Label: Kapital Rekord
Release date: 14.11.2019
Producer: Damir Avdić
Length: 45.11 min
Genre: Singer / Songwritter
Rating: 10 / 10
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Damir Avdić is back on the scene with his eighth studio release. Over the years, the Bosnian singer-songwriter has become something of a fixture of Slovenia’s cultural and artistic pulse, especially when we talk about the reach of the Slovenian rock’n’roll underground, which has adopted him and claimed him as its own. No surprise there. Not only is he a punk and singer-songwriter legend from the territory of the late, lamented homeland, he’s simply one of a kind, and any encounter with him, especially if you somehow didn’t know the guy beforehand, is frankly shocking. If you’ve got an open mind and a love of the truth, it’s definitely a shock in the best possible way.
On »Radikalno šik« Damir addresses us right from the cover, paired with the album’s chosen title, “very tidy.” And if we first take apart the approach to composing, which we know to be a naked, rudimentary, abrasive and primordial collision of guitar phrasing and caustic dictates, “Radikalno šik” follows logically from the previous album “Amerika” (2017). The new record shows that over the years Damir has calmed down a bit, in the sense that he’s paying more attention to shaping his guitar arrangements too. Not only has he discovered the delay effect, which now keeps the ever-popular overdrive company on his new album, but a single song can even turn on two different phrases or two different rhythms, and the man as a guitarist ties the phrases together with inventive transitional bits, which is definitely a promising gain that gives the album’s dynamics and moods more movement. Of course, we’re still talking about the complete punk nakedness of heartfelt singer-songwriting.
The average consumer of his artistic exploits, though, doesn’t come to Avdić to analyze the guitar playing, which is of totally marginal importance. Rather, his spiritually frozen, parched soul is looking above all for that sweet chalice to drink its fill of the substance and theater of Avdić’s poetry. In this respect too, on »Radikalno šik« Damir comes across as an artist who’s a touch more romantic and nostalgic. That’s what years and maturing bring. He’s woven a few personal anecdotes into the poetry and music, but above it all he stays sharp, venomous and on the attack, and he doesn’t skimp on the vehemence of a full-on charge, which only the mind of this brilliant Bosnian language doctor and thunderer can muster.
There’s no heavy philosophy here. Just the truth. Sharp as a razor, because it is? Simply the truth. That’s the only point and of course the essence. And Damir stays caustic and bilious beyond all limits, a rapid-fire dismantling of the system we’re all enslaved to, and in reflecting on the times of our mad present he once again brings it to life with an incredibly juicy, unbridled vocabulary. Of course, a nice big bag of toilet-talk vocabulary is woven into everything again, but it’s a touch more concisely worked into the lyrics than on past records, especially on the early albums of his singer-songwriter career, since the verb »jebanje« (fucking), in its various combinations of poetic confession, really did throw the doors wide open for the man to the masses, who very quickly took him as their own. I’m talking about the masses of the former Yugoslavia region.
Damir is still driven by passion and, above all, honest truthfulness. What he feels and thinks, he says straight out. In short. If we all perceived life the way Avdić does, the world would surely be a nicer place, and illusions like justice and love, peace and reconciliation would actually become reality, and the word moralizing wouldn’t need the prefix »quasi« stuck in front of it.
This time too, the theater in the studio, in which the musician otherwise embodies himself on stage, is once again provoked into a merry gallop of ingrained Balkan rhythm, and also of the melos to which the artist ties his poetic confession, accompanied by noisy and fierce phrasing. For all his unyieldingness, he can still be wonderfully merry-lucid and bitterly sarcastic, boundlessly biting, when he ignites in clever wordplay or the magnification of adventures with a brilliant imagination for describing events. Above all, and once again, he attacks the system head-on, and in that he’s one of the few, we might even say the only surviving curator of true Balkan punk. A real punk in the sense of real rebellion. The song Afera, which runs over ten minutes, (progressive in scope) in terms of playing time, is no longer a new discovery for Damir (Detroit from the previous record), and behind it is a story that’ll have you laughing till you cry. Sto mu neoliberala is just one of the artist’s brilliant reflections on the moral decay of society at the individual level, sinking into a bottomless pit. When Žižek’s “intellect” in bookshop windows gets equated with a handbook for housewives. This much sparkle and sincerity, the kind that knocks your socks off and disarms you, isn’t something you expect these days, since all the sheep have long been scared and quiet, and all the heroes killed off. No prettifying and no wrapping in cellophane. And no. There’s no reason for deep philosophizing, since the truth is plain as day. Simply, run straight over to Damir Avdić’s Bandcamp profile and give yourself over to his new adventure, which is, after all, the adventure of all of us. There’s a ton to read here, a ton of messages that are an alarming wake-up call and in 2020 can serve as a good handbook so that in the existing chaos of the apocalypse, which has only just begun and with which this unfortunate system is trying, in absurdly convulsive attempts, to cling on, you’ll find your way better and be less shaken.
The program »possess.« The program »grab.« The program »take.« The program »hoard.« Already in kindergartens. In exchange for freedom and in exchange for the birth of all the negative traits that the system we’re programmed in has been dragging out of us for millennia and that we feed it with. That’s humanity. Today in the disguise of »Sto mu neoliberala«, tomorrow it’ll find itself a new one.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Nisam ja (02:37)
2. Radikalno šik (03:03)
3. Mund (03:53)
4. Afera (10:20)
5. Android (03:01)
6. Žena koju sam (04:21)
7. Kolone (03:30)
8. Šećer (05:22)
9. Sto mu neoliberala (03:40)
10. Spomenik (03:45)
Musicians:
Damir Avdić – vocals, guitar
