Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Stray Train
Label: SAOL
Release: 2016
Runtime: 35:10
Rating: 3.5/5
Slovenian outfit Stray Train may be a brand-new band, barely a year old, but it’s a quintet of seasoned musicians who racked up their mileage over a long stretch of earlier musical adventures.
The debut, with a title that’s pretty clunky in length but no less fun, ‘Just ’cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town’, delivers a bundle of original songs that can boast slick arranging right out of the gate, which is down to noticeable creative inspiration and also reflects the maturity and experience of the band’s members. The coherence and compact form of the songs also reveal a unified, solid musical focus from the whole quintet that accompanied the band while the debut was taking shape.
The album runs barely 35 minutes, which is a good thing. Quality takes priority over quantity. In its own take on hard rock, the band leans heavily on blues foundations, and the sheer riff fever it builds in the lively sound of a dynamic production packs a serious dose of decibels, so it’s not out of place to reach for the adjective »heavy«. So this is a hard-hitting heavy / hard blues rock record that doesn’t discover a musical revolution at its core, but still delivers a slick and exemplary arrangement package, executed with heart and fire, and that’s convincing. The story of Stray Train is, in other words, a story of retro-nostalgic hard rock sentimentality. There aren’t many bands like this in Slovenia, or else they’re only in the seed stage of »revitalism«, a kind of modest emergence. You can feel a love for the music of Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath in the band’s style (Man or Stone), and the band also adds elements of cheeky, rascally flirting to the vibe, for which the piercing and endlessly versatile vocal performance is mainly responsible, and which (and this is very important) also handles English really well. In that sense, Stray Train could be slotted in among the Slovenian bands that draw, one way or another, on the old guidelines of rock’n’roll, e.g. Retro Cult, Freeway Machine or Top Stripper. Some phrases are also underpinned by the kinetics of funk rhythm »trickery« (Wander Man, Green Card Paradise), which further livens up the overall picture of this release.
An interesting detour on the album is Can’t buy Happiness (..not even in December), which evokes the golden days of grunge, as the vocals are sung in a mid-to-lower register of vocal harmonies, calling to mind Alice in Chains and/or Soundgarden. A cunningly exciting closer to the album, effectively and darkly seductive in its theater of moods!
As a debut, the album ‘Just ’cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town’ is an achievement worth paying attention to, as it shows the unsuspected musical potential of Stray Train. Of course, there’s still some room left to grow. In terms of trimming the repetition of the choruses themselves, which the opener Soulseller already flags (it could have been a few seconds shorter), and in terms of further livening up the tracks by incorporating extra instrumental passages, as boldly shown in the song Man or Stone, which would bring a dynamic upgrade in switching between the moods of the album’s tracks. Otherwise, it’s a release the band can represent with great pride on concert stages. With the kind of commitment the debut studio album shows, we can look forward to even more interesting retro-sounding hard’n’heavy blues rock gems from Stray Train down the road.
Stray Train – Soulseller:
Lineup
Luka Lamut – vocals
Jure Golobič – guitar
Boban Milunović – guitar
Niko Jug – bass guitar
Luka Čadež – drums
Production
Stray Train
Tracklist
1. Soulseller
2. I Wish I Could Be Free
3. Wander Man
4. Green Card Paradise
5. Blow
6. Plastic Princess
7. Dead Romance
8. Man or Stone
9. Can’t Buy Happiness (…not even in December)
