Label: ZARŠ Records
Release date: March 2017
Production: Vlado Lešnjak & All Strings Detached
Album length: 49.19 min
Genre: Alternative Rock
Rating: 8.5 / 10
Buy the album!
All Strings Detached is a Slovenian all-female alternative rock duo who, three years after their debut »Heavy Rain« (Rockline review HERE), are back on the scene with its follow-up, »There’s Something Painful About The Pearls«. The two musicians and singers behind the All Strings Detached name, Vesna Godler and Jana Beltran, stick with the creative vision they laid out on their studio debut, and carry it over to the new record.
All Strings Detahced are seasoned musicians with serious mileage in the music business, and on the new album they keep minimalism as the starting point for arranging their songs. But watch out. The new material is once again armed to the teeth with poetry that has real weight to it, and with a freshly lived-in, passionate and unbridled delivery it grabs your attention in an instant. That’s why it fills in the “gaps” of the otherwise minimalist sound so effectively, from start to finish.
So the strings are attached. All of them. The bare jangle of the strummed guitars, caught in a live, raw moment, is melancholic and dark. In the sound production, the guitars pick up an occasional touch of dissonance. The songs unfold from minor keys, and they capture the real charm of alternative music, in the truest sense of the word. Vesna and Jana bring a real sense of difference, and this album, their second in a row, joins the ranks of the most interesting releases on the Slovenian “underground” music scene. It speaks to you without pretension as it invites you into the wide-open, confessional depths of female emotion.
The two female voices once again swing between a whole range of emotional states, delivered with incredible vividness and the glow of bubbling passion, stretched between the tenderness of yearning longing on one side and eruptions of rage on the other. The lyrics are strictly personal and confessional, approached with sensitivity and deep feeling, and they openly paint the vulnerability and fragility of the human soul, which so often becomes a prisoner of the invisible shackles of the life principles of our times, the ones we sometimes follow and fall for almost “robotically.” When it comes to building drama through the interpretation of so-called “black erotic” poetry, both authors are masters, and they deliver their English with a skilled command of meter. The two voices are interwoven again and again, and within the arrangements they are also the basic generators of the melodies.
So dive once more into the inner world of women, feel the intuitive storytelling, the boundless depth and the full penetrating force of the black erotic theater of the duo All Strings Detached. The new album effectively deepens, nurtures and expands the confession of the studio debut. Remarkably authentic, special and one of a kind. With the new album, All Strings Detached remain firmly in the saddle of authorial, creative artistry, a space they handle with serious skill and where they feel most at home.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
