Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Miladojka Youneed
Label: Helidon
Released: 1987
Runtime: 38:02
Rating: 4.3/5
Plenty of acts have proved that Slovenia is capable of more than imitation, but few have done it as subtly, artfully, musically and juicily as Miladojka Youneed, who show that the gray of Ljubljana’s hideouts can spin to something other than punk and post-alternative. Until then, funk was the turf of connoisseurs and self-appointed experts, and jazz the turf of intellectuals. This Bežigrad musical trust formed spontaneously, unplanned and totally naturally at the Ljubljana jazz festival just two years earlier. If music could be compared to plants, Miladojka Youneed would be less an ikebana arrangement and more a bush of blazing-hot, sinfully spicy peppers. The blame for this outstanding record lies with a happy accident: after the band Quatebriga, three musketeers of Slovenian rock decided to join forces and give birth to some music together. They were the young and then still pretty unknown, talented bassist Miroslav Lovrič, former Martin Krpan man Dadi Kašnar on rhythm (also of Marcus 5), and wind expert Mario Marolt. The sum of all that mental energy is a hyper-energetic, compact string of surprise punches, and Ghastly Beyond Belief is more than full of them.
Let’s take it from the top. The intro theatrically warns that the show to follow is full of edge, necrophilic carnality and explicit content. Still, words have proved far too often that a coat of sound and letters can be a space for speculation, puffery and flexing muscles, while the fruits on offer are actually rotten, inedible and artificially servile. With Miladojka, none of these problems show up. Instead of degenerate intellectualizing, the sextet devotes itself to the quiet fears and speculations of an intelligentsia that was predicting the inevitable: the collapse of a country that still seemed rock solid. YU special is a bizarre dance mash-up of chaos, noise, jazz atonality and musical unruliness that few in Slovenian music circles can match. Maybe Gastrbajtersi and Demolition Group, then 2227, and after that it’s imitations all the way down. There’s a bass duo of two funkoid jazz-core zealots, Miroslav Lovrič and Igor Ožbolt. The central thread, instead of being driven by distorted guitars (courtesy of Boris Romih), is spiced with the wind eccentricity of Mario Marolt and Urban Urbanija, while Dadi Kašnar follows the seemingly asymmetrical rhythms with great polish. This musical allegory of the Yugoslav political situation is as disharmonious as relations were between the supposedly brotherly nations in a crumbling shared state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOCJ7z1IiEw
As a follow-up, Ratata is a track you could more easily pin on the already-mentioned gods of alternative racket from Brežice, Demolition Group. Its interplay of winds and rhythm, massive basses and playful melodies recalls Pegam’s best moves in the Deep True Love and Neovangelij era. But let’s leave the obscure similarities aside, since comparing the two is like debating the chicken and the egg. Ghastly Beyond Belief, let’s be honest, competes very convincingly in quality with the artistry and cathartic, chaotic tightness of the Brežice crew. All that’s missing is a vocalist, a meditative, dreamy voice. When it comes to vocalizing and putting stream-of-consciousness out front, these Ljubljana funkadelic metalheads of industrial jazz racket are pretty stingy. Proof of that is the logical musical continuation of Ratata on the instrumental masterpiece AfroAgro. Then on A je omari …, in a smoky club fashion and with a wind-section take on Summertime, it’s time to step into the throaty part of the record. Lovrič is an artist of bizarre drunken mantra-chanting, and in the discursive play of ideas nothing is sacred to him. The closet holds drunks, whores and disconnected artists of nonsense. With a bonsai of boozy ravings, Miladojka Youneed present themselves with full dynamics and a romp through jazz standards. Modern-day takes on Black influences join the urban club crowd, and alongside the illusions of smoky dives from the start of the last century, there’s room for ease and freedom from meter.
Aubidala is the schizophrenic oddball of the record. The electronic drum sound and broken rhythms feel bipolar, sick and mentally disharmonious, yet effective if you treat it as an intro to the track No, which shifts the mood back into a more danceable gear. Bis Program continues as a musical interjection at first, but in its own happy way it’s one of the best and brightest (and, in alternative terms, holiest) moments of this outstanding debut. Primus-style basses play with the rhythm while the wind section builds the atmosphere to a full meditative peak. Swans Lake is, let’s be honest, the record’s only dead weight. With its minimalist guitars and rhythmic monotony it irritatingly puts the brakes on an otherwise racing heartbeat. Blues joins the jazz, and it’s not bad, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that after accelerating down the highway, it doesn’t always work to slam on the brake or yank the handbrake at a top speed of 160 kilometers an hour. The swan song is also the last act of the record, and there’s barely anything to add to a last act, despite the already sparse outpourings of worded rage and disagreement with the system.
Miladojka Youneed are critics, and in their own artistic way they achieve more precisely through a less verbalized approach. They settle scores with the past and with a rotten system. In their own artistic way they impale both politics and watered-down values. With their trademark cynicism, freedom of expression, and indifference to units of measure, genre boundaries and permitted commandments, they weave an incredible first act that fully deserves its place among the best records of 1987. After that year came only the descent into the abyss of the Balkan Sodom and Gomorrah, and Ghastly Beyond Belief is, in its own prophetic way, a surreal reflection of the mental state of an already apathetic social body. Miladojka Youneed are actually something we could use today. In their evergreen form they’re just as relevant these days, except the corpus that needs dissecting and impaling on artistic stakes is much smaller now. Glamour was superfluous a quarter of a century ago, when Miladojka began their studio count, and Ljubljana’s experts in free-sailing between genre reefs knew it well even then. Ghastly Beyond Belief is therefore an organically perfect projectile of pure passion, full expression and unbridled musicality. For that very reason, it represents, fully deserved, one of the rare limitation-free bursts of musical genius that ever happened in the metropolis of our small country.
Lineup
Mario Marolt – tenor sax, clarinet
Urban Urbanija – alto and baritone sax
Boris Romih – guitar
Dadi Kašnar – drums
Igor Ožbolt – bass guitar
Miroslav Lovrič – bass guitar, vocals
Production
Two Thousand Maniacs (Janez Križaj & Iztok Turk)
Tracklist
- Intro
- YU Special
- Ratata
- AfroAgro
- A je u omari …
- Aubidala
- No
- Bis Program
- Swans Lake
