Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Taša
Label: Celinka
Release: 2017
Duration: 44:53
Rating: 4/5
Taša, known by her “official” name Nataša Vester Trseglav, is a musician who is handing us her singer-songwriter debut, »Panta Rei« (everything flows). Don’t worry, it’s not a tribute to the famous Serbian singer-songwriter Đorđe Balašević, who put out an album with the same title many years ago (oh dear, it’ll soon be thirty years). So Taša’s album gives us eleven thoroughbred originals. She wrote it all herself: the music, the arrangements, the vocal melodies and the lyrics. In the studio she had help only from her close creative ally Teodor Amanovič – Toš, a guy who kept a watchful, careful eye on all the small but important corrections throughout. The songs and the album stand just as they should.
All in all, »Panta Rei« is a powerfully confessional singer-songwriter album. The lyrics are intimate and deeply personal. They string together stories of longing for emotional and spiritual fulfillment (Nežnosti), for acceptance and forgiveness. The messages are bright, brimming with heartfelt optimism and love. For Nataša, the harsh trials life has thrown at her taught her that there was nothing left to do but scoop up life with a full ladle of optimistic vibes. Taša grew and matured along with the verses she wrote for this album. She is their spiritual shepherd, handling them as if they were part of her, which they are. And not just on paper: bringing them to life as recorded sound gets to the very heart of it, too. Taša approaches them with incredible heart and devotion. Without that kind of authenticity and honesty, a record with no room for cosmetic studio makeup applied after the fact would go down in flames in an instant, and its singer-songwriter “competitiveness” would be badly shaken, if not downright questionable. So »Panta Rei« delivers a varied, tightly convincing landscape of emotions and passions. With a wonderfully pleasant voice that speaks directly to the listener, especially when she gives in to gentle vocal coloring, she sometimes takes her interpretation almost to the edge of a whisper. Taša’s vocal flexibility and softness effectively magnify individual emotional states, especially longing, quiet yearning, anticipation,…Taša can almost shyly tuck her voice away, like a little girl of spotless innocence, whenever bringing the message of the verses to life calls for it.
What else matters on an album without guitars? You can tell Taša has loved improvising on piano and keyboards for many years. She also uses an electric piano, a Rhodes of course, and in the verses she likes to build the arrangements from nothing more than simple synth pads. The piano and keyboard arrangements wrapped around her vocal performance are often harmonically lively. Taša doesn’t just “lay down” bare chords on the piano; she moves them around in all directions with harmonies that “sit” beneath the vocal lines. What I’m getting at is that the piano and keyboard parts, and the way they’re laid out in the arrangements, are optimized, and you don’t miss any other additions in the sonic landscape. Given the intensity of Taša’s sincerely re-lived vocal performance, this kind of arranging is more than enough, even though I’m not trying to provoke when I modestly add a personal flash of insight: there are never too many guitars in music.
It’s pop music that occasionally leans on a touch of cabaret or chanson, very skillfully hidden, because the level of listenability across all the songs is outstanding. The album creeps into your ear instantly and invasively. No wonder Taša already lined up a nice bunch of radio singles back in 2015 and 2016 (Vedno znova, Čarobna cesta, Škratove sence), where the album also likes to spin into dance-floor rhythmic kinetics. In those two years? Yes. »Panta Rei« entered a long creation process, so it ends up extremely polished, as the tasty “middle-eight” passages prove in the end, along with the remarkably skillful, arrangement-wise fluid build of moods from verses into pre-chorus and chorus. Against the album’s leveling, musicality-driven pole, the “poisonous” duo of Urban Krč (drums) and Žiga Golob (bass) deliver a lively, organic rhythmic performance. Especially in the calmer passages, the two players drift toward a cabaret-jazz rhetoric, even though »Panta Rei« has little to do with jazz, if anything. It carries only a few optional hooks in the compositions that could lead to jazzy stretching-out, but you can still feel in their playing that Kugler and Golob are jazz players at heart.
As noted: an exceptionally strong album. The compositional perfection of the arranging is a joy; it keeps an astonishingly effective backdrop under Taša’s vocal lines, so they come across with optimal emphasis and contrast in what they express. That lets them shine with full expressive intensity. That’s also the essence that makes for a robust, convincing singer-songwriter achievement like »Panta Rei«. That’s why the whole album is so skillfully aimed at the middle of the road. It’s a singer-songwriter achievement that could do a lot to enrich the often impoverished image of Slovenian middle-of-the-road music, or contribute to a healthy image of the Slovenian “mainstream”. »Panta Rei« is a high-quality, openly pop album that, thanks to the flexible structures underpinning the arranging landscape itself, also carries a pile of excellent seeds for Taša’s future artistic endeavors. But that’s still a long way off; for now, here and now, it deserves as many live performances as it can get.
Taša – Čarobna cesta (official video):
Lineup
Nataša Vester Trseglav – Taša – vocals, piano, keyboards, backing vocals
Žiga Golob – bass guitar
Urban Krč – drums
Kevin G. Davy – trumpet
Production
Teodor Amanovič – Toš
Track list
1. Drevored
2. Čarobna cesta
3. MOrda pa kdaj
4. Nežnosti
5. Nora misel
6. Panta Rei
7. Zapleši z mano
8. Vse je OK
9. Škratove sence
10. Vedno znova
11. Za njo
