Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Overflow
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 2013
Running time: 43:24
Rating: 4.5/5
There’s something rebellious and critical in the Koprivnica water, which is why we can all rightfully take our hats off to the Podravina crowd and give them their due – the backbone of resistance wasn’t broken by Ustasha collaboration with Hitler’s vision of one Reich, one people and one Führer, nor by the socialist era of the proletariat’s »dictatorship«, nor by the metamorphosis of rotten capitalist greed into what we can now ironically call the »dream of a big, happy Europe«. A loud »NO« to usurpation, dumbing-down and exploitation is easy to find in poetry as well as in the music oozing out of those superb punk melodists – the indestructible Overflow. Which is better? Poetry or music? Why choose? On their latest, damn-timely record, which has topped expectations this year after the sadomasochistically sweet Hit Me, Overflow wed their edge to the lyricism of a critical poet beaten to death under the boot of a fascist regime, a poet of native Croatian soil and herald of social injustice, Mihovil Pavlek Miškina – and the result is an outstanding album that spews revolt at a time when revolt is bloody badly needed. No money, no work, no bread, no prosperity, no hope, even the light of a bright future is going out, and the youth are left with no safety net to push responsibility onto a better tomorrow, one that begs the question of when it’s actually going to show up.
The task this Koprivnica foursome, with their energetic revolutionary helmsman at the stern, shouldered was anything but easy. Putting yourself in the shoes and the position of a man who wrote verses at the turn of the last century and was brutally murdered in Jasenovac (in 1942, not so long ago, to be exact) at the rise of the Nazi-fascist doctrine sounds like anything but a walk in the park at first glance – yet from the very first listen of Overflow & Miškina, the relevance of the Podravina poet’s verses is felt, heard and felt again through every single pore. Things in history happen twice, wrote Hegel: first as tragedy, then as farce, and clearly it’s more than necessary to serve up the painful stagnation of mentality and the repetition of the same exploitative patterns of modern-day enslavement in a way that even those who can’t stand books, poetry and intellectual effort will grab it by the gusto. Music is a good go-between, and with their recognizable structure of well-built, bittersweet yet bouncy punk rock, Overflow have acted as musical catalysts for a well-known but never-aired old story and done the lion’s share of charging up the battery – which is why I can already tell you the guys have outdone themselves and added another incredible, bloody-necessary gem to their discographic crown, one that compromises on absolutely nothing!
So far Overflow have pushed into the world with English lyrics and wailing notes, but this time the sharp, minimalist guitarist with the style of Nikica Jovanović, bassist Zoran Piberčnik, rhythm man per excellence Marko Kuhar and the band’s indestructible, throaty trump card, the vital Goran Živković, have added the brutal honesty of their native Croatian tongue to their linguistic toolkit. This Koprivnica-Varaždin organism with four heads has breathed out a mother’s cry of rebellion, and it sounds punchier and more convincing than ever before. After the poppy intro Proljetne pjesme I, which first brings to mind something by those Rijeka wildmen Let 3, all the registers open up and the flame of cohabiting your own ideas with someone else’s words blasts through the ceiling at full tilt. Overflow sound like themselves, and the comparison both with the coastal heroes of punk (ah, when I think of Termiti, and Let 2 …) and with the standard-bearers of the continental elite (yep, you’re probably thinking of Hladno pivo too, right?) is fleeting and completely unconscious. The outstanding track Na paši poetically glorifies the sweet smell of native soil, which the youth refuse to give up even though they’re anything but happy with their homeland. It’s a sociological analysis, but one that radiates reality, the real thing, and not the ravings of some armchair thinker hidden away from the world, rambling about things that are totally beside the point. Žika, the educated vocalist of Overflow, doesn’t deny, degree or no degree, that despite living in cities we’re all more landless peasants than kings of Betajnova, and with his feeling, vision and understanding of Miškina he serves up every trump card for falling in love with the whole and its individual parts. Usred ciče zime is a musical monolith of compact guitar punch, the Overflow rhythm section at its finest, and the contextual repetitiveness of Žika’s hypnotic vocal. And then the wake-up call, Bijeda. »Kruha nema / zarade nema / novaca nema / ovrha se sprema,« it screams from every corner of a well-balanced frontal outburst of rage. Facing the people stand the guardians of order, protecting the oligarchs, while the tearful, hungry landless Ivans are shoved into despair and stagnation. It’s fucked up to live in the countryside, in a village, in Goveji Dol, when you’ve got no land and the fields yield nothing …
With a dedication to a dead friend (Kad u noći sve se smiri), Overflow decide to fight the darkness and hopelessness, and you start to think Žika is mourning the loss of Happiness and the Future more than a flesh-and-blood departed companion who never got to walk life’s road with him. A punchy package of superb music, lyricism and above-standard production leads you on a walk to the next grave of yet another dead friend, one with a less optimistic note and a pessimistic whiff of grey, leaden sky. Tmurno je nebo, and the cold winter chill, with the gentle tempo of the drums and a minimalist touch of piano keys, leads to a foggy cemetery of memories where something hot, rebellious and searing is waking up. Pjesma međimurskog zlatara is a cynical ‘fakof’ that, through a hymn of happy people who aren’t, underlines the misery of an age where we’re all happy thanks to an imaginary game of digits and zeros in our bank accounts, and a person’s work and dignity can be measured by the depth of their wallet. Have we really hit the bottom of our human shallowness, ask Overflow and Miškina, and they offer the answer in the superb fusion that is Invalidova pjesma. A punk rock shockwave to the power of ten tells the story of a man who had it all – life, a song on his lips, grain in his hands and the wealth of youth and happiness in his chest – and then came the time of the mindless call to fight for the wrong ideals. Waging war for politicians, ideologues, isms of every stripe is stupid, and plenty have fallen for the trap of (self-)destruction, and plenty more still will – so the compact duo of punks and poets in the shape of Overflow and Miškina warn against war, the senselessness of slaughter, the deception. We’re harnessed in the reins and straps of our own carriage-driver’s self-deceit, now willingly handing them over to the dimwits in the sabor, the parliament, the senates, at home as much as in »blue« Brussels, and Pjesma kirijaškog konja is a stampeding gallop down the track of all of us, offered whips for the disobedient, false light for the blinded and empty hope for the dreamers by every last delegate of the new system of the new world order. Overflow are sharp and good interpreters, and the shockwave of brutal music drives this outstanding record to its finale mercilessly and without embellishment. We all carry fate on our own shoulders and in our own hands, and what we plan to do about it is up to us, my dear friends. The album gets its final fade-out in the closing hymn Orač, which condenses the meaning of the song into verses that say it all: »I budi i raste, donosi nam ploda / Hoče li več jednom doći i sloboda?«. It will, once we reach for it ourselves, Overflow silently add and answer, and the note of revolt they suggest is understandable to anyone with a bit of brains and a sense of reality.
With Overflow & Miškina, Overflow have stepped out of the field of positivity and energetic carefreeness onto the ground of rock-solid political resistance, from the passive aimlessness of the suburbs to an existence with meaning for everyone, not just themselves. The record is so many-layered that it offers plenty of joy both to those looking merely for good musical release amid piled-up tensions and to those looking for depth and meaning in music and lyrics, and for what at the core of everything good means »žmoht«. Even with the help of the words of a long-departed poet, the sense of relevance in Overflow’s message never fades and never fizzles out into nothing. The record is compact, confident and free of filler that would steal your time and attention, and the foursome have genuinely strapped on the best record they’ve made to date, without underestimating the high bar of quality they’ve set for themselves since the debut Through The Departement Store. The guys have grown into men in the meantime, and now that they call for revolt and revolution, they understand it all too, with a bow to the fallen victims of revolution. Revolution devours its own children, after Lenin, Trotsky, and perhaps more relevant figures like Gandhi, Lennon and, last but not least, Miškina, and the fact is that, for the sake of those who fell to swords, bullets and the criticism of the »true believers«, mainstream ideologues and bigots, you must not give up your stance, your thoughts, your path and your mission to become a person who can turn the misery of today’s world into the prosperity of a better tomorrow for our descendants. Part of the journey is coming down to earth and tasting the bitterness of times that are anything but kind to us today, while never agreeing (and if you’re even remotely alive, never being able to agree) to the systemic programming into passive robots, obedient to the idealess and lost oligarchs in their political seats of power. Overflow & Miškina says all that and more, and this standout of this year’s Dallas output deserves something more than a standing ovation from those who’ve managed to piece the mental jigsaw puzzle together from fragments into a whole picture!
Lineup
Nikica Jovanović – guitar
Marko Kuhar – drums
Zoran Piberčnik -bass
Goran Živković -vocals
Production
Overflow & Petar Horvat
Tracklist
1. Proljetna pjesma I
2. Na paši
3. Usred ciče zime
4. Bijeda
5. Mrtvoj drugarici XXX (Kad u noći sve se smiri)
6. Mrtvoj drugarici XXVI (Tmurno je nebo)
7. Pjesma međimurskog zlatara
8. Invalidova pjesma
9. Pjesma kirijaškog konja
10. Orač
