Author: Urban Bolta
Artist: Let 3
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 1992
Running time: 59:40
Rating: 3/5
In the early nineties, the rockers from Rijeka known as Let 3 faced a tough job: making an album that wouldn’t let down the listeners they’d won over with the excellent debut Two Dogs Fuckin’ (1989). History has taught us that plenty of promising bands, after an inspired first record, tend to get lost in mediocrity later on, which is why the second album is so often the key proof of a young band’s form. With El Desperado, Let 3 showed they were dead serious about conquering the Croatian rock scene and that Two Dogs Fuckin’ was no fluke.
El Desperado was a big step forward for Let 3, less in terms of the record’s sheer quality than in carving out a sound all their own. They’d already tapped into that unique form on the previous Two Dogs Fuckin’, but with El Desperado the Croatians waded even deeper into their own musical waters, the thing that makes them so different from everyone else.
Born from the ashes of Rijeka’s extinct punk school, Let 3 started out deeply under the influence of punk, and you can still feel it on El Desperado. They fused punk’s punch with traits of alternative rock and a pinch of pop-rock, and given how specific their sound is, I might even provocatively call them art punkers. From start to finish there’s a strong dose of goofing around cemented into the music, which (along with all the experimenting and genre-hopping) can be too big a hurdle for fans of the classic rock school to digest El Desperado. That’s where the album’s biggest weakness lies: it’s meant only for a limited number of listeners who, besides quality music, are ready for plenty of excursions into the waters of hard-to-parse humor and the other shenanigans typical of Let 3. If they still managed to hold back on Two Dogs Fuckin’, then with El Desperado Mrle, Prlja & Co. finally broke the ice and started flirting with every musically secondary element. They haven’t found their way back to this day. What’s more, with every following album they’ve bitten harder into the apple of experimentation and drifted further from the classic rock sound.
The album’s cherry is popped by the title track, which already sums up the outline of the whole record: lots of sounds layered over the instruments bring an extra element that many will find distracting. “Fuck Famiglia”, with its metal riff and not-at-all-friendly message, whisks the listener off to a completely different dimension. “Pokvarena žena” offers a prominent role for female backing vocals as one of its aces, and the calmer “Pogibe”, with its mini horn section, feels more like a song for spinning before you drift off to sleep. And of course there’s the squealing torture of the listener that is “Ciklama”, which will show up on absolutely every new Let 3 studio album from here on. “Vjeran pas” deserves a special mention: a legendary song by Termiti and one of the flagbearers of the new wave (much like, say, “Lublana je bulana” by our own Pankrti). Let 3 dared to cover it, and they naturally found their immunity in Mrle’s former membership in Termiti. Compared to the original, the cover has stronger, more defined guitars, but it doesn’t quite find its feet in rock waters. The original is simply unbeatable! So El Desperado is a collection of a thousand and one faces of rock music, but as a whole it won’t be to everyone’s taste. Let 3 knew how to dress the chaos of punk in the frame of modern rock, which they were building as they went and where they felt very much at home. As for proof that the album went down well with its target audience, a few El Desperado songs are still in Let 3’s live repertoire today.
At the end of 2009, Dallas released a reissue of the band’s first two albums, long unavailable in their original form and cult favorites among the fans: Two Dogs Fuckin’ and El Desperado. It revived interest in this unusual band, which today often manages to push the Croatian public into a checkmate position with its provocativeness. The El Desperado reissue includes four bonus tracks that show how Let 3 sounded live back in the day, which is surely one more reason for every fan of Croatian rock music to buy it and enrich their collection.
Lineup
Damir Martinović Mrle – bass guitar, vocals
Zoran Prodanović Prlja – vocals
Ivica Dražić Miki – guitar, vocals
Zoran Klasić Klas – guitar, vocals
Dean Benzia – drums
Boris Reinić – drums (14,15)
Orijen Modrušan – guitar (13)
Marko Bradaschia – drums (13)
Guests: Raoul Varljen – keyboards, Josip Krošnjak – keyboards (4), Nina Simić – backing vocals, Edi Kraljić – backing vocals, Alfa Camera – backing vocals, clapping, Jaka Hawlina – trumpet (1,6), Marko Lovrić – trombone (6), M.C. Kundalini – rap (9)
Production
Goran Lisica, Damir Martinović, Zoran Prodanović, Bojan Mušćet, Sanjin Đukić
Track list
1. El Desperado
2. Voules vous
3. Fuck Famiglia
4. Vjeran pas
5. Pokvarena žena
6. Pogibe
7. Fahrenheite
8. Ha ha ha
9. Love killer
10. Ciklama
11. Mona
—– bonus tracks (2009) —–
12. Elevry budy nous’a
13. Pokvarena žena (live)
14. Pogibe (live)
15. Fahrenheite (live)
