Collage

When you get a band’s CD in your hands, the cover is definitely the first thing that catches your eye. You look at the front, you look at the back, and you let yourself be surprised by how it’ll sound. “We have art so that we don’t perish from the truth,” the famous line from Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher, is definitely one of those little details on the cover of the debut album by Carinthian rockers Pisna that grabs the listener’s attention. A band without all that long a history, they’re definitely one of those that stands out from the flood of instant, quasi-rocker mixtures trying to keep their balance on barely hatched eggs. With their debut record, titled “Kolaž” (released in December 2007), the guys go back to the experimental rock of the seventies. Through the lyrics we get a glimpse of how today’s teenagers think, still building their identity and looking for their place under the sun. “Kolaž” contains thirteen songs in different shades, from acoustic ballads to faster rock`n`roll, and you can even catch hints of punk and blues.

The place of honor as the opening track goes to “A lahk` ?!”, which you can already find on the compilation “Rock Otočec 2007”, released in June 2007. The guys took an excellent third place out of a hundred and fifty bands that entered. A video was shot for the track, which sadly has no real story. It does have a meaningful lyric, though, one that recalls rebellious high-school life, when most teenagers follow the “live fast, die young” way. The tempo of the song itself fits that. “Da se zgrabim” is the complete opposite. With the first riffs you get an association with the chorus of Šifrer’s “Martinov lulček”, and toward the end it serves up a pretty enviable guitar solo, which enriches the track with a positive vibe. The first of three English-language tracks on the record, “Raindrops”, offers us a vocal experiment. Singer Dejan Vončina’s voice sounds a lot more masculine and serious this time than on the earlier tracks. The lyrics, which mention the existential crisis of first love, are no great literary achievement. They’re written simply and clearly. Like teenage love, which rarely survives. Next, a one-minute-and-twelve-second instrumental intro leads us into the track “Poljub”. Is it about the crisis of relationships between modern people, or about the original sin of Adam and Eve? At the start, the whole thing seems like miserable, pathetic whining. Toward the end the rhythm builds, and a short but excellent solo sounds interesting too. The ballad “Trikrat potrkaj” is about how to live a full life in this fast, envious world, “where in the world you’re on your own, as you are your own death and life.” The second English-language track from “Kolaž” is the slightly more swing-flavored “Subconsciousness”. The lyrics are about love again, but unlike “Raindrops” they have a slightly more positive vibe. Hope for a new love dies last. Even if it’s only a fleeting fling (“Slika”), time heals all wounds.

Another extreme on the album is “Senca”, an atypical Piksna track. They dressed it in rebellious punk colors, used a swear word or two … Still, it sounds very “Piksna-like.” “The Oak” is probably the saddest song on the record. It’s dedicated to their friend Klemen Lamprecht “Šluk”. In loving memory … No rocker at heart can resist the tempting worlds of getting wasted, and Piksna are no different. They sing about their experiences in “Ti”. What kind of high it is, you can judge for yourselves. The guys hand us another dose of awareness of grim reality in “… in oblačno je nebo”. Is the slightly religious-flavored lyric a coincidence or on purpose?

Piksna close out their debut album with the “folk-party” and simply titled song “Trinajsti komad”. So we don’t accidentally forget about authentic Slovenian music.