Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Via Ofenziva
Label: KUD Nika
Released: 2015
Rating: 4/5
V.I.A. Ofenziva are a cult punk rock band from Ljubljana who got started 34 years ago. Between 1982 and 1983, the quartet of Esad Babačić, Zoran Železnik, Ivo Frančič and Robert Fritsch shot off toward a shining career, but after playing the Nova rock festival in 1983, they suddenly fell apart and stopped doing anything.
The wake-up from that long winter sleep was announced by a DVD released in 2006 and, 4 years later, a show at CUK Kino Šiška in Ljubljana, where we celebrated the sixtieth birthday of Igor Vidmar, the famed patron of Slovenian alternative rock. The band finally woke up to a new life at Izštekani in 2011, freshened up the lineup with young bassist Toni Šemerl and at last decided to get down to recording and releasing their first album.
For help with that, the band turned to the seasoned Zvone Kukec, whom Fritsch knows very well from their shared days in Elektrika. Kukec, an excellent guitarist in his own right, has found plenty of joy in twiddling studio knobs these days, so we’ll hardly ever see him with a guitar in his hands on stage again. Still, while shaping the sound of »Bele rože«, Kukec did pick up a guitar in the studio here and there, and with his know-how he added extra color to some of the songs and filled out the sonic picture.
So »Bele rože« is finally here. The album serves up half new, half old material, with the old stuff dressed in new, i.e. refreshed, arrangements. The band’s core expression stays rooted in punk rock. In the musical sense that the songs put front and center, the way the band picks up on melody has an “alternative rock aftertaste” that is typically tied to its Slovenian roots (which, logically enough, is just part of the healthy evolution of any band). Otherwise, the band also comes across as rustically new wave. The album opener, before Esad Babačić’s vocals come in, has the distant, atmospheric-gloomy charm of someone like The Mission, dunked in a modern-sounding aftertaste. The “eighties new wave” feel is cemented by the flirting with reggae elements in the otherwise rock-“bristling” and previously mentioned song Ko zaprem oči, which is what lots of bands did at the turn of the seventies into the eighties, with The Police at the head of the pack.
These instantly memorable alternative rock numbers, in which the band manages to distill a homegrown songwriting beat and a recognizable sonic and stylistic stature, are built up and fulfilled by the striking poetry of Esad Babačić. When you weigh up Babačić’s nature as poet and singer, he stays on the poet’s side. Already in the opening Ljubim tvojo tišino, you can’t always miss Babačić’s dissonant departures from the “ideal vocal melody”, but we’re talking about punk energy here, of course, which not only makes up for that with ease but, in its fundamental stamp of rejecting conformist stereotypes and smashing taboos, simply demands it.
If the first part is structured more subtly, even more amiably in a musical sense, then the rest of the album, which takes in the old eighties material, delivers that primordial rage of once-young, untamed, hot-blooded stallions full of rebellious kicking, which the band, despite the refreshed makeover of the classics, has managed to hold on to. Proleter vred.Mladi delavci included, which still feels far too “Trainspotting-esque” today. In the song Ne stopaj, guitar phrases wrestle with an old-school keyboard sound that you quickly (wrongly) assume is played by Borut Činč. Babačić’s vocals sound like the echo of a notorious ghost, piercing with its sharpness the artificial faces of false angels, in which we hide, frightened and helpless, like single-minded slaves of neoliberalism.
The production delivers a lively, rough, garage-packaged sound, which of course brings some artistic prettying-up, especially in the subtler parts of the album (the song Bele rože). Zoki’s stripped-down, irritated guitar riffing is nicely balanced by the contrasting counterweight of Toni’s thick, rattling bass lines, which, combined with the cannon fire of Fritsch’s drum swings, cut through concrete on the album. Esad is a chapter of his own. His disillusioned (at times emotionally numb, even phantom-like), way of delivery is instantly recognizable and remains the elemental trademark on the band’s unique musical ID card.
Had V.I.A. Ofenziva kept developing in their new wave energy through the eighties, they could have been a distant Slovenian derivative of something like The Clash, and the same could be said of the defunct Slovenian band O!Kult, whose format is close to the energy of early V.I.A. Ofenziva. Whatever. These are just passing reflections. What counts is only what your own ears judge. So here it is at last. After many, many years. The lost studio debut of V.I.A. Ofenziva.
Lineup
Esad Babačič – vocals
Zoran Železnik – guitar
Toni Šemerl – bass guitar
Robert Fritsch – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Zvone Kukec – guitar
Production
Zvone Kukec
Tracklist
- Ljubim tvojo tišino
- Cesta
- Preveč
- Zakaj
- Ko zaprem oči
- Bjele ruže
- 7. Mladi delavci
- Ne stopaj
- Minimalni ritem
- Vsak otrok je lep
- Proleter
- Bele rože (bonus track)
