Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Various Artists
Label: Front Rock Records
Release: 2012
Length: 76:33
Rating: 3.2/5
Where, in an age of global melting-pot blandness, do you go looking for a gram of your own identity? After five decades living in the same shared country, part of that identity was undoubtedly muddied, sprouted and spread around the notion of Yugoslavism, and whether we liked it or not, we were all part of Balkan unity, brotherly and sworn-brother nations from Triglav to Dževdželija. After two decades of Europeanized living on a sub-Alpine islet of difference, the time has come to drill back through memory to the state of shared coexistence, and the ones who first scraped together enough guts, determination, balls and essence weren’t the politicians or the tie-wearing envoys of the faked shared interests of capital and money, but the real carriers of revolutions, upheavals and revolt – the alternative crowd and the garage artists. The glitz and misery of two decades of isolation need to be strained through the sieves and filters of sonic messaging, and the job was done, in a noncommercial and sexy way, by the movement that has been the cradle of No Border Jam from day one – Subkulturni Azil from Maribor. It has to be admitted that every one of our once-brotherly republics always had enough creative charge that, besides the milquetoast commercial acts of the central mainstream, you could always feel plenty of raw edge served straight from the garage, from our neck of the woods all the way to Prespa and Ohrid. All of this is mirrored in Ex Yu No Borders Underground Jaming – a record that packs nineteen Yugo-artists into a full twenty tracks, and this time they aren’t waving five-pointed stars on flags or singing odes to Tito and the Party, but opening their own idiosyncratic Pandora’s boxes of pleasure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HEPWnVnjQw
The opening slot, with the track Otvaranje, goes this time to the Serbian outfit Real Danger. The trio from Sombor, made up of Robert Merey, Stevan Dabić and Sonja Romić, toys with classic rock form and naive electronics, and the eclectic Otvaranje, which flirts in a post-punk way with both the Belgrade legends EKV and the American nonconformists Butthole Surfers, is just one fragment of the album Leš našeg letnjikovca. The repetitive, effects-laden electro-pop-punk intro carries on with some more rock’n’roll balls from Varaždin. The Evokers (or just Evokers) show up with no fewer than two tracks, which present two sides of this Croatian band’s garage heritage. If Brand New Cadillac rudimentarily recalls the surf-rock garages of early-sixties American suburbia, 1-2-5 is a more direct souvenir of unrefined rhythm & blues in its rock’n’roll puberty, which doesn’t mean that the sound and content necessarily veer off into some dumbly pointless direction just because the band is young. A great set of gorgeous guitars, harmonica, and solid bass and drum lines is topped off by Koki’s rather polished masculine vocal, but it lacks a bit more resolve and punch, which is what made the No Border Jam compilations proper uncut diamonds.
A bit more balls comes this time from our own neck of the woods – the rebels with a cause from Celje who go by the name Kronika. A dirty, dusty garage and three-chord symphonies recall everything that gets your feet moving so nicely to Scuffy Dogs, Res Nullius and similar organic talents. After six years, Kronika have finally crystallized into the lineup of Žan Kovačevič on vocals, Rok Pinter and Lovro Lah on guitars, Vid Verdev on bass and Davorin Ulipi on drums. There’s no great revolution in image or content, but Razvajeno dete is a lovely noisy addition to the record, even if the boys were born, just as their debut announces, V napačnem letu. Much further south, you’re then blasted off by the high-octane racket of the wonderful Bernays Propaganda. Bezbedno levo is a textbook lesson in gorgeous punchy music with a critical undertone, with Vasko Atanasoski on guitar, Džano Kuč behind the drums, bassist Nenad Tifunovski and the hyper-energetic singer Kristina Gorovska, always ready for revolt, dancing and fun, serving up what they do best – pop, funk, punk, revolt, a nonconformist middle finger to global trends, and groove to the power of ten! My favorite track on the first half of the record serves up a mix of Fugazi, LCD Soundsystem, Gossip, The Slits and the real, homegrown Macedonian rhythmic genius. There’s no room for fake ideals, toothless politics, lukewarm benignness in lyrics and music, sitting on the fence, artistic safety and conformism! Bernays Propaganda are virtuosos of rhythm and fucking good times, my dear friends, and Moonlee Records has a horse in these dynamic Macedonians (and Macedonian woman) that’s always safe to bet on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bt_m2C9XKo
I’d bet somewhat less on the benign Slovenian trio Charlie Butter Fly, who, with an attempt at Jim Morrison-style sex appeal (and a hefty dose of lacking, at least when it comes to sex appeal and intellect), in Between Two Legs not only shoot down your whole libido but make your finger automatically drift to the skip button. Despite eight years of existence, all their trump cards look more like a badly rehearsed practice session, but a gorgeous mess of distortion and rhythm from Can Of Bees offers a fitting plaster for the sore ears. The garage trio consists of potent youngsters from Šentjanž near Dravograd, with vocalist and guitarist Jan Lužnik, bassist Jure Gobec and drummer Davor Detečnik serving, in the short, punchy 21, a very enjoyable mix of stoner, punk and blues on a hyper-energetic base, plus a hellish dose of balls dressed just right with splashes of hellish Tabasco! Kyuss, Monster Magnet (in a higher gear) and a small sea of wonderful associations with a garage soaked in sweat, blood and testosterone make for a great send-off, which is why I’m urging you, dear readers, to keep an eye on these kids! After the short organic outbursts of potent rage, it’s time for a return to the nexus and plexus of the Balkans.
DBAU are a Bosnian collective of punk electro rockers, and the revolt of Prijedor is reflected this time in the track Punkboy, which lyrically tells a story of aggression, treachery and the predatory logic of primal fun, while the Dadaist little number from Dada Band radiates far less weight and heaviness. The Croatian outfit (at least I think so) deserves only a mention, since they don’t bring any deeper essence or power to the record, but the Slovenian youngsters Dandelion Children give things a fresh run-up in the Dadaist rock’n’roll department. These open-minded post-grunge rockers caught attention with a record that earns the band credit for courage and all-out sacrifice. Dandelion Children’s So pičke was a record that drew attention not just with its name but also with a musical ethos that swears by unpredictability, and Jure (bassist, guitarist and above all the band’s lead throat), Anže (guitarist and bassist, whatever strikes him) and Katja (believe it or not, but this young woman from Jarše hits the drum skins damn well) deserve, judging by Little Craig James too, a standing ovation and a few more records on your shelves!
The latter are also deserved by the post-rockers and post-metallers from Velenje, Entheogen, who this time present themselves without words, but by no means silently, with the instrumental gem Ganymede. Sonically, drummer Matic Kadliček, bassist Sergej Žižek, guitarists Matija Bencik and Matej Voglar and sound engineer Simon Garfunkel Penšek feed on the nectar of inspiration from Pelican and Neurosis, and besides the post-rock and post-metal names, there’s plenty of room in the package for unexpected sonic excursions into more progressive waters. The rule by which noise and atonality were the commandment of past No Border Jams has evidently been changed this time, and thank the gods of the sonic Olympus for that!
What follows is less artistically inclined. Die Hamsters are a five-piece from Ljubljana steered by indie, and despite the promise that there’s so much essence in the package that it’s hard to stay indifferent, the track Today OK left me feeling damn limp-dicked. Youthful indie rock pop waffling with the freshness of rose and the criticality of fluffy Japanese anime critters just isn’t an everyday thing, so it was time for a (quick) move on. Far juicier and worth listening to is the rhythmic number Liquid, which brings a much more listenable note with the French lyrics of RondNoir, and it’s precisely on listenability and music with balls that you can build an opposition to all the golden castrati of commercial castles in the clouds. The Ljubljana quintet consists of guitarist Luka Seliškar, bassist Jure Bedenk and drummer Jaka Krenker, with Lan Turek serving up the sweet saxophone sounds and the young, gifted singer Luana Lisa Nomsi squeezing the dreamy Francophile vocals out of her just-right darkened vocal cords. The jazzy, nicely mellow little piece Liquid sends you dreaming and leads you to a state of calm, after which comes the time to shred that dreaminess to ribbons! The Zagreb four-piece Kevlar Bikini, with their mix of rockabilly garage on a punk foundation, could only have given birth to a record like Explodisiac, and instead of sedatives, this time you get a fat stick of dynamite shoved up your ass, while Yikes Mama, for all its chaos, is just the warm-up for the big finale. Applesauce Lorraine is further proof that we Slovenes may not really know how to sing consistently well in English verses, but we do know how to play guitars and drums pretty well and write dynamic little songs. Mary Jane Doe proves the fact that fairly pathetic lyrics in a foreign tongue come out damn infantile, while every solo on distortion sounds far more learned and listenable, and if the young artist can also string the chords together, the song is worth your time – despite all the onanism of ideas and the wretched »I love you baby, maybe« verses.
The Celje veterans Stranci turn up on the record rather unexpectedly, but with the track To je ta dan they fit in quite nicely, and instead of English-language clumsiness, Pero and company would rather present themselves with homegrown lyrics and a ton of their own balls, which gives Stranci a stamp that makes this long-overlooked band worth putting on the player again. Besides the Nietzschean lyricism of eighties punk, there are also inventive compositions and just the right dose of world-weariness that gets the melancholics to listen to music at all. Paving their way into the future far more ambitiously are the hipster youngsters from Ljubljana, Toronto Drug Bust, who build on an alternative-sounding indie rock sound, but with more ambitious, let’s say Rolling Stones-ish, moves, and besides nice hairdos and glitz, Toronto Drug Bust have just the right dose of edge, musical know-how and charisma, which this time is the domain of the band’s central namesake and ideas man – singer Izak Košir. After the lively-sounding The Dandy Song, it’s time for a little surf, beach and sun, which in the superb rendition of Dry Surfing, played by the fingers of the excellent Uroš Planinc Group, gets all the elements of Dick Dale brilliance. The superb feel that guitarist Uroš Planinc weaves with bassist Janez Lupše and his five-string brother-in-arms David Rack and Jure Kolšek is genuinely capable of pulling off masterfully conceived compositions and, in the instrumentals, not spoiling the sense of primal rock beauty with soul and substance. Far less refined and pretty-sounding are the punchy sounds of the Jarše band Wrong Moose, who, besides uncompromising punkoid garage pounding, have a sense of humor, even if the mating calls of moose and a new genre called wrong rock may really be echoing out of their garage, which is anything but wrong, and the guys, judging by the official page and the Facebook chatter, by their own choice, prefer to stay in the safe shelter of anonymity rather than in the public eye. The seasoned tomcats from Ptuj, Vibesonic Jam, have fewer identity problems. The band rose from the ashes of the late Sleazy Snails, and the guys score a big NO to trendiness by mixing hard rock, psychedelia, alternative and country as well as kilometer-long jams. The track Speed submits itself completely to that last definition, proving that guitarist Zlatko Kuret, drummer Milan Murko and bassist Bernard Pintar are still fully committed to the unique beauty of controlled melody, noise and the perfect synergy of the mental energies of all three conspirators at once – no cosmetics, no primping, no pretending!
And with that the whole thing wraps up, and in a somewhat different way, the pioneering EX-YU No Border Jam record successfully gets to its first goal. Personally, I think it’s a shame, at least as far as coverage of the former shared homeland goes, that I can’t say I’m completely thrilled. There’s quite a hefty pile of talents from our shared homeland missing, though I believe the lads and ladies are capable of offering a bit more quality alongside the quantity of material. Still, in the mass of what you hear, you can make out a good dose of quality musicians who, besides strumming, also have the right measure of inner poetry and lyricism, which many would gladly listen to in a more extended form too. The first milestone has definitely fallen, and after pulling out the first bricks, the wall of narrow-mindedness and self-limitation could soon come down as well. Alternative guys and gals are the first standard-bearers and heralds of a new artistic spring, and the subcultural guardians of difference and nonconformism are the guarantee that from this multitude of seeds even more good ideas and even more badly needed connecting beyond all borders and differences can sprout. Thanks also to records like Ex-YU No Borders Underground Jamming!
Track List
- Real Danger – Otvaranje
- Evokers – Brand New Cadillac
- Evokers – 1-2-5
- Kronika – Razvajeno dete
- Bernays Propaganda – Bezbedno levo
- Charlie Butter Fly – Between Two Legs
- Can Of Bees – 21
- DBAU – Punkboy
- Dada Band – Mlada djevojka
- Dandelion Children – Little Craig James
- Entheogen – Ganymede
- Die Hamsters – Today OK
- RondNoir – Liquid
- Kevlar Bikini – Yikes Mama
- Applesauce Lorraine – Mary Jane Doe
- Stranci – To je ta dan
- Torronto Drug Bust – The Dandy Song (Live)
- Uroš Planinc Group – Dry Surfing
- Wrong Moose – Dogz
- Vibesonic Jam – Speed (Live)
