Label: Pivec
Release year: 2015
Production: Blaž Celarec & Marko Turel
Album length: 35.24 min
Genre: Folk / Rock
Time flies! Four years have gone by since the album Noč čarovnic came out.. It feels like it was yesterday. And now here’s the new “Enci Benci Katalenci”. Your first listen leaves you feeling like you’ve flicked on the right turn signal while driving, then swung left at the intersection. Unlike its predecessor, which was an album of original material, “Enci Benci Katalenci” is basically an album of children’s folk counting-out rhymes that have been through a thorough process of so-called “Katalenization”.
Look back and you’ll see Katalena took similar creative steps when they were “driving out the witches” and heading off into the “Resian landscape”, so it’s no surprise that “Enci Benci Katalenci” offers another experimental makeover of folk melos. The main springboard for the new album is a collection of children’s counting-out rhymes, “Enci benci na kamenci”. The band members have recently taken on the role of young parents, in step with their life stage, and found it more than inspiring as they listen to their kids babbling through those rhymes. That makes “Enci Benci Katalenci” a genuine imprint of Katalena’s healthy evolution, of their artistic development and maturity as of 2015. It’s a kind of artistic release valve, which at this moment was really a kind of necessity for the band, and one they simply couldn’t have avoided.
The band members are so seasoned, with such mileage and such a finely honed sense for putting a composition together (the “Katalena recipe”, of course), that this new stew of musical building blocks really works. It’s led by a colorful mix of folk melos, experimentally turned upside down with jazz variations, then veering off toward cabaret chanson, blues, swing, gospel and rock. It’s fresh again, immensely witty, and, content-wise, it effectively melts away not just genre barriers but generational ones too! So the album is just as good for demanding listeners, meaning grown-up audiences, as it is for entertaining the youngest. That’s why on stage the album also gets a kind of interpretation that’s visibly tailored to how the little ones take things in. It’s worth remembering, too, that the individual members of Katalena are true specialists in stage performance, and for them theatrical acting is something that simply belongs to a live musical performance.
The interweaving of all the album’s building blocks again radiates an extraordinary bond and effective chemistry among the band members, held together by great camaraderie and a feel for one another. The album is stamped through and through with vivid organic sonic pastels, and it sounds organic and alive. It oozes fun and the huge enjoyment that carried the musicians along as they shaped the compositions in the studio itself. In the process of “Katalenizing” the source form of each rhyme, Boštjan Gombač (as you’d more or less expect) won the most room for solo exposé, with his well-practiced use and integration of his whole array of wind instruments. The band also filled out the sound with striking vocal contrasts, from spot-on vocal harmonizing and doubling of the main lines of the lead vocal melos, to the interplay of lead female and male vocals, mostly between Zornik and Gombač. The elements of playfulness and lucidity run through the whole album as two of the essential and most distinctive trademarks that have always made Katalena’s musical statement instantly recognizable. Besides the mostly skipping, playful romp, the album also has moments of real compositional sophistication. Two tracks stand out in particular: Križ kraž and, just before the end, Uspavanka, whose softness and refined delivery draw out a special kind of intensified emotion and mood!
So the new musical experiment has once again fully paid off for Katalena. It sounds unmistakably Katalena, yet different from everything the band had offered listeners in their career up to this album. The transformation of Slovenian folk counting-out rhymes into the story of “Enci Benci Katalenci” shows off Katalena’s exceptional artistic brilliance once more, and its density of content and layered structure will gradually peel back the veils of finesse and compositional detail for you, so it keeps thrilling you long after many spins in your CD player!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.0 / 10
Track list;
1. Enci benci
2. Bela lilija
3. Cipcipilipcipilonika
4. Križ kraž
5. Maček
6. Andale bandale
7. Bam bam bam
8. An ban
9. Uspavanka
10. Gospod in gospa
Lineup:
Vesna Zornik – vocals, backing vocals
Polona Janežič – keyboards, harmonium, percussion, backing vocals
Boštjan Gombač – clarinet, trumpet, flugelhorn, soprano saxophone, bass recorder, Irish whistles, overtone flute, theremin, ukulele, melodica, fujara, whistles, accordion, andes 25F, kazoo, percussion, backing vocals
Boštjan Narat – guitar, banjo, percussion, backing vocals
Tibor Mihelič Syed – bass guitar, saz, ukulele, kalimba, typewriter, bass drum, percussion, backing vocals
Robert Rebolj – drums, percussion, backing vocals
