Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Stone Orange
Label: Self-released
Released: 2007
Runtime: 45:12
Rating: 2.5/5
Stone Orange are yet another Slovenian rock outfit perfectly happy to have invented electricity. They play predictable hard rock driven by dead-simple impulses, with no tangling themselves up in complex (let’s even say potentially progressive) musical forms. The riffs are open and flowing, but the studio presentation of their design just doesn’t land on fertile ground for anything distinctive and appealing to sprout from it. Sure, hard rock on the global music map is generally worn out and run by a thoroughly well-trodden template, but today’s bands from the British Isles, the US, Scandinavia, the Benelux countries and Central Europe manage to patch that up with their own recognizable essence or a knack for predatory, dramatic atmosphere. “Nori mlin” doesn’t manage to convince on that front.
It’s also interesting that the guys decided to stick with Slovenian on the album. There are few historical exceptions among Slovenian efforts of this kind (Martin Krpan, Pomaranča) that managed to defy the crushing grip the Slovenian language has on the singability and melody that hard rock seeks and demands. And by the way, both Kreslin and Magdalenič broke out of that bind with the simple fact that they had a one-of-a-kind stamp, the recognizable color of their own voices, which the Stone Orange vocalist is nowhere near having. Not that he can’t sing. No. Technically he’s perfectly acceptable, he just lacks charisma and that fatefully magnetic charm needed to smash the indigestible, ground-up sawdust of the Slovenian language in the school of hard rock.
The opener, the intro Mene Tekel Fares (instrumental), pulls hard toward the intro of Crusader (orig. Saxon), let’s hope only by coincidence. The follow-up riff in Na drugi strani ulice is like listening to the continuation of the Saxon story, Saxon from the first half of the nineties. Where Saxon are at home, references to classic Judas Priest and Accept become fitting too. Parallels to the structure of the songs on “Nori mlin” can also be found in, say, the Europeans Krokus, Vengeance, Bonfire and the slightly younger Mad Max or Biss. There are thirteen tracks on the album in total. Of those, a full three are instrumentals, two of them very short, which could have served as intros to the “head and tail” songs, since they’re motivically completely uninteresting. That this is an extremely cautious album sorely lacking imagination is confirmed, for example, by the title of one of those two instrumentals (Čarovnik iz Oza). The third instrumental, Bad Like Jesse James, carries a whiff of southern blues, again with a thoroughly clichéd basic riff, so it’s simply more filler for the album’s running time. A pinch of glam hard rock is caught in the track Ne gledam dol, which is one of the brighter moments, though not because of that “glam” bit, but because the combination of the vocal’s arrogance, the rawness of the riff and the torpedoing drive of the rhythm section works superbly in this song. Compact, confident, with exemplary communication between the chorus and pre-chorus. This is a track that flows from head to tail, with a successfully crafted dramatic atmosphere.
The album cover motif, taken from an old abandoned linseed oil factory whose building is crumbling in the middle of the industrial zone of Ljubljana’s Moste district, looks rather punkish, and it’s actually a surprise when, instead of that, a hard rock message hits you from the record. So, an atypical hard rock/heavy metal cover.
The production pushes the guitar riffs to the front, which gives the required raw liveliness, and the communication between the front line and the rhythm section gives the album exemplary sonic depth and dynamics. The keyboards and backing vocal harmonies, however, come across as very static, and there’s still plenty of untapped room there for building juiciness and fullness in the overall sound. A guttural, arrogantly clipped vocal and ditching the keyboards completely, so you get the basic form of rock ‘n’ roll hop-skip galloping stripped bare, is one potential option for the band’s further development. And yet it’s not hard to spot the band’s tendency to land more intelligent hard rock, even AOR, which a heap of the album’s melodic harmonies don’t hide. That’s why you often miss a more decisive keyboard sound and the nicer, arranged cloak that multi-part vocal harmonies would offer, since the raw production of “Nori mlin” is generally tailor-made for albums of the recent past by the likes of AC/DC.
Stone Orange are still finding their feet with their debut. Still, they deserve every bit of encouragement, simply because they exist. And Slovenia doesn’t exactly have a ton of solid hard rock references raised and nurtured in its own bosom. But the time when Slovenian listeners were satisfied with just that has passed, right? The guys simply need a bit more experience, which comes with time and the band maturing through that very time, lots of gigging, getting to know each other, which would result in chemistry that would bring an upgrade. And that’s a strongly expressed spirit and essence of the band, which Stone Orange are still searching for. So “Nori mlin” is, on a casual listen and for an undemanding ear, a perfectly okay album, but put it under the binocular of analysis and you quickly find there’s still a lot of hidden reserves. The guys have potential. Fingers crossed they cash in on it big time!
Line-up
Marko Erjavec – vocals, backing vocals, guitar
Tomo Jurca – guitar
Davorin Kovačič – bass guitar
Andrej Obranovič – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Tomo Pavlin – keyboards (tracks: 1,2,5-8,10,11)
Drago Popovič – keyboards (tracks: 13)
Production
Drago Popovič & Stone Orange
Track list
1. Mene Tekel Fares (intro)
2. Na drugi strani ulice
3. En korak nazaj
4. Nori mlin
5. Zaprašene sanje
6. Ne gledam dol
7. Čarovnik iz Oza
8. Ko ne vidiš me
9. Bad Like Jesse James
10. Blues za lahko noč
11. Nič ni večno
12. Suženj občutkov
13. Mali princ
