Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Nina Bulatovix
Label: Kapa Records
Released: 2014
Runtime: 38:11
Rating: 4/5
Another batshit alternative rock trio is coming out of Slovenia’s Styria corner. Nina Bulatovix is exactly the wake-up call for anyone looking for difference in the fullest sense of that magical genre tag, »alternative«.
The band doesn’t use guitars. They build their musical dossier on the simple rhetoric of hypnotic rhythms which, combined with a thick, booming, rattling bass, draw parallels with the disco-tinged stance of the eighties new wave of punk, thanks to the extremely gloomy atmosphere the album conjures up in places, let’s just call it a post-punk stance, while the trio’s bizarre minimalism even lets you catch a whiff of krautrock dogma. The band masterfully makes up for the missing guitar with all sorts of studio »tricks«. The bass guitar often hammers out whole chords and at moments, through distorted sound effects, unleashes some real noise filth. Given that the album was recorded pretty much live, there wasn’t much time for any of the beautifying a studio can offer. The band walked in with a polished set of tracks and laid them down on tape in an extremely short window of just a few days.
“Jate” is a manifesto of rebellion, defiance, and also hopeless surrender to fate. The strong, authoritative vocal is convincing in its curt, booming dictates and unyielding in its acts of constant complaint and calls for disobedience. It’s often run through a distortion effect and slots into the soundscape like the echo of a demon, at times evoking, with an extremely dark and cold stance, psychedelic or even gothic theater. The depressive mood of the album, especially thanks to the deeply lived-in delivery of the messages in the verses, is gripping all the way through! All the album’s produced black expressiveness at moments even flirts with the gloomy atmosphere of old Borghesia on one side, as well as with the older artistry of Disciplina A Kitschme on the other. The work is extremely convincing and real in its artistic strokes. It offers a collage of thematically varied tracks, where the band, working the tricks of minimalism, masterfully finds its way even in sophisticated numbers like Pridi k skupini and the album’s title track.
The album »Jate« has a convincingly dark stance, really a post-apocalyptic note, through which not a speck of hope shines. Even though the band is relatively young, the elaborate musical vision of these three seasoned musicians drags out the most impressive moments of the alternative rock movement that unfolded in Slovenia in the eighties, as well as on the soil of the former Yugoslavia, and you can draw parallels with sharp new wave too, yet with all of the above Nina Bulatovix come across as homegrown and utterly their own in delivering their artistry. Nina Bulatovix is a band that, with the core of its slyly planted intellectual message, forces the listener to think, stirs movement in body and mind, and creates its own artistic world full of tangible musical substance. A musical world of idiosyncratic impressions, which is an authentic alternative rock imprint of our reality of stumbling around in the hopeless cauldron of Slovenian “swindling culture”.
Lineup
Gregor Kosi: – vocals
Marko Širec – bass guitar
Jure Lavrin – drums, vocals
Production
Andrej Hrvatin & Marko Lavrin
Tracklist
1. A A (03:39)
2. V okove (03:08)
3. Brecht (03:58)
4. Gobci (foreva) (02:11)
5. Ljudmila (03:38)
6. Z obema rokama (04:49)
7. Pridi k skupini (03:03)
8. Psihiatrija (03:33)
9. Iz obrazov molčečih (02:24)
10. Topla voda (03:18)
11. Jate (04:44)
