Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Grrizli Madams
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2014
Length: 25:00
Rating: 4/5
After all the evolutionary branches and the multiple creative-expressive ramifications that the word rock reaches today in terms of artistry (and, luckily, there’s no end in sight), one of the basic axioms of making good rock music remains stubbornly down to earth! The rock tradition works best when the energetic, expressive forces manage to line up in a triangle. In a trio formation. Examples of »revolutionary impact« along rock’s evolutionary path pile up the moment we say the word trio: Motörhead, Rush, Grand Funk Railoroad, The Police, Nirvana,…
Grrizli Madams have been around for a good decade, but have only been active on the release front for four years. And yes. They’re a trio! With the EP »V vrtincu vsemogočnega miru« (2010) and the studio debut »SNTNTN« (2012), Grrizli Madams have deservedly anchored themselves among the essential crowd of those welders of Slovenia’s alternative rock underground who, with their musical substance, now count as one of its load-bearing bands. That is, one of those bands that define the very evolutionary and artistic reach of Slovenia’s »underground« sound in the new millennium. Which is why Grrizli Madams have to be taken dead seriously. To a large extent precisely because of their »organic unseriousness« (but let’s leave that for later in this piece). With both releases the band signaled that it’s an out-of-the-ordinary act, developing homegrown, authentic musical matter with a heap of thrilling expressive seeds that give the trio a solid platform for evolving that same homegrownness in several directions.
»Bloated Pigs« is their second studio album. It has barely 25 minutes of music. That alone is one of the oddities, but it’s of minor importance once we look at the music itself. On the album the trio has allowed itself even more experimenting than on »SNTNTN«. Which was to be expected. Above all, Gašper Prus behind the drums is becoming a real »trapeze acrobat«. The raw, unpolished bitterness of rocky, cuttingly roaring, thickly loaded guitar riffs, often stoner-rock minimalized (built on just a few notes), gives Prus a huge amount of space, which he deftly uses to fill with his creative genius through all sorts of inventive solutions in how he »breaks« the basic rhythms! Rattling bass lines add an effective contrast to all of this, and the end result of the musical landscape on the album of the »bloated pigs« is that the creative forces of the trio are laid out in a proper triangle. The interplay of all three members sounds even more convincing in building the musical matter on the new album, which proves that the members’ visionary musical communication has reached an even sharper focus here. The direction is called "musical experiment" or "trying out the untried"!
Two fundamental elements of the new Grrizli Madams decisively lift the new album to a higher qualitative level than the previous releases. An evolutionary step up. The first element is the already mentioned and decisively upgraded experimental drumming adventurism of Gašper Prus, and the second factor is the inclusion of vocal arrangements, which is new. The band decided to start using vocals! Given the occasional »yowling« on past studio work, which strictly served as a spice for the musical forms, this time the songs have actual lyrics. Still, Grrizli Madams approach vocals in an unusual way. I’d rather say less usual. The vocals in the band’s overall picture still play the role of an extra spice and don’t strike a dominant pose. The instrumental passages stay dominant and show that the trio primarily still enjoys »spontaneous garage jamming«, and everything else comes after! Nobody can take that joy away from them. That’s exactly why Prus’s role is all the bigger, since within the occasional riff monotony, with his well-crafted solutions for »breaking« the rhythms, he builds a platform for the kind of musical outcome on »Bloated Pigs« that’s interesting to listen to throughout. With his occasionally downright bizarre, almost »Voivod-style« twists (drumming »in reverse«), he adds the necessary allure of unpredictability and spontaneity. The drums often take over the role that vocals would otherwise carry in standard arranging conventions, which is a singular experience for the kind of underground alt rock being brewed in Slovenia. Grrizi Madams have always cultivated a sense of lucidity. And it’s precisely the use of vocals that deepens this feeling of lucid craziness! The vocals in the arrangements are deliberately placed so that they often chaotically shout over one another, or merge into piercingly atonal gang shouts that would drown out even a troop of baboons. The vocal figures are often the subject of sonic experimentation and deepen the occasional psychedelia of the moods. In this respect, the only song in Slovenian, Emeli, originally by the Krško punks Maze, also got an extraordinarily successful cover in the hands of Grrizli Madams, which, by experimentally stripping bare the punk rock stance of the original, in Grrizli Madams’ artistic upgrade of the recipe sits most sensibly in symbiosis with the rest of the musical picture of »Bloated Pigs«.
It’s precisely this more strongly expressed side of experimental adventurism that gives the feeling the band paid even more attention on the new album to defining its homegrown musical path. The rocky crushing power of unbridled roaring riff masses, which in their raw stance sometimes ring out even deliberately dissonant, remains the album’s unmissable first adrenaline kick. But this element of crushing power now carries even more of the variable »tickliness« of the drum passages, as well as the pinpoint-accurately placed space-filling with the lucid grimacing of the vocals (including in terms of the content of their message). »Bloated Pigs« is an album of optimal rock impact, thrilling with just the right dose of potently vibrant rock bitterness and experimental wildness!
»Bloated Pigs« is an extremely convincing achievement, with which the band managed to hold on to the creative momentum from the previous album, carry its musical expression to a higher qualitative level of perpetual change, and on that basis decisively blur certain genre cues (with which music critics unsuccessfully tried to pigeonhole the band in the past), into a focal point through which the new Grrizli Madams can be seen as a band that, with this album, has established a stylistically homegrown music culture!
Line-up
Matej Hočevar – guitar, vocals
Miha Vodušek – bass, vocals
Gašper Prus – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Vladimir Janc – gong
Production
Samo Pavlica “Linč”
Track list
1. Bloated Pigs
2. Albastron
3. Aj Jabe
4. Cala
5. Emeli
8. Pleasure Porntrance
