especially for the extraordinary dramatic twist at the end of the song, conjured up by a guitar solo with keyboards behind it.
I won’t ramble on any longer. En Face have put out an album that feels incredibly relaxing, unburdened, an album that’s just begging to be listened to. You’ll love hanging out with it at different moments of everyday life, and especially, say, on a night drive in the car on the way back from a Motorhead gig at, say, Munich’s Zenith. The gentlemen have woven together a set of compactly polished songs adorned with strong, expressively rich arrangements that optimally cover and exploit the full sonic spectrum the studio has to offer. Motif-wise the songs are varied and dynamic, so the album sails lively and varied through different moods. In the eighties an album like this could have been a big “hitmaker”. It’s a mature guitar-driven pop rock album of the kind that only the old-school guard of the craft still turns out, which En Face belong to. A splendid, “less is more” kind of perfection that can serve as an example.
Line-up
Sandro Bastiančić – vocals
Miro Vidović – guitar
Samir Šverko – bass
Alen Tibljaš – drums
Production
Robert Funčić
Track list
01. Labirint
02. Paranormalan
03. Afrodita
04. Kad san započne tu
05. To sam ja
06. Sreća
07. Kad treba, ja sam tu
08. Tajni ključ
09. Ritam
10. Pusti me da spavam
11. Otvori vrata
