Artist: Ayra
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 2008
Duration: 43:31
Rating: 4/5
Ayra is a Croatian singer from Rijeka. But then, which Croatian musician isn’t? On that front, Rijeka remains, now and always, a special spot on the map of our southern neighbor. A true stronghold of Croatia’s best acts! The guy has been in the game for some 20 years, and got more serious about music around the turn of the ’80s into the ’90s, playing in various rock bands from Rijeka as a singer and instrumentalist.
Ayra serves up an album of easygoing pop grooves with beautifully balanced production, where the instruments sit crystal clear and separate from one another. He’s a seasoned musician with plenty of miles on the clock, who knows exactly what he wants and, generally speaking, knows how to treat things in the studio. The songs carry a sugary, seductive melodic sense, and he builds the mood step by step toward peaks in dominant choruses. He pulls that off on the songwriting side as well as with the velvety warmth of his yearning vocals. On the rhythmic front, Ayra has everything figured out too. That’s the main trick behind how convincing and real this album feels.
A textbook example of this album’s great musical toolkit is the opener Nedostaje mi dio tebe, where the pre-chorus stands out for the contrast between the singer’s warm, velvety voice and a sturdy rhythm line, further dressed up with playful percussion and a lively, melodic bass line. In the chorus, a rock riff sneaks in from the background, flipping the whole atmosphere and dynamic of this gorgeous pop rock puzzle. Next up is Još sam uvijek tvoj, which the artist presented at Dora 2007, where Ayra carefully pulls back the rock accent of the opener, and the melodies are mostly carried by acoustic and orchestral arrangements. It’s precisely in a song like this that the delicacy and sophistication of the vocals come into their own, even carving out some room for soul improvisation, though in very mild doses, of course.
The vibe quickly snaps back to where the album opened, with Sretan broj, which keeps the approach of building an extreme contrast between a compact, funky rhythm line and the vocals in the pre-chorus, which a rock riff then replaces, carefully woven into a standout chorus. The guy returns to this formula successfully in the bouncier Bez tebe, while the rest of the album is made up of more or less typical “chill out” pop ballads. And those are?
Dvije ruže could easily replace the chosen Dora 2007 entry, since it sticks to the tried-and-true template! That was my first impression. But when you consider that Ayra already presented it at Dora back in 1996, things make sense. Over the years the song has gotten an excellent revision and a mood upgrade, with an even fuller sound. The pop flavor of this record by no means hides its dance impulses, and Lady, for instance, is a winning combo of funk and rock, artfully sprinkled with the sugar of Ayra’s vocals. The singer keeps dreaming successfully about unfulfilled love, carrying on into the softly flexible Samo ti. If the guy had decided to pin the lead melody on an alto sax in Tu si pored mene, the listener would have no trouble picturing the lead melody of George Michael’s Careless Whisper in the association cortex of their brain. The album closes at a high level with Tko zna, where the interplay of Ayra’s vocals with multi-part vocal harmonies is strung together with great success, especially in the big finale, and the guitar finally gets some electric current again after a long while. You rockers will miss that on the album a bit, though. Truly, among the mellow songs, everything sounds far more convincing than Još sam uvijek tu, so it’s an interesting question why Ayra chose that particular song to represent himself at Dora 2007. Maybe at the time it was the best prepared of everything on the album for something like that.
Another relaxed track, Reci mi tajnu, splits the album’s 11 songs in half, and its “chill out” atmosphere is successfully and harmoniously upgraded by the jazzy melodic lines of the alto sax from the song’s special guest Denis Razumović – “Razza”.
Ayra has capitalized on his experience brilliantly in shaping the musical ideas of the individual songs. You can tell these ideas matured over a long stretch for his studio debut, and that all these grooves, which come across as simple and easy, were clearly thought through in the search for ideal combinations, to get the most out of seductive melodies, dance rhythms, and a rich weave of background soundscapes. The background curtains triumphantly alternate between organic-sounding acoustic orchestral arrangements, compatibly reinforced in select spots with a veil of rock. It’s an emotionally powerful and convincing product, a collection of lively little pop songs that offer plenty of good music and give you a heaping pile of excuses for why listening to the album gets you busting out dance moves.
Lineup
AyrA – vocals, keyboards on tracks 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, bass guitar, drums, backing vocals
Ivan Bajsar – electric and acoustic guitars
Kristijan Novak – keyboards on tracks 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Denis Razumović “Razz” – alto saxophone on track 6
David Trkulja – bass guitar on track 1
Production
Ayra
Tracklist
1. Nedostaje mi dio tebe
2. Još sam uvijek tvoj
3. Sretan broj
4. Dvije ruže
5. Lady
6. Reci mi tajnu
7. Bez tebe
8. Samo ti
9. Tu si pored mene
10. Sve me još podsjeća
11. Tko zna
