Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Yesterday Banda
Label: Self-released
Release date: 14.10.2016
Duration: 19:52
Rating: 4/5
Yesterday Banda is a Styrian crew of grizzled old rock’n’roll tomcats from Ruše and the surrounding area. The guys are sitting on ID numbers with birth years from the days of Abraham, so it figures that the album »Nov teden«, which clocks in at under 20 minutes with all seven tracks put together, is a catapult shot straight into the bosom of the eighties. In production, performance and songwriting.
On »Nov teden« Yesterday Banda serve up seven varied tracks that won’t exactly discover Einstein’s theory of relativity in musical terms, but they do reflect the kind of musical vision that Slovenian radio frequencies were eagerly hunting for in the eighties. Yesterday Banda are full of lucidity and sarcasm in their lyrics, even though nearly every story ends in the tragic demise of its hero. They’re socially critical, personally confessional, and all the way through those lines of honest poetry they crack jokes at their own expense and make fools of themselves. So first and foremost this is a proper retro-sounding rock’n’roll album, packed with self-irony and also some undisguised rebelliousness. A mature rock’n’roll album of pure-blooded Slovenian geographic origin, the kind that only the generation the band members happen to belong to can make today.
The title track has a real surf drive; if it were an instrumental, someone like The Shadows would have loved to adopt it back in the sixties. The song Gostilna pri ovinku is a flirty rock’n’roll loafer, where the band cleverly uses echo effects in the production to color the vocal in contrast. The vocal resonates old-school, in the style of the doings of someone like Elvis Presley. The song Punk is, as its title already says, a classic imprint of how punk rock was made in Slovenia in the eighties (the chorus), while its hugely fun »waltz-rocked« verse even comes close to the boundless cynical humor of the likes of Buldožer. Holcarski Blues, up next, is a real boogie blues rock sly fox!
The guys are incredibly brave and hide absolutely nothing in their artistic moves. They’re stripped bare in their poetry, they know no kitsch, no polish. All that counts is the calloused fight for your daily bread! In all this endearing honesty you can find a blatant dose of boyish naivety. Us men, after all, stay a kind of kid for our whole lives. We stay childish. Western, inspired by the works of Ennio Morricone, is an instrumental that could easily serve as the soundtrack to any film with Terence Hill and Carlo Pedersoli, known of course by the nickname Bud Spencer. The only thing that really jars a bit in this track is the sound of the keyboards, which you could hardly coax out of the production with a more authentically cheap eighties sound. The album closes with the optimistically minded country blues of Kar bo pa bo, with a truly predictable songwriting nature, as if Johnny Cash had accidentally run into Andrej Šifrer in some random sub-Alpine dive in the eighties. Could be worse, right?
All in all, Yesterday Banda’s guitar is superbly played. It has a gorgeous semi-acoustic ring, is placed into lovely contrasts throughout the production and sounds crystal clear all the way. At the same time it comes across as dynamically active in the solos. The solutions in the lead guitar phrases, though full of predictable templates, are still inventive enough. The guitar work spreads its notes and tones so fittingly that the mid-eight parts never tear apart the otherwise very listenable format of the compositions themselves.
I won’t be far off if I bizarrely caricature the following. Imagine somebody froze the members of Yesterday Banda in 1984, woke them from their sleep in 2016 and sent them straight into the studio to record an album. An album lost in time and space is thus before us! A fun, old-school and retro-sounding product of honest rock’n’roll, the way worthy middle-aged dads revere and understand it, and one that also shows that Yesterday Banda are a very seasoned band when it comes to concert stages too. Though it looks like they still haven’t discovered a You Tube channel, they do have their Soundcloud profile!
Lineup
Andrej Perkuš
Zoran Perkuš
Ervin Matjašič
Damir Knez
Vladimir Kraner
Rudolf Kraner
Production
Andrej Perkuš
Tracklist
1. Nov teden
2. Punk
3. Meni vseeno je
4. Gostilna na ovinku
5. Holcarski blues
6. Western
7. Kar bo pa bo
