Artist: Stranci
Label: FV Music
Release: 2009
Runtime: 37:00
Rating: 4/5
Stranci are an interesting musical phenomenon in Slovenia. No, you didn’t misread that. We’re back in alternative waters again. Stranci arrive with their second studio album “Kirjetukinor?” at just the right time, because with the flood of new party rock bands calling themselves punk under false pretenses, the scene is crawling with them. Stranci are armed with real, authentic punk rock energy, and they’re not bluffing!
On top of the songs on “Kirjetukinor?” holding up solidly in their preaching, these naughty rockers from the Celje corner of Slovenia can even grab a chord or two more than your average Slovenian alt troublemakers. Good stuff.
But let’s take it slow. With Stranci, everything revolves around the vocals and performance of Peter Schmidt. The guy has developed a peculiar approach to singing. He’s a proper psycho, adding a good deal of “sobbing” to his frenetic outbursts. It might sound a bit odd at first, but spin the record twice and you’re already making friends with it. More than that. You soon realize there’s no Stranci without “crazy” Peter, and that his voice is the strongest asset the band can sell, the thing that pretty much defines the whole point of Stranci.
The music is out-of-tune rock n’ roll. And where rock n’ roll is out of tune, punk naturally lives. The production is very noisy, yet it comes across as seriously lively, creating a real sense of garage vibes, rock defiance, rebellious arrogance and youthful hotheadedness. Z $ Z (Zgrab in zbejž) and Alkohole are two excellent depraved rock n’ roll rascals, the kind that make it easy to picture the scenes security cameras at gas station shops record every day. It’s true. People love to steal. And they love to drink even more. Especially Slovenes.
Stranci took care of one more thing, too. They decided to sing the songs in several different languages. Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, English, German and even Russian. This move is extremely welcome, as it gives the predictable genre framework that Stranci’s music belongs to extra wings of flavor, and the songs a measure of added dynamic variety. With this move the album as a whole gains in diversity. Sure, these are minimal departures from the basic template, but they’re just right. Which means they were needed. And since they work, it means they weren’t forced! That’s the main thing.
Stranci can be “melodic” too. The wound-up, crunchy rocker Rdeča raketa, which borrows verses from the poet Srečko Kosovel, takes first place on the album in this department. It’s also the most varied song on the album in terms of arrangement. It even features a choir, which fits perfectly in the middle section of the song and, with its compatible plug-in to the song’s garage rock foundation, delivers what the listener already caught with the song Zemlja. That one is sung in Russian. Земля, that is! It features female vocal accompaniment and a motif taken from the vast wheat fields of Russia, where it’s not hard to picture wheat-haired harvesters accompanied by proper sock-combines.
Oluja and Kao da je are filed down in a similar atmospheric manner. A mid-tempo pace, but with riff-driven rolling and solid, unyielding rhythms that bite with the required sharpness and a fire of dilettantism. In these two songs, Stranci, knowingly or not, tap into something that once flourished south of the Kolpa. Let me return to Rdeča raketa. This song is added to the album once more at position no. 11. In a shortened, radio-edited version. Without the added choirs. This version first officially came out in November 2008 on the Vala 202 compilation “Imamo dobro glasbo”. In this version it could easily have worked as the album opener, no brakes needed.
Our dear Monika from the FV Music label thus keeps diligently making sure her infallible ear catches the right bands, so they can calmly “find their feet” and present their music to the masses. Under the wing of the long-lived and unbending label FV Music. Besides the properly functioning attributes that real alternative rock has to generate – that is, twisted rock n’ roll, or punk rock in plain speak – Stranci can also boast a pleasing integration of the right dose of authentic goofing around. Times are different. We’re not hungry anymore, and in 2010 there’s a general danger of poisoning yourself with drinking water from the tap of your own home. “Kirjetukinor?” is one of the more successful releases, one that can worthily link up with the rich legacy of alternative rock from the late seventies and on into the eighties. So with “Kirjetukinor?” Stranci present an album with a healthy bond to the pioneers of the first punk wave in Slovenia. At the same time they do things differently, especially thanks to Peter Schmidt’s vocal approach, and they even reward the listener now and then with musical arrangements that demand a few more brain folds than a pea in a chicken’s head can muster. They call their own principle “ljuta rokčina”.
Lineup
Peter Schmidt (Pero) – vocals
Matjaž Naglič (Spidy) – guitar
Jernej Vidmar (Jero) – bass guitar
Dare Gozdnikar (Darči) – drums
Production
Stranci
Tracklist
1. Oluja
2. Diži ovde
3. Kirjetukinor
4. 42
5. Z $ Z (Zgrabi in zbejži)
6. ЗемлÑ
7. Rdeča raketa
8. Rücktritt
9. Kao da je
10. Alkohole
11. Rdeča raketa (skrajšana verzija)
