Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Miladojka Youneed
Label: Helidon
Release: 1990
Length: 44:43
Rating: 4.6/5
For a few inspired exceptions, just three years is plenty to move way more than a couple of steps past their first release, and you could count on the fingers of one hand the aces who changed beyond recognition in such a short time. Miladojka Youneed are such masters of molting that you’d think at least ten years had passed between Ghastly Beyond Belief and the second full-length act of their career, or that this is a completely different lineup, though that’s only partly true. Every successful musician is at least a little schizophrenic, and when you’ve got a collective that got tempered in garages and bomb shelters, tested its recipes empirically at gigs and filed them down to the last amen, the result of that kind of work can only be a quantum leap into the thirteenth dimension. And Bloodylon is exactly that kind of gem, born in Ljubljana, and musically it’s a more polished, cynical upgrade of the debut. Why? More on that in a moment.
The fact is that Miladojka Youneed are a band that fate has treated pretty unfairly, which is why their star shone less brightly than some of their alternative competition. It’s also a fact that the band’s collective consciousness headed in a direction where the raw, primal horn-and-rhythm approach needed changes, and the band was ready to make them. This isn’t just cosmetics but some pretty serious surgery, and the first noticeable part is that Miroslav Lovrič gave up the bass and put all his energy into vocals. Miladojka thus got vocal cords ready to provoke and dissect mental states in a more transparent way that’s friendlier to the audience. The next step was to fire up David Jarh’s dirty trumpet alongside the pair of saxophones, while on guitar came the gifted Kristijan Cavazza, son of the well-known Slovenian actor Boris Cavazza, who brought an extra pinch of melody, outstanding solos and guitar embellishments into the band’s body. Bloodylon thus got a completely new soul, character and a fresh pair of balls, destined to make something better than anything before, and the record shows it in all its playful fullness. Sonically, Studio 26 Radia Ljubljana delivered an album that, despite all the polish, is even dirtier and cheekier, and bites even harder precisely because of its crystal clarity.
Bloodylon is a record like something Magnifico would write, except this time the Balkan soul comes with lots of jazzy-funky extras, and the vocals sound like they creep up with associations to Intimn Frizurn – with the full awareness, of course, that a record from before Slovenian independence is a real geyser of unique punch, and everything after can only be approximations, mimicry and imitations of what’s already been done. The very first track, Bloodylon, is a dirty overture into the labyrinth of passions of a decadent society. Necrophilia is just a shock tool, and new-wave corpses dance even more grotesquely to the sounds of kerosene-fuelled music in which, for the first time since the Miladojka Youneed phenomenon began, the guitars get cranked up, and the distorted melodiousness complements the ample, multilingual, cheeky growl of the previously rather quiet Lovrič in an excellent way. Like night and day, the masculine principle gets a polyphonic female ring in the backing vocals. The big turns don’t stop, because Bloodylon is just the overture, and I My Lotion goes in a Demolition Group-like way (the track reminds you in passing of the tonality of Ogenj), though it does raise the chicken-and-egg question again, since Miladojka’s tonal excursion in 1990 came a few years before Neovangelij saw the light of day. The outstanding dance music has chrome-plated balls, Cavazza hooks up beautifully with the dirty sax lines, and the dirty funky child of the new decade is full of steroids, rhythm and refined forms. Cavazza endears himself with a truly exceptional guitar solo that gives Miladojka an even more erection-hardening ring.
Fire The Sky is a perfect piss-take on flower power, and Lovrič’s toothy, lisping, dumpling-mouthed vocal gives you every argument to drop your pants and dance naked in complete erotic release, while pop has never sounded so fun, so dirty and, for all its danceability, so heavyweight – at least as far as the music goes. Because Miladojka do their job the way it should be done, the left-handed approach, in its horn-laughing-at-the-mainstream way, is completely organic, and the subversion of its hidden obscenity is totally inaudible to superficial listeners. The track Ja-Ku-Za weaves into this tangle beautifully and wraps up the first half of the octopoid web of freshly tailored ideas. The rhythm is slowed down, and the horn lines fan the embers in the heart even more juicily than during the fast passages. And since the only language of music is the universal One, Espagnol is like a knife plunging deep into the heart in its own gypsy way. Guitars, the smell of Spain and a gypsy soul match the band’s new cosmopolitan spirit, which is leaving its little island in the middle of the Balkans and is ready to sail off into the wide world, while still not cutting the blood ties with the place where it was conceived. Saj Ni is just as universal a dance torpedo of passion, and Cavazza foams the stucco-work on top of Lovrič’s otherwise repetitive cacophonic wordplay with words that mean nothing, in an outstandingly virtuoso way. Meaning takes a back seat, and the play of the music is something that wouldn’t need vocalization even despite the words being spoken. In their own peculiar way, Miladojka Youneed are an alternative version of the bebop bands of the early century, and despite their Yugoslav roots they’re understood (or misunderstood) just the same on this side of the Atlantic as on the other.
Beautiful Lie is a lovely penultimate act of the record, and the cherry on top is the record’s main hit, the one a lot of people know Miladojka for: Reel Love is the last song of total orgasmic release, hiding an escapist disconnect from the world and from the historical currents that had by then degenerated into something inevitable. Besides love of life, urban tribal dance and rhythm, you can sense in the background the smell of blood, slaughter and the collapse of old systems. The transformation, which includes the members of Generation X, has reached its climax, and Miladojka give the whole thing a slightly less ominous ring, which is exactly why they hit even more cynically hard and are damn critical. Bloodylon is a pop-oid middle finger held high in the air, and this gesture of positive ambiguity, in its multilingual, meaningless way, needs no translation, while in the Babylon of a decadent, idealess society big changes are happening all by themselves. All of it with purpose and exceptional subtlety, and instead of dirges and tearful ballads, sometimes dancing is even more bitter. With the album of their career, Miladojka Youneed have woven a sonic veil, a funeral shroud for a world that has lain down on its deathbed and won’t be coming back, and the textures of what you hear are richer and more swaggering than anything the ears of the Slovenian new wave ever heard. In the moldy, musty bowels of the bomb shelters, it’s time to decorate with disco balls and playful colors. If the end of the world has come, we can at least meet it with a bit of style and, kitsch be damned, with glamour that doesn’t give up its solid balls.
Lineup
Miroslav Lovrič – vocals
David Jarh – trumpet, horn
Mario Marolt – tenor sax, backing vocals
Urban Urbanija – alto sax, baritone sax
Kristijan Cavazza – guitar
Danijel Kašnar – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Igor Ožbolt – bass guitar
Guest musicians:
Cole Moretti – backing vocals
Meri Trošelj – backing vocals
Nada Žgur – backing vocals
Žamil Tatai – backing vocals
Mark Čuček – guitar on Ja-Ku-Za and Beautiful Lie
Production
Iztok Turk, Goran Lisica – Fox & Janez Križaj
Tracklist
- Bloodylon
- I My Lotion
- Fire The Sky
- Ja-Ku-Za
- Espagnol
- Saj Ni
- Beautiful Lie
- Reel Love
