Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Mary Rose
Label: 57 Records
Released: 2006
No, no, no! It’s finally here! “Feniks” – the second album from Slovenian hard rock legends Mary Rose, from Postojna. Before we get into a detailed breakdown, let’s run through a few basic facts. This album took a long time to make, a very long time. It’s the follow-up to the band’s debut “Rocks Off” from 1990. Among the other material it features two re-arranged tracks from that album (Akcija, Vse in malo več), which now come with fully Slovenian lyrics, just like everything else on “Feniks”. The twelve tracks are joined by Farewell as a bonus song, recorded in 1993, just a few months before Studio Tivoli burned down, and with it, for more than a decade, Mary Rose’s dreams too. With “Feniks” those dreams are being reborn right on their own ashes. The songs were recorded back in the spring of this year, but the band stuck to its own perfectionism and sent the whole batch through another mix and master.
Mary Rose serve up hard rock stripped to the bone! Sauerkraut and sausage. Slovenian-style! Hard rock raised on the school of Deep Purple and Rainbow in a modern outfit (Kralj za eno noč, Sam, Križ je s tabo, the “funky groove” of Krivda – heads up, the booklet is missing one stanza from the lyrics of that last one (the printer’s gremlins strike again, sadly): “I swept up all the shards of my crazy dreams, from now on I want to wake up to a new day without fear”). Why did I add Rainbow? So nobody goes looking for pointers in the other important child of Deep Purple – Whitesnake, that is. There’s practically not a pinch of blues in Mary Rose. They thrive on the epic quality and bombast of classicism, of the big melodies they build, which also marked the aforementioned Rainbow.
The riffs are open and well-crafted, and they get under your skin on the first listen. The band’s core focus is always melody, compact songs built “heads and tails” and punch, hand in hand! In the riffing, the guitar is matched by the Hammond organ, and together they make up the bulk of the band’s sound. The vocals are clean and explosive in every register, keeping their power practically untouched. At times he veers toward B. Dickinson (Iron Maiden), and when he adds a bit of raspy edge to his articulation, toward the Dickinson of the Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son era. Žak is the ideal solution for Mary Rose. His melodic voice brings epic grandeur and pomp, and in the quieter passages he’s so deft that he can slip in a touch of soul.
The guitar carries a pinch of the Scandinavian school of soloing. The solos are clean and precise, and at moments extremely fast, yet always wrapped in a clear classical melody. There’s no blues to be found anywhere. Alilovski steers the notes skilfully and doesn’t squander them all over the place. His solos have a recognizable architecture and aren’t heaps of hastily sprayed bursts of notes off the sheet music (Petrucci, are you listening?!!!). In places the Hammond and the guitar play off each other in thirds, the typical Rainbow / Purple trick, which slyly breaks up the potential monotony that repeating the basic riff could bring, and lifts the dynamics of both the songs and the record to a higher level, adding a dash of unpredictability to “Feniks”. The guys take care of this dynamic in the middle instrumental passages. Take Izgubljen v času, which has a classic explosive riff while the middle instrumental section breaks off into a slightly jazzy line. These parts are just proof of the mastery of the whole five-piece, who combine their know-how with an innate sense of melody with remarkable feel. In the lineup that recorded the album, Mary Rose have definitely found the right working chemistry. The band has the big “English” balls that a rock outfit has to have, so on that front we can truly talk about something exceptional on the Slovenian rock scene.
There are also a few AOR detours! The song “Vse in malo več” follows the spirit of Journey. In production and playing approach it’s much rawer than Journey’s polish and softness, a sort of European version of Journey, very, very close to what the Scandinavians House Of Shakira do, built even on the legacy of the good old Europe. The song “Zvezda” also largely follows these lines.
The core of Mary Rose that forms the melody is of course the Kastelec / Alilovski duo. You can feel a touch of the greatest pairs of this kind – Lord / Blackmore (although Alilovski has nothing to do with Blackmore, more with Rhoads, if I’m nitpicking), topped off by Žak’s unique and devilishly explosive vocals. They simply take your breath away when you listen, because it’s hard, really hard, to find a singer in melodic hard rock today who could pull off singing in Slovenian with such polished perfection. The bonus track Farewell, with its English lyrics, shows what exceptional potential Žak still has in reserve. So if I illusorily throw in a potential breakthrough to the world (and it exists!) for Mary Rose, they have absolutely nothing to worry about on that front. Like I said, a fully developed rock singer whom hard rock bands in the West would “eat up”.
The peak of the record is the middle section! A run of three songs: “Strah pred užitkom”, “Zven tišine”, “Želja”! “Strah pred užitkom” shows off the perfected communication between keyboards and riffing, and has extra tasteful symphonic arrangements that are seamlessly cast into the basic structure of the song, serving to build up that atmosphere. The track even opens in a typical Dream Theater manner, so Mary Rose touch on prog metal here. It has a progressive pre-chorus and a rock-charged epic chorus. Pure perfection as far as polish goes, with bursts of fast-played scales and double harmonies in thirds woven in here and there. Next comes “Zven tišine”, where Žak’s feel for subtlety shines, and the calm intro carries a light breeze of soul, especially because the song glides on a gentle classical piano melody before exploding into a classic rock chorus, with the vocals once again tackling the epic melodics at full breath. In short, the track ebbs and flows dynamically. The contrasts between choruses and pre-choruses are downright triumphant at this point. An exceptional power ballad! The seventh track, “Želja”, has a mystical touch of mid-to- late-romantic Led Zeppelin in its opening main riff, but sophisticated and without a hint of darkness. Mary Rose masterfully carry on here in the style of witty alternation between waves of dynamics, through subtler parts built on keyboards, which they swap abruptly with riff bombast. Yet another song where there’s simply nothing to add and nothing to take away.
Next the guys roll through the wicked, debauched Akcija, which most obviously flirts with sleaze/glam hard rock, no wonder when you consider it’s a reworking of an original song first released in 1990 on the album “Rocks Off”. The singer Žak’s subtle side, highlighted in “Zven tišine”, gets underlined once more in the “punchy chanson” “Najdražja”. The combination of classical piano and his voice is clearly a winning one. The song’s structure again proves how highly profiled the Mary Rose musicians are.
In their verses the guys don’t hide their chasing after female bodies, which definitely belongs to rock and roll. But the lyrics are by no means shallow, threadbare and blunt, and they certainly don’t belong in a dive bar. They express a maturity in which the guys have the male-female principle perfectly clear, and let’s hope they’re successfully educating women about it too.
The following two lines from the song “Želja” embody the typical male-female principle of our creation:
“Everything’s easier now that you know I’m guarding your dreams.
No more fear, now that I’m here, you can sleep in peace.”
(the man has a clear vision through which he’ll create a goal, the woman surrenders to him fully, because she’s found safety beside a man)
With the album “Feniks”, Mary Rose return in big, triumphant style. I can claim that with the birth of “Feniks”, after the decline with Martin Krpan, we finally have the restoration of glory and honor to healthy melodic hard rock in Slovenia. As a unit, Mary Rose return with “Feniks” as the embodiment and example of rock-solid cohesion, with a clear musical vision and direction, and they deliver an album that visibly stands out against similar works by Slovenian rock bands and that only a handful can successfully compete with. At the same time, the gauntlet has been thrown down, the challenge of topping it. In short, an album that in Slovenia must not and cannot go unnoticed. Not this time!
Lineup
Žanil Tataj – Žak – vocals, backing vocals, acoustic guitar, viola, violin on #13
Eki Alilovski – guitar, acoustic guitar, backing vocals
Davor Kastelec – keyboards, backing vocals
Mitja Kobal – bass guitar, backing vocals
Jure Doles – drums, percussion
Production
Toni Jurij
Track list
1. Kralj za eno noč
2. Sam
3. Izgubljen v času
4. Vse in malo več
5. Strah pred užitkom
6. Zven tišine
7. Želja
8. Akcija
9. Krivda
10. Zvezda
11. Najdražja
12. Križ je s tabo
13. Farewell(bonus track)
Album length: 54:09
