Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Toxine
Label: Subkulturni azil
Released: 2013
Running time: 69:33
Rating: 4.5/5
“Ever Worldless” is a new creative high-water mark for the Slovenian music scene. It’s an outstanding album. It brims with information, it brims with message, and it brims with surplus energy poured into its homegrown ideas. It brims with ambition, drive and, most importantly, honesty. It’s hard to get any closer to the heart of what musical art is about.
Fourteen tracks. Four of them you could call connective preludes, while the rest are solid, standalone pieces that live together in a remarkable symbiosis of musical adventurism, with the restless, exploring spirit of an outsider and a free-wheeling approach that reads like a genius ID card.
You can tell this is a debut. It’s a very ambitious record. At moments, overly so. That very ambition still carries a whiff of beginner’s naivety and impetuousness, which usually backfires. To the ear it’s “exhausting”. The band tried to squeeze the bulk of their creative ideas onto the album in maximum doses and lay them down at full tilt. So this is a demanding record, one that asks for more focus and attention from you than your average release. But in return it offers a whole lot more tangible musical substance, built on the outstanding musical camaraderie of a crew with real chemistry, where everyone tunes in to everyone else with a hugely positive effect.
»Ever Wordless« is a rock album of layered genre fusion. At its core, the rhythm section gives the music a proper funky groove mattress. Where there’s funk, things quickly branch out into dance rhythms, even late-seventies disco pop cushions, and also avant-garde oddities, as shown by the wild, unpredictable shapes of jazz rock fusion that the band folds into most of its musical substance. Every building block grabs as much room as it can for its own free-spirited experiment. The blocks are fully exposed in their own idiom and, crucially, they don’t “overshadow” one another in their mutual “conversation”. That’s how the album reaches its incredible range of constantly unpredictable twists and turns, which never stops thrilling. The album creeps slowly into your ear. After repeated spins. But once it “grabs” you, it won’t let go of its grip of extraordinary musical substance.
There’s constant wandering through jazz waters in guitar solo escapades, treading across “pedal effects” and other wild gear that thicken the spectrum of the sound picture and uncover new dimensions of mood, usually cerebral ones, even those typical of seventies progressive rock. The band takes music in a visionary way. And that’s not where the story ends. Toxine also bring in woodwinds, which slot perfectly into this kind of musical platform and add a new layer of quality to it.
In short. “Ever Worldes” is an album that breathes with full lungs of adventurous musical creativity from start to finish. It knows no reining in, no limits; instead it reshapes and “decodes” every single idea into its own language of constant positive change, the unique form of the band’s musical entity. Take the soloing in Pussy Everywhewre, for example: it proves the guitarist matured under the deep influence of listening to Frank Zappa and his approach to solo escapades in the second half of the seventies and the early eighties.
The deciding factor in how the lay public will react to Toxine’s music, though, is surely the vocals. Their timbre and the way they’re delivered. The vocals carry characteristics that give the Toxine story the clear, unmistakable character of an alternative rock paradigm. In their vocal acrobatics they occasionally drift toward colors that would suit trips back to the eighties and the cues of new wave, post punk, even “2 Tone SKA” punk. I’m not exaggerating if I throw in the vocalists of The Cars, The Cure and Dexys Midnight Runners as parallels. Of course, the vocals also speak in another “dialect” (definitely not a “cockney” accent), which fits the band’s musical and instrumental character perfectly. The singing comes across as amusingly unhinged and radiates wit and plenty of cynicism, but never pathos or whininess.
I don’t want to waste too many words, even though plenty is still left unsaid. With every spin of this album, curtains part for the listener to reveal new moods in its musical information. »Ever Wordless« is an outstanding creation. It’s an album of perfect sailing that grabs you almost instinctively “on the first touch” as it travels through the timeless boundlessness of the musical universe. It’s easy to conclude from here that this is a provocatively fresh, miles-apart release with a progressive bent, one that puts Toxine not only in a special place on the Slovenian scene, but on the world stage too.
Let me also add that the musicians are exceptional. That’s the precondition for even starting a conversation about “progressive wildness” and a distinctive character of the kind Slovenian music desperately lacks. It’s a record completely unbothered by chasing musical trends, and that makes it all the more different. And this is only a debut. It’s stuffed with message, in places a bit too much, so it’ll be interesting to watch where Toxine go as they define their sound and style further. I recommend the album to all music gourmets drawn to uncommon wildness and a full-on showcase of free-spirited musical experiment. The sense of spontaneity radiating from the album’s unpredictable twists and turns will thoroughly hook you after a few spins.
Line-up
Tomi Toth – vocals
Samo Turk – guitar, vocals
Jaša Hedžet Jajo – bass guitar
Gregor Brajkovič – drums, vocals
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Žiga Fabbro – saxophone
Production
Lukas Stepančič & Mladen Krkač
Tracklist
1. Ever Wordless?
2. Everbirth Overlap
3. Cathay
4. Bad Camouflage
5. People Need Preludes
6. Carousel
7. Pussy Everywhere
8. Bow Down Comedy
9. This World is a Playground
10. Bricolife
