Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Dubzilla
Label: ZARŠ Records
Released: 2011
Duration: 62:17
Rating: 5/5
Ingenuity really does know no bounds sometimes. Dubzilla are a special collective, sprouting from a “special” corner of Slovenian soil. “Podgurja” – in geographic terms, roughly the area “south of the Krka river up to the foot of the Gorjanci hills.” Dubzilla are homegrown, self-made originals in the musical sense. Of course, their expression is rooted in the primal ancestor of sleepy reggae rhythm, where its echo, in the literal sense of the word, plays a properly “echoing” role. Yep. As the band’s name already hints, we’re talking dub.
But Dubzilla’s authentic vocabulary stretches much, much further. To win as much freedom as possible on the creative proving ground embodied by the blossoming creative genius of these five musicians, they started by cutting vocals out of the equation entirely. That’s all in the service of the intriguing jigsaw puzzle packed into their debut “Dubzilla”, built on a cunningly brilliant weave of many genre forms, which is exactly what earns this kind of expressionism the “art” prefix. So yes, we’re talking about an instrumental record.
An album running over 62 minutes can’t and won’t bore the listener for even a millionth of a second. Instead it thrills with the sheer dominance of its creators’ incredible intellectual flexibility. Every track on this album is a self-contained, separate entity with a recognizable atmosphere and the quintet’s own charisma of artistic insight.
Hypnotically lazy rhythms, soft and organic-sounding, virtuously propped up by the warm, dynamic legwork of the bass, carry an airy, fragile structure on their frame: an extraordinary blend of interwoven lead motifs built on mellifluous synth drapes and simple guitar phrases. Brilliantly sampled loops “gnaw” their way into all of it, strengthening and deepening the mood power of the atmospheres the quintet wants to bring out. Dubzilla build their authenticity very simply. They let bare “feeling” guide them as they create.
This album never runs out of interesting stuff. As a listener you’ll practically be forced to pick your own personal favorites. I’ll only point out the most interesting moments, but otherwise I urge you: try the album, listen from start to finish, in the track order as it appears on the CD, and go with the flow. The cerebral, esoteric element is packed into the essence of this album, so it’s worth enjoying by switching off your “ratio” completely.
The sampled “recitals,” “speeches,” “addresses,” “exclamations,” etc… woven into the basic motif of the tracks naturally hint at a trip-hop touch, and the band uses this superbly to break the track’s basic motif into a multifaceted structure that lives together in fully compatible harmony! The most successful moments of these moves are caught in the tracks Krpan dab, Tribe and Rdeča kapica v linearni roaciji, where the atmospheres literally come alive!
These three tracks also successfully chase the element of lucid sarcasm “Slovenian style,” which, in Dubzilla’s hands, comes out in a unique way this time. For Krpan dab the guys latched onto a one-of-a-kind brainwave. The “Krpanization of dub” is one of the craziest yet most superbly realized ideas on the album. Your mouth, stretched to its elastic limit, practically pulls toward your ears all by itself when you suddenly hear a sample of actor Janez Albreht reading Levstik’s tale of Martin Krpan, which was once broadcast on TV in several parts. In Tribe, Ivan Kramberger speaks up, to this day the only honest politician in independent Slovenia, a man who didn’t hold his tongue, which he sadly paid for with his life. Tribe is the band members’ revolt against the general dehumanization and devaluation of Slovenian society and the slow decay and falling apart of the Slovenian state we all once built with such great hopes. It’s as if an icy gust suddenly blew across the album and gnawed your bones right down to the deep chill. Then there’s the immensely sarcastic Rdeča kapica v linearni rotaciji, where the band once again brilliantly weaves into the music samples of the characters from literary recitals of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf in Slovenian.
The dark two-minute intro that opens the album, Trial, soon melts into proper Zion-style esoterica, rippling over a synth curtain inherited from the pioneering sounds of the late seventies, the kind already used by the legendary Miha Kralj on the album “Andromeda”. It’s clearly contrasted with the rhythm. A moment of Yugo-nostalgia is caught in the next one, Zlatne stijene, where the band used a mandolin sample for the wall of the sonic backdrop (later replaced by lighter synth curtains), and the track keeps up an extraordinary colorfulness and mutual tolerance between all the pieces of the puzzle. In its outro a distorted guitar roars in too, in a warped, grimacing echo that works great for lifting the atmosphere to a new level. Kvart goes properly, grinningly rocker-crazy in its outro!
The track “Od nič do neskončnosti” has an exceptionally beautiful lead melody in the intro and outro, combining melancholy and exploratory adventurism, which the track’s central message ties into as well. Judging by the samples of a “conversation” between two people, it’s safe to guess this is the band’s thank-you to Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current. A superb and really special track on the album. Its atmosphere works brilliantly from head to toe, carrying the listener toward a special dimension of the band’s musical vocabulary.
Enough pontificating. It’s already turned into a “thick read” anyway. In short: “Pudgorski dub” is a rainbow-vivid musical picture book, where the richness of the vocabulary and the wide spectrum of contrasts in painting the sonic landscape are exceptional. You could say it’s optimized by the quintet’s outstanding sense for uniting these contrasts in a refined, filigree way into an extraordinary weave of perfect musical symbiosis. It has its own special character and special atmosphere, the kind only Dubzilla can define.
The debut “Dubzilla” is one of the best albums to come out in Slovenia in 2011. It has everything a good album must have: fundamental songwriting insight, a clearly expressed touch of avant-garde authenticity, and highly effective moods in the album’s individual moments, in which the band develops its own special atmosphere! “Dubzilla” is an album that’s incredibly easy for the listener to get into and effortlessly stirs the imagination, while at the same time fascinating with the boundless depth and breadth of the quintet’s homegrown musical intelligence, proving that it’s still possible to redefine the artistic spheres of the musical universe all over again. The album unfolds with flexible spontaneity, softly and utterly unobtrusively stringing together the contrasts of an undefined musical adventure that defines and paves a new musical path, “Artzilla”. Don’t hesitate. Join in, and it will richly reward you, in its own “freest, most sparkling musical concept.”
Line-up
Luka “Singer” Švajger – guitar
Dejan “Sleyk” Slak – keyboards, synthesizer, sampling
Saša “Selyak” Serban – turntables
Črt “Krt” Zorko – bass guitar
Tomaž “Buc” Rifelj – drums
Production
Miha Šajina
Track list
1. Trial
2. Zlatne stijene
3. Krpan dab
4. Kvart
5. Tribe
6. Echoes
7. Steppa rulz
8. 0 -> ∞
9. Rdeča kapica v linearni rotaciji
10. Green Garden
