Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Kukushai
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2017
Duration: 49:47
Rating: 4/5
Trio Kukushai laid their foundations two years ago with the EP »Kukushai«, and with »Fruitile« they’re putting their first real studio album on the scene! The band, which formed in the Netherlands years ago and is represented by Slovenian pianist Rok Zalokar, singer Eva Poženel and Dutch drummer Sun Mi Hong, is a fresh source of musical strangeness and tantalizing quirks.
»Fruitile« widens the sonic-exploration range of the adventurous EP »Kukushai«, and with the new album the group has pinned down its own songwriting and performing charisma even further and stretched the reach of its expression. You could say the trio has hit the core. They’ve served up a musical oddity that stays seductive from start to finish, is wonderfully tight and convincing in execution, and, for all its focus on huge artistic and cross-genre flexibility, this picturesque conglomerate is also, to a degree, eclectic. What it certainly doesn’t lack is witty experimenting with different musical formats and fusing sonic structures into a multilayered musical foldout.
But there’s one more key point. Although »Fruitile« is anything but a simply arranged album, it manages to speak to you easily enough, with a strong dose of invasive musicality and listenable compactness. That’s rather surprising, especially when you look back at Rok Zalokar’s past work. He’s known for an unbridled experimental side as a jazz pianist, which makes it hard for him to stick to established formats of musical phrasing. »Fruitile« therefore firmly and instantly refutes that (mistaken) impression. On this album Zalokar proves an incredibly mature, concise musician who, with his sensual finesse in shaping structures, fully adapts to a patient dialogue of musical equality with the other two building blocks of the Kukushai story.
Eva’s vocals are wonderfully pleasant. Even though she sounds as if she’s beaming in from an extraterrestrial dimension, in places she doesn’t shy away from a lovely sweetener of pop catchiness, which proves the singer would do great in soul and R&B too, along with the occasional (if distant) flirtation with chanson. Zalokar plays the deft tightrope walker on the thin line between musical compactness and experiment. With a rhetoric of jazz exploration that smashes the shackles of format in just the right measure, so the songs never feel predictable or (even worse) generic. Sun Mi Hong seems the natural choice for Poženel and Zalokar, since she senses their contributions throughout, adapts to them, and in turn skillfully nurtures and builds up the trio’s overall musical statement with her mastery of drums and percussion.
The band likes to sail into fields of psychedelic alternative sound, especially when swept up in an (often dissonantly shaped) interweaving of vocal layers and synthesizing, which gives off a trip-oid feel. Eva’s vocals are often used as an extra instrument, too. »Fruitile«, despite all the courage it shows in sonic exploration and experimentation, is still, on the whole, an album of soft sonic pastels that speaks to the average listener completely unpretentiously.
Half the album is instrumental, the other half vocal. All in all, it’s seriously special and challenging. Both in terms of the artistry all three musicians express and toward music consumers themselves, naturally all those »with ears in the right places«. Especially the gourmands drawn to musical oddity, driven by the axiom of authentically penetrating songwriting insight and a musically eclectic idiom that knows no creative limits, or rather tolerates them extremely poorly.
Kukushai – Sea Animal (official audio):
Lineup
1. Fly
2. Own Pace
3. Her Mountain
4. Fruits
5. Sea Animal
6. Her Interlude
7. Oh Brothers
8. Blue Trail
9. Box With Pearls
10. Run Again
Production
Rok Zalokar
Track List
Rok Zalokar – keyboards
Eva Poženel – vocals
Sun Mi Hong – drums
