Label: Celinka
Release date: May 20, 2020
Production: Divje jezero
Album length: 48.32 min
Genre: Progressive Rock/Jazz Rock Fusion
Rating: 10/10
Divje jezero is a Slovenian band from Idrija that has been thrilling audiences with its musical adventurism for more than ten years now. This is a band that’s constantly on the move. After swimming out of “Divje jezero” (2009) as a mere child, they set off into “Mestni vrvež” (2015), and from that “Pobeg iz blodnjaka” (2017) they’ve finally arrived at “Korak iz okvirjev”! The album, released by Celinka, is their third studio effort in five years, which is a seriously impressive feat for a band that mostly fights its way through the scene entirely on its own. Especially because “Korak iz okvirjev” marks a hugely important milestone for them on several fronts. The band has grown into a sextet, brought a vocalist into the ranks, and swapped out their keyboardist. Plenty of promising Slovenian bands get lost in a whirlwind of changes like that: they start searching for themselves, languish, and eventually throw in the towel and hang up their careers in despair. Not so the persistent, stubborn and tough guys from Idrija, whose fascinating new record only confirms their unbreakable faith in their own musical vision, built on a heartfelt devotion to what the world has given us in progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion.
Divje jezero, who recently made it through a phase of drastic change, come out of the ordeal victorious with this new record. The creative nucleus, which has been the driving locomotive and heart of the band from the very start, running along the line of Luka Čibej (drums), Alen Bogataj (bass guitar) and Aleš Golja (guitar), didn’t just stand still and stay put, but held on to its recognizable musical style. More than that. They’ve broadened it artistically. With a vocalist on board, the band had to polish, adapt and loosen up the arrangements in a much more concrete way. It’s a challenge that cuts both ways, and in terms of artistry it naturally grows hand in hand with the music. With this change they didn’t sacrifice a single speck of their homegrown artistry, they expanded it, built on it and carried it to a new level of maturity. And they passed this new test of maturity with flying colors.
The band’s new member, Žan Sedej, has an exceptionally fine voice. A fully formed vocal charisma. His arrival brings – musically speaking – a melos rooted in Slovenian geography, which is of course partly down to the Slovenian lyrics. That also breathes the occasional touch of chanson into the new musical identity. On one hand, the vocal lines adapt superbly to the band’s pronounced musical exploration and experimentation, and in doing so give off an improvisational feel themselves. On the other, Žan comes up with memorable chorus melodies that would hold their own in the language of pop music too (Nad tokom, Virtualna generacija, Padec na trdna tla). Žan’s great sense for flexibly adapting his vocal melodies shines especially in one of the album’s most progressively dynamic tracks, namely its title track.
Apart from the lyrics for the song Nebit, written by Jože Kos Sine, all the lyrics on this album come from the band’s drummer, Luka Čibej. The late Neil Peart, one of the most influential drummers in rock history, played the same role in the Canadian progressive rock legends Rush.
“Korak iz okvirjev” is also the band’s most ambitious work to date. That’s hinted at by some of the “maneuvers” with which they try to knock on the door of the radio airwaves. One such moment is definitely the song Nad tokom, marked by a vocal duet in which Žan is joined by Vesna Zornik, the famous lead voice of Katalena, whom the guys managed to catch “in the form of the current Brest moment.” The contrasting colors of the two voices in this song make the duet a hugely compatible generator of a one-of-a-kind, remarkably special aura. V Beogradu is an uptempo track with a funky contour that follows the title track and delivers a contrasting jolt. For its inspiration it owes more to the elements of traditional seventies jazz-rock fusion. Alongside Nad tokom, V Beogradu is another vocally prominent number, and at the same time the most compactly composed one on the album and, with its gripping rhythmic drive, yet another moment on the record that gives the band the potential to be adopted by the radio airwaves too.
Nebit, a critique of general dehumanization in which we turn into unfeeling, robotized machines, is, along with the title track, another phenomenal experimental move by the band, the likes of which they haven’t pulled off before in their career. In this one the guys shamelessly reach for a bigger dose of unleashed decibels, coming from pronounced guitar phrasing. The track delights in the band’s well-known “theater,” where the guys playfully open up space for one another to trade solo spots stacked on top of a given motif. There are quite a few such moments on the album, and they emphasize just how well-oiled and tight a unit Divje jezero remains in performance. The band maintains exceptional chemistry and an effective sense of one another. You can feel the long shared mileage behind the instrumentalists, and that Žiga fit into the collective extremely well even before they started recording the new album.
Complementing each other, linking up, opening up space for one another for a flood of free-spirited solo wit, and creating unexpected switches between passages and motifs all constantly demand a great deal of focus and concision. Plain and simple. A musical fellowship that reaches such an exceptional level of technical complexity, with tangible expressive substance and a distinctive motivic voice, is hard to find anywhere else in Slovenia. And there are the moments of all-instrumental comedy that simply take your breath away – the leaping playfulness of the inserts in the middle of the opener Padec na trdna tla, or the outstanding instrumental solo mix in the closing section of the song Drugam. In the finale, Lesena ptica, where drummer Luka Čibej also gets more room to stretch out in a solo spot, the band paints a mysterious and at times gloomy story in which Pinocchio collides with Steven Wilson’s raven that refused to sing.
Bringing in the excellent Žiga Kovačič to replace the otherwise superb David Križaj has paid off hugely for the band. With him, their sound on the new album has grown quite a few extra “tentacles,” since it uses a wider sonic palette and frequently reaches for Hammond organ lines, which in passing confirms that the guy knows his Keith Emerson too (the instrumental passages in Virtualna generacija), while also slyly going for parts played on Moog (Nebit, Lesena ptica).
Divje jezero is the band that, in today’s Slovenian music scene, holds (and I say this immodestly) the spot that Predmestje held in the second half of the seventies. That’s a very flattering label for the plucky guys from Idrija right now, and one they’ve undoubtedly earned the hard way. The band has come out of this album artistically even stronger. With an exceptional level of focus and commitment, they’ve created a document of great creative freshness. And in exploring newly discovered musical expanses, their bold integration of everything, vocals included, has taken them up another level of evolutionary maturity. As a whole, the record radiates enormous confidence and maturity. This is surely not the last act of this superb band, who keep sailing their own homegrown path in their own free-spirited idiom. Totally independent and eclectic! “Korak iz okvirjev” is without a doubt an artistic peak of the Slovenian music scene in 2020!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Padec na trdna tla
2. Drugam
3. Nad tokom
4. Virtualna generacija
5. Korak iz okvirjev
6. V Beogradu
7. Nebit
8. Lesena ptica
Lineup:
Alen Bogataj – bass guitar
Luka Čibej – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Aleš Golja – electric guitar
Žiga Kovačič – keyboards
Žan Sedej – lead vocals
Tomi Peljhan – saxophone, clarinet
Guest musicians:
Vesna Zornik – vocals on track no. 3
Petra Jurič – violins, viola on tracks no. 3 and 8
Kristina Pivk – cello on track no. 3
Blaž Ogrič – French horn on track no. 8
