Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Deca Debilane
Label: Radio Študent
Release: 2010
Length: 39:42
Rating: 0.3/5
Avant-garde? Art? Pure bullshit? Sometimes the paths of rock and musical snobbery get seriously weird, and I don’t want to jump straight into ad hoc hypotheses and negative value judgments. The story of Deca Debilane is as old as our country, and damn, those two decades were long. Especially for the masters of Dadaism and musical disobedience, who have only now delivered their nameless firstborn. You could comfort yourself that it’s hard to shock you, rattle you or knock you off your feet, but you’d be wrong. The calvary of waiting was just a mild prelude compared to what your vengeful sweetheart or abusive lover can buy you for your birthday, New Year, name day or some other holiday. So what exactly are Deca Debilane? They’re radicals and mad scientists. They’re loud, and they’ve been around one hell of a long time. At the same time, they’re by no means music for weddings or funerals, and by no means a pleasant stimulant if you’ve snacked on some hallucinogenic mushrooms or taken some other psychoactive substance. Nor are they virtuosos on their instruments, but they sure know their way around mental, sonic and visual provocation. And that’s not all! Their musical muse wallows post-punk-style through the drainage channels of the sewer of worldwide idiocy and laughs in your face if you think you’ve read it completely.
I came into contact with these guerrillas of the musical avant-garde by pure chance, through a lovely account of a regular gig from the early nineties, when they took over the stage in one of the dives in Domžale. A handful of alternative-hungry kids crammed in below the stage, opening their ears and souls for a new revelation and maybe a Slovenian version of Nirvana. Instead they got 15 minutes of grinding on a single chord, squealing, and a brutal attack on possibly the only healthy sector of their already battered brains. Nomen est omen, and after the first, let’s call it, track the hall empties out, leaving in front of the stage of ritual slaughter only a few hopelessly drunk and intoxicated lost souls who, to their horror, can’t find the exit, bartenders with earplugs, and a lonely sign reading “sorry, we ran out of razor blades: do the suicide yourself!” The prospects are therefore phenomenal, and the psychophysical preparations for squeezing out the basic essence of the record are just as fitting. The opening, or rather initiation, into the world of twisted images starts with a screeching that sounds like the defective opening and closing of rusty gates to an asylum courtyard. Tribal is an attempt at a dance overture, and the droning, Hitler-esque vocal outbursts are like the address of an incoherent moron. Adorable! Then comes the revelation, as you realize the boys, men by now, actually have instruments, a rhythmic backbone in the drummer, and a noisenik’s poetics. Pet (Droga) is still the damn catchiest part of the record, and after two minutes it’s over pretty quickly. Next up is a treatise of aborted souls, spared the suffering of the afterlife before they were even born. Fetus Abortus feels like a slow cut into the most sensitive tissue of your self, with all the pain condensed into the vocal address. Under the banner of seeming love and carefree, nonchalant fucking, the postmortem follows. The new unwanted life is finished off bloodthirstily and damn slowly. The revelation lasts a symphonic 13 minutes and change. Nothing is sacred, and the total nihilism carries on in the din of Gravitacijski val nevtronskih zvezd, which squeezes out the will to comprehend, while from the limp body only screaming of total agony can still be articulated. Improd brings not a gram of comfort, and the military Prisega tramples the last scraps of beauty lurking in your heart. This gloomy cohort of musical sadists rubs nothing but salt and thick layers of noise into open wounds. A monument to the fact that the Ljubljana basement and garage scene really did have a punchy, brutal punk HC expression is now a genetically modified monster that, on steroids of total noise and non-conformism, tears up every musical commandment. After Bog črne luknje and Smrt črnega moža, the introspective gazing ends in the guitar farce of Tanov, after which you’re left completely and utterly to yourself again.
The shock to the system is total. Bodily fluids ooze from your open veins and bleeding ears, and things aren’t going any better down in the usually rather obedient and otherwise hidden bodily openings. The extra kick in the face is that they didn’t even give you a farewell smoke before they shoved you, or rather before you shoved yourself, in front of the sonic firing squad. In the jewel case I actually found a completely smoked cigarette butt, and as the notice on the parent label’s website sweetly announces, you may get some other trash too, or even a used cotton swab. Like a fork in the optic nerve, the rather simple design also stabs in, revealing none of the track titles and giving you no help in deciphering them. The aesthetic extras are swastikas and thoroughly sick little drawings of schematically sketched human freaks. Tough to look at and tough to listen to, these mutts, aren’t they? And as if it were the masterpiece of kids with developmental disorders, this is merely an allegory of the world we live in. Deca Debilane can also be understood as loud critics who, with middle fingers raised, defy the herd instinct of the consumer scum surrounding them. They hate this world so much that the very fact you can actually buy the record and listen to it more than once is a provocation. Do you have that much masochist in you?
Lineup
666 – drums, synthesizer, vocals
Hruki – guitar, vocals, synthesizer
Katabrank – guitar, vocals
Strup – bass, vocals
Production
Sašo Kalan
Tracklist
1. Tribal
2. Pet (Droga)
3. Fetus Abortus
4. Gravitacijski val nevtronskih zvezd
5. Improd
6. Prisega
7. Bog črne luknje
8. Smrt črnega moža
9. Tanov
