Avtor: Aleš Podbrežnik
Izvajalec: Bakan Rock Gang
Založba: Samozaložba
Izid: 2014
Trajanje: 32:48
Ocena: 3.5/5
»BRG – Bakan Rock Gang« is yet another album that landed in our editorial office recently, more thanks to a lucky twist of fate than to any big push to get it in front of us. Plain and simple. Some things just slip past. True, the album came out back in March 2014, but as I keep stressing in situations like this, every rock and metal record by a Slovenian act has to get its review on RockLine, sooner or later. That’s our bare minimum.
The whole thing wouldn’t be half as fun or interesting if it weren’t for the man behind it: a longtime music and guitar mentor and instructor, the seasoned coastal guitarist Stane Bakan, who is hugely respected and appreciated in the nooks and crannies of Slovenia’s coastal Primorska region. Practically a rock icon. This is the guy who helped take the first guitar steps of plenty of musical talents who now represent the new generation of Slovenian guitar heavyweights, and in 2007 he decided to start the band Bakan Rock Gang, or BRG for short. It’s about as authentic an imprint of Bakan’s personal rock philosophy and views as you can get, drawing on the gains of blues, rock’n’roll and hard rock from the sixties and seventies.
Even though we can’t call »Bakan Rock Gang« the musical invention of the millennium, it’s a slab of genuine coastal rock’n’roll carved out with a »Koper-Izola« take on vocal accent, which gives the record its much-needed authentic charm. On the album that means a sharp, nasal, mostly mid-range singing voice, with which Bakan keeps teasing the listener in a fun way, as he addresses you quite pleasantly through all that »humming and grumbling«.
Against expectations, the album opens in a somewhat lazy, even melancholic and bashfully introspective way with the track Punca pusti me, where a generous dose of harmonica joins the arrangement. A track that doesn’t leave much of an impression. But the rest of the album quickly slots into clearer rock tracks with the next one, Rock Rock N’ Roll. As the name itself says, this is a rock’n’roll gallop and a proper high-speed rumble, and the album consequently jumps up to a higher adrenaline level, and for the first time you really feel the essence of the trio, which comes across totally unforced, honest and heartfelt, delivering organic, living sound, like a live gig played in the studio.
Although the album is wrapped in a constant sentiment of melancholy, it’s also sarcastic enough, or rather it strikes a likable balance with tragedy, which cements its geographic roots. At heart, Bakan Rock Gang are a party-time rock’n’roll band, and the intensity of the songs that define this new, second studio album, you really feel at full swing when you catch the band live.
Bakan also made sure to bring in backing vocals that add color to his lead vocal, bringing a pleasant dynamic and mood shifts to how the album unfolds. And we certainly can’t overlook his solo carvings, with which the guitar master craftily decorates the compositions, adding one of the most attractive elements of this release as you listen. Bakan really gets under your skin with his subtle, filigree-fine touch when he serves up his guitar confession through acoustics (Zate bi). The compositions also hit a pleasant level of arrangement variety, even though they all spin around the basic, boilerplate triangle of rock’n’roll, blues and hard rock.
One of the most successful compositions on the album is the excellent Rock ti dušo daje, which also catches a moment of pomp and bombast, »challenging« the work of some of the more prominent hard rock acts in Slovenia (Šank Rock, Requiem, Mary Rose,…). The mood crescendo is superbly captured in the chorus melody, and the song carries a nicely conciliatory build-up of atmosphere from verse to chorus. It’s a track with an outstanding rhythmic backbone, onto which the kinetics of the original guitar phrasing are flirtatiously hooked. Potent and rocking. Just the way things should be in rock. Elementary. With a mid-eight passage and another lovely Bakan solo. The track Dan je zdaj also steers the album into a dramatic moment with a hefty dose of »classic« hard rock; it sounds truly rustic, as if it had been made in the seventies, and it effectively relieves the somewhat too naive mood set up just before it by the less original »little song« Ko po tebi zadiši, whose lucid note doesn’t quite cancel that out either.
Tacked onto the tail end of the record is Ragazza svegliati, a track sung in Italian that was included on a compilation of the best rock songs from the Italian festival Fuiori dalla Mischia. Word of BRG spread over the years all the way to the heart of Italy’s Lombardy, as the band regularly plays gigs all the way from Trieste to Milan. They’ve become well-liked there, perhaps precisely because mildly raspy vocals like Bakan’s evidently go down well with Italians. Take, for example, the melancholic »cocker spaniel« character of Vasco Rossi, the king of all kings of the Italian rock scene. Ragazza svegliati is, in fact, Punca pusti me »reworked« in Italian.
»BRG – Bakan Rock Gang« is, then, a thoroughly solid piece of work from the pen of a seasoned master, and judging by its fire and drive, it hints that the story continues and that this one will get its rightful studio successor. Although it’s clear that BRG will stick to their vision of coastal rock’n’roll going forward, there’s a whole pile of expressive directions they could take it in.
Bakan Rock Gang – Rock Rock And Roll (uradni video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyda3kBY_Dk
Zasedba
Stane Bakan – kitara vokal
Aleks Štrekelj – bas kitara
Mitja Stropnik – bobni
Produkcija
Stane Bakan
Seznam skladb
1. Punca pusti me
2. Rock Rock And Roll
3. Če verjameš al pa ne
4. Zate bi
5. Rock ti dušo daje
6. En kvartin
7. Ko po tebi zadiši
8. Dan je zdaj
9. Ragazza svegliati
