Performer: Elvis Jackson
Label: Self-released
Released: 2009
Length: 43:12
Rating: 4/5
Is Elvis Jackson the child of Michael Presley? Or is it the other way around? If the band’s newfound musical suspension really does defy gravity, there’s surely some truth in that. The cheeky sporty rockers, inspired by the off-the-rack threads of good old J.K. from Jamiroquai, have shoved a new studio album onto the market, and it’s by far their most ambitious move yet. Bill Gould himself, the album’s producer and Faith No More’s bassist, spotted the potential, the clear vision for growth and the mapped-out goal in Elvis Jackson. Landing a producer of that caliber is no given.
“Against The Gravity” effectively captures and highlights Elvis Jackson’s core strengths. It brings out the heart of that raw rock energy that is the band’s driving spirit. It sums up the looseness, the carefree attitude, the big dose of positivity, the sense of humor (caught in the endearingly goofy Boyz And Girlz), and a minimalism that works wonders in its punchy economy. The “less is more” motto is put to good use. The production keeps things alive while clearly spotlighting all four basic building blocks of the sound and squeezing the maximum out of the quartet.
The deliberate production touch of “metal lathe grinding” on the bass line in the title track, which never reappears anywhere else on the album, is an unbelievably juicy and inventive way to ground the raging “thrashy” guitar phrase (palm-muted) of Against The Gravity, the song that kicks off the album, while the rhythm and vocalist Buda’s recognizable approach give it a clear alternative rock flavor. The loudness is shocking, and it heats the album up to the right working chemistry in an instant.
What follows keeps up the same frequency, with another fiercely positive wild march, Wake Me Up!, with early Green Day outlines. Three, four chords and energetic “pogoing”. The unbridled gallop continues with Sweet Perfection, where the great payoff of the melody placed in the bass line provides an excellent counterbalance while keeping the album’s development in a highly dynamic flow.
The first three tracks fly by before you can breathe in and out, and then comes one of the album’s peaks, Dry Your Tears, driven by the lively rhythmic sway of a slightly sped-up reggae beat pointed toward SKA rails. The first minor chords finally sneak onto the album, and Elvis Jackson confirm what a strong rhythm section they have. It’s a textbook example of a song showing how important the bass guitar can be in rock, since it creates a seductive rhythmic figure while carrying the bulk of the melody in all its highly inventive playfulness. In general, with their fusing of “groove” rhythms, which they triumphantly lay under simple rock templates of guitar riffs or plain strumming of clean chords, Elvis Jackson can remind you of a kind of Slovenian equivalent of Red Hot Chilli Peppers (even with all the straining for commercial success).
The band returns to its familiar mischievous burn through Breaking The Silence and Not Here To Pray – the latter could easily be covered with the “metal riff” feint of the opening track, swapping the two in the album’s running order. They carry a very similar expressive energy.
Dirges aren’t exactly an everyday thing for Elvis Jackson, but This Time is an excellent and much-needed change of mood and dynamics, drawn from the band’s love of reggae, and it keeps the listener on their toes. You’ve barely soaked in the change when Street 45 surprises you in a good way, perfectly built to be a hit thanks to the sheer catchiness of the chorus. Alongside Dry Your Tears, Street 45 and This Time are two more songs that deserve special praise for the perfectly combined melodic fit of pre-chorus and chorus, where the band pulled off an incredible fluidity and high listenability, while adding (rarer on this album) an emotional pulse of pain that reminds us that the Elvis Jackson boys bleed under the skin too.
Still, This Time is the point of the album that, within a run of four tracks, joins together the most exciting moment of the new record. Their basic dynamo is the thrilling play of the rhythm line, crowned by an especially effective, originally combined and demanding motif shift in the burner Salvation. A Glass Of Tequila could have been put to much better use as the album’s closer. That’s where the album could actually have ended, though not without a delightfully cheeky bit of tomfoolery like Boyz And Girlz. The closing track What Took You So Long is, in a generic sense, the straw that breaks the album’s back, its less interesting moment, but the educational lyrics about personal self-discovery earn it valuable points. Sometimes the only way is to break every rule of everyday life in your head, slip away from them, and only then, in the peace of liberating solitude, find your true self.
We can’t skip over the thrilling progress in singer Buda’s vocals, who has built on the recognizability of his own approach. In the faster moments he can be annoyingly stinging, which gives the songs a punk accent, and in the laid-back moments he deliberately bends the melody in the verses like a true Jamaican great-grandson. His delivery is highly energetic throughout, even explosive, flexible and understandable, and his English pronunciation is at such a level that it comes across, at its core, as satisfyingly American English.
You can tell that quite a few seasoned hands of foreign masters of studio sound processing worked on the final product. This undeniable new fact widens the gap between Elvis Jackson and the other Slovenian bands of the fashionable alt rock wave, who are still fighting for that kind of pedigree. With their new sound, Elvis Jackson have stepped beyond the confines of the provincial hen yard and, with mature vehemence, sailed into the wide sea of international waters. That’s something we can be very proud of, and we wish the same road for the rest of the Slovenian rock bands that would like to follow. The guiding principle of being qualitatively comparable in the wide company of music bands of planet Earth is the breakthrough abroad. Hallelujah. What wasn’t exploited from the foundations of the third album was picked up by the fourth, “Against The Gravity”. Evidently some things had to ripen, like the change of drummer, as well as the ever-growing paring down of fusing reggae, ska and funk content into a basic rock form, because ”Against The Gravitiy” is a much more cutting and direct (rock) album than its predecessor, which may surprise some with its “simplification” of this lineup’s new game. Another five years of seasoning and ripening passed between the previous and the new album, which is professionally “ironed out” to the point where it can win over the musical masses. “Against The Gravity” confidently lays Elvis Jackson’s foundations for a safe symbiosis on the world map and secures the band a safe, independent artistic path ahead.
Lineup
David Kovšca (Buda) – vocals
Boštjan Beltram (Berto) – guitar
Erik Makuc (Slavc) – bass guitar
Marko Soršak (Soki) – drums
Production
Bill Gould
Track list
1. Against The Gravity
2. Wake Me Up!
3. Sweet Perfection
4. Dry Your Tears
5. Breaking The Silence
6. Not Here To Pray
7. This Time
8. Street 45
9. Salvation
10. A Glass Of Tequila
11. The Burned Out Flame
12. Boyz And Girlz
13. What Took You So Long
