Artist: Bordel
Label: Racman
Release: 2007
Življenje v čipkah by the quintet Bordel is yet another in a long line of gargantuan attempts to give the hopelessly doodled-on Slovenian public a proper taste of the essence of rock n roll. An ambitiously planned undertaking, but one that carries the seed of its failure from the very start. The first problem hits the moment you face the unpleasant fact that there’s about as much rock n roll in Bordel as there is Stalinism in Hitler. Rather than a fear-inspiring musical monster, their sound recalls a hard-to-digest mix of the old Divji Kojoti school and the utterly moronic lyrics of the more modern, dilettante sexy scene in the style of da phenomena. The cherry on top of this laughable and thoroughly tasteless setup is the lost lyrical wandering through a “critical” take on society, rounded off, in that obscurantism so typical of today and obviously easy for your average Slovenian Joe to grasp, by an annoyingly polished production.
Življenje v čipkah is a horribly inconsistent product that, beyond a hard-to-stomach clichéd title (which you can explain either as a possible, though hardly believable, enthusiasm for Idrija’s lacemaking craft, or as a direct confession of the boys’ same-sex leanings), offers precious little, or, if I’m honest, next to nothing. With the exception of the markedly sharpened “Ostan Kakor Si”, which easily wins the most sympathy in this thematically empty collection of second-rate rocker fillers, the five-piece stays trapped the whole way through in some kind of bizarre labyrinth of quasi-rebellion and inconsolable mourning for long-dead loves, all of it wrapped in utterly daft, slang-inspired lyrics in the vein of “U Parku”. Take this, for example: “mal u parku sem se ušetu, naletu na prjatle tri. En je molu, drug je ubolu, tretmu se vse dobr zdi”. Guys! If anyone here is ubolu, it’s definitely you! The bizarre Ich Liebe Dich starts to slowly call into question the point of wasting the money and time of these, I don’t doubt, very nice-in-private-life lads, who finally manage to add a pinch of refinement to this comically “lacy” musical wreath with the average “Nov Obraz”. Fun moments, but then for the rest of the album the “Bordel boys” go right back to circling around dull and often half-baked motifs, with no swaggering character whatsoever and not even the hint of eroticism that, judging by the cover, you’d expect at first glance to be their export product. Instead, rock n roll here means instinctively teenage thrashing through “Še En Zamah”, “Odspodi Navzdol” and the bored title track, not to mention Tina’s revival of the Design myth. Anyway, willingly or not, življenje v čipkah creates a highly dispensable rocker mix that, if nothing else, can also serve as a nice showcase of nostalgic reconstruction of the Slovenian rock scene of the nineties, when bands like Bordel, with their racket, scared passers-by out of practically every halfway big Ljubljana dive.
Lineup
Stane Vrbek: vocals, guitar
Bogo Pretnar: guitar
Tomaž Zajšek: bass
Uroš Drobež: organ, synth
Janko Orešič: drums
Production
Aco Razbornik
Track list
1.Še en zamah
2.Odspodi navzdol
3.Življenje v čipkah
4.Ostani kakor si
5.Kdo je to?
6.Tina
7.U parku
8.Nov obraz
9.Pred menoj ni več ovir
10.Ich liebe dich
11. Dildo
Album length: 38.42
