Artist: Ant, The
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 2012
Duration: 34:17
Rating: 3.3/5
Sometimes you get the feeling that all the most musically interesting stuff among our southern neighbors only happens in Rijeka. Rijeka has always been a driving force of musical ingenuity and has given Croatian rock some of its most gloriously unhinged bands. Anthony Kukuljan, going by the stage name The Ant, keeps up that high Rijeka pedigree of rock n’ roll meccas south of the Kupa.
The Ant is a long-serving musical veteran who has waded through a pile of past projects with various lineups, starting in 1993, when he played in Pax Aeterna. The band later shortened its name to PXA, and he mostly performed with it in Italy. After that he played in En Face. So this is an artist you’d expect to deliver real musical substance on the songwriting front too, even after a 15-year dormancy.
The best way to start the story of the album »L & P« (the full title is »Love And Pain«) is with the song River. It’s the lead single with which The Ant was already priming audiences in the first half of last year for the release of his solo studio debut. An indie folk tale with a gloomy, atmospheric thickness, mostly down to Anthony’s vocal delivery, River is wrapped in accordion and piano, the latter contributed by seasoned Fiumens member Vedran Križan. Križan gets the point of a singer-songwriter confession, since he works in a similar role himself in his singer-songwriter duo Manofon. River embodies a happy combination of folk melos harmonizing the accompaniment to Anthony Kukuljan’s vocals; add the slide guitar of Vlado Simchich »Vava« (the ex-»Laufer« man also produced the album) and the puzzle is solved.
Anthony’s vocals lean exclusively on falsetto, which has two faces. The lower-pitched one is all mumbling and humming, and despite its depressive character it hunts down a pleasant timbre that’s easy on the ears. That variation has its levelling counterpart in the higher registers of the very same falsetto. Emily is an example of an interesting collision of folk music with vocals “sunk” in distortion. Here the voice creates a schizoid, frenetic howl of depressive morbidity that Nirvana fans will like, along with everyone who’s into that kind of depression. Vocally, Kukuljan surprises again with a sense of personal breakdown caught in Lovemore – surely one of the album’s depressive peaks, with the vocal delivery at this point deepening the perfect trick of unplugged-style grunge bands. The author also brings some “southern” sentiment into the album’s character in We Said Everything, where Vava’s slide guitar once again lends nobility to his vocals, similar in character to River.
He recorded with an eight-channel portable studio, so the recordings come from different corners of the Kvarner coastal region, from Gorski Kotar and Mali Lošinj to the coastal stretch between Rijeka and Opatija (Kastav) and, of course, Rijeka itself. This “moving around” benevolently magnifies the artist’s emotional states – or rather the mood of a person at a given moment, in a given time and place – which, through the spontaneous interpretation of the material caught on the album, defines and deepens the dynamics and variety of his moods.
The album doesn’t escape the time thieves – take John & Paul, which is distinctly boring in its repetitive motif. Sail Away, placed right after it, carries a hint of psychedelia thanks to the combination of bare acoustics and Anthony’s higher-pitched falsetto. In this song the drawn-out notes in a “southern” mold are an excellent filler that breaks up the song’s otherwise predictable nature, since without this trick it could easily have gone watery in a monotonous development (like John & Paul before it). A collision of early Floyd-style “More” psychedelia with a country folk point, plus a pinch of “southern”, in other words. The heavy depression doesn’t let up across the record. Anthony masterfully dodges a similar monotony-prone situation in The End too, where a violin lurks in the background of the accompaniment in a few trivial tonalities, yet pleasantly blended with the development of the vocal lines. For Us (with the prelude I.F.A.) closes the album, and Anthony, with his sensual delivery stepping fully to the front here, keeps the album afloat and brings it safely into the harbor of credible creative reach.
It’s interesting that Kukuljan chose to confess through poetry in English, which is a marked rarity on the Croatian music scene (especially when we’re not talking metal), since it’s usually precisely the Croatian language that adds that juicy weight which serves up the recognizability and authenticity of the musical heritage of individual acts from our southern neighbors. This way Kukuljan has surely sacrificed some of his own identity too, but it’s obvious he made the move for the simple reason that English gives him a wider range for placing the emotion with which he wants to bring the message of his verses to life. Of secondary importance, but still worth mentioning, is that the use of English may stir up a bit more interest in the album abroad.
»L & P« is a special album. It’ll be interesting to all of you who enjoy alternative experimenting and who love the independent, untamed, rebellious steadfastness of musical artistry! The “unplugged grunge prism” reading suggests itself, especially given the alienated, depressive content of Kukuljan’s vocal character, and the guy adds one more distinctive piece of indie folk messaging to the colorful mosaic of Rijeka’s music scene, with nice potential for future artistic growth.
Lineup
Anthony Kukuljan – vocals, guitar, programming
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Maja Valjak – violin
Vlado Simchich “Vava” – slide guitar, twang
Vedran Križan – accordion, piano,
Production
Vlado Simchich “Vava”
Track list
1. Pray
2. Funeral
3. The River
4. Emily
5. Lovemore
6. We Said Everything
7. John & Paul
8. Sail Away
9. The End
10. I.F.A { I Feel Alone }
11. For Us
