Label: Self-released
Release date: December 2017
Production: Emil And The Detectives
Album length: 50.13 min
Genre: Jazz / Rock / Blues
Even though this one has been out since December 2017, it has finally made its way into our editorial office’s hands, and it deserves all the attention it can get. At first glance I thought it was the new album from Emir & The Frozen Camels. Well, the frozen camels have been swapped for detectives, and Emir for Emil. More precisely, the name Emil and the Detectives most likely comes from the children’s fiction of the German writer Erich Kästner. “Agora” (in Homeric tradition, you’d translate the word as “gathering place”) is the studio debut of the Maribor-based band Emil And The Detectives.
“Agora” is a collection of seven tracks, which mostly walk in the footsteps of jazz-rock fusion, with the ambitious jams hinting at detours toward progressive blues and seventies rock, with noticeable touches of psychedelia (especially in both of the longer instrumental pieces). Even though the engine driving the band and its visionary is vocalist and bassist Rastko Zager, who wrote all the music for “Agora”, lyrics included, it’s really all six members together who give this musical achievement its final artistic character. The guitar certainly shows a great fondness for the white blues wave bands of the late sixties, when Cream, Ten Yeas After, Traffic and Fleetwood Mac in the Peter Green era ruled the roost, while the electric piano and saxophone on the other side ground its electric rock and blues jaggedness, keeping the album firmly planted in a jazzy premise.
Even though, all things added up, blues and jazz (bebop, modal jazz) could be counted as the main influences shaping the band’s character, the songs are defined by far more cross-genre variety. The first track, the opening Fly Fly Fly, which is a vocal number, could be pinned with some distant, nostalgic progressive rock seventies vibe, but then the next composition, the longest on the album, the nearly 13-minute Acqua Alta, quickly puts things in their place. In the first part, a blazing, constantly exploring guitar takes center stage, filling the space above a slowly rolling blues rhythm. This instrumental jam then gets “broken” by the electric piano jumping in, which steers the story into the bosom of jazz, while the winds, with the occasional modal form, mark the composition just enough so that it doesn’t fall apart thanks to the improvisational inserts, and so that it stays compact and easy to follow. Even more interesting than Acqua Alta is Equinox, which is almost experimental in spirit. Here the rhythm section loosens up too, and the feeling of spontaneous and unpredictable development grows. This is the most interesting track on the album, one we can easily tag as pure jazz-rock fusion, and where you definitely can’t miss the playful funk rhythm of the spring. Malibu Beach keeps an element of playfulness, even though the band sticks firmly to its clearly marked jazz guidelines, with the keyboards dominating again, while the lead phrases also add an element of world music, which means that among the instrumentals, alongside the closing Flora, this track is the most compact in its arrangement, and the musical substance in its structure is the most clearly outlined and tangible. The closing Flora carries even more of this so-called “world music” accessibility and charm, and in the second half it’s backed by a salsa rhythm too, while in the first part, especially thanks to the saxophone melody, it feels like the closing exit number of a musical for a film directed in 1960, or some Yugo-nostalgic TV series (e.g. “Grlom u jagode” (Head Over Heels) and/or “Pozorište u kući” (Theater in the House)).
Island is a cheerful little number where the vocal is harmonically backed even by a sound reminiscent of a vocoder. The modal structures of the piano parts liven up the predictable format of this track and give it an element of playfulness. In the seventies, a song like this could easily have been played on the radio. Blindness unfolds in the glow of a cabaret chanson, which in the vocal department suits Rastko Zager almost better than the other two vocal tracks.
The sextet Emil And The Detectives is a crew of battle-hardened rockers and old, experienced tomcats who know exactly what they want and don’t play hide-and-seek. What you see and hear is what you get. The result is a very honest and distinctive album, with its own musical character and a recognizable musical track record. That’s definitely a good thing, because with its presence the band brings an extra genre enrichment to the Slovenian music scene. With the album “Agora,” the guys have basically jumped into a time machine and landed deep in the new millennium, because they play and compose in a way that today’s generations of young musicians don’t know, and don’t even notice anymore. They aren’t reinventing the wheel and they aren’t bringing any musical revolution. Just plenty of fun in the studio, culminating in an old-school album that comes closest to the era of seventies rock.
So Emil and The Detectives have put out an incredibly bold and lovely debut, which with its variety makes for fun listening to while away the afternoon hours, but at the same time, because of its elementary, organic nature, even its live-sounding echo and, to put it bluntly, its “roughness,” it reveals that there are plenty of open leads for the sextet to artistically hone in the future. There are two paths. Either the band will cling to more defined arrangements (the last three tracks on the album), or it will head into fields closer to a bigger experimental edge (the two longest compositions on the album). It’s very important that with the second album it cements its own artistry and confirms everything we can hear on the debut. It’s precisely the occasional predictability (Flora, Blindness, Malibu Beach), or the lingering in a laid-back conformism of playing through certain phrases already thoroughly tested in the world of rock and jazz, that, if overdone in the future, can lead the level of arranging toward the thankless spheres of genericness, which can bring the band more harm than good.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 8.0 / 10
Tracklist:
1. Fly Fly Fly
2. Acqua Alta
3. Island
4. Equinox
5. Malibu Beach
6. Blindness
7. Flora
Lineup:
Rastko Zager – vocals, bass guitar
Dejan Pečenko – keyboards
Žarko Jankovič – guitar
Zdravko Zimič – saxophone
Igor Ambrožič – percussion
Matjaž Sabolek – drums
