Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Lollobrigida
Label: Menart Records
Release: 2012
Length: 51:49
Rating: 4/5
One of the points of rock ‘n’ roll is recycling it, serving up fresh offerings in repackaged wrapping. Dressed up in whatever the latest studios can produce as the fashionable cry of the moment. Sure, you come across as retro-nostalgic, and by pushing your own originality that way you automatically seem less original, but it’s still a better role to be a reviver who draws direct inspiration from the work of recognizable artists than to try to straight-up imitate their stuff, or even make a quick buck by reworking evergreen hits.
The members of Lollobrigida belong to the league of somewhat wiser birth years. Their coming of age was undoubtedly soundtracked by the electro new wave synth pop movement that left its mark on popular music especially in the first half of the eighties, and behind it all a shy veil lifts to reveal roots in alternative music, “punk with brains” – post-punk. The extensive use of primitive synth sound patterns and their repetition occasionally brings Lollobrigida close to krautrock as well. The crafty jigsaw is built on a “perfectly cut” track of dance rhythms, over which a soft collage of minimalist synthesizer sounds builds the soundscape, along with primitive patterns that come from the beeping alarm of your first digital Casio watch, and you can draw parallels with the sound structure of the first video games that showed up on ancient Commodore and ZX Spectrum computers.
This “plastic sound” is neatly topped off with similar behavioral patterns in the use of guitar, which barely pushes out of the sonic picture, yet works amazingly well in bringing in an organic, not entirely alienated feel. All of this ties Lollobrigida’s musical character to the success stories of the wave of eighties synthpop bands like The Human League, Soft Cell, O.M.D., even to the feints pulled in their eclectic ways by oddballs like Depeche Mode or Ultravox. And last but not least. Since we’re in the territory of the late Yugoslavia, it’s worth mentioning that Lollobrigida’s sound will feel close to the sound of the long-gone carefree days of Videosex and/or Denis&Denis.
Obviously, the center of gravity, the whole point of Lollobrigida’s music, is aimed at the vocals of singer Ida Prester, who with her authoritative delivery of the verses adds that lump of sugar, while in the production her vocals are at times deliberately “distorted” so they come across like an echo from another galaxy, totally unreal. Her name, familiar to many as the host of MTV and HTV shows, is surely an element that throws the doors wide open for the band to take over the mainstream music scene of our southern neighbor, and the band’s direction is definitely set up so it can instantly satisfy a not-so-demanding crowd of listeners who are scared of a distorted guitar riff. And that’s the majority. So Lollobrigida are a commercially minded, mainstream-oriented band (as proven by the already released and by now “folk-ified” hits from the album, Kompjuter, Sex on the TV, Bivša cura, and the release of the radio single Malo vremena). But the band doesn’t go about it half-heartedly. Behind them stands the firm and clearly focused steering hand of producer Gregor Zemljič, who made sure the expressive reach of the band’s ideas was capitalized on sonically in the best possible way.
One-dimensional dance rhythms combined with washes of synth loops tip the scales toward a generally cold, extraterrestrial atmosphere, and the album title “tabletka” (Pilula) itself calls out and lures you to nightclubs, where the intoxicating trance of mental disconnect and the giving of yourself over to hedonistic excess seem to have no end in sight. Lollobrigida come across as light, relaxed, undemanding. They call you to party, to reset your brain, to escape from the real world into a parallel dimension, where ordinary folks can find their mental salvation, even if only for a short while.
The strict template the band sticks to is a factor that leaves no room for any special art detours or expressive variety that would be the fruit of eclecticism. The band gets around this rigid expressive straitjacket mainly through colorful manipulation and sampling of sound structures. Besides the original material, the band also surprises with their own ideas in the masterful reshaping of the Zdravko Ćolić hit Pusti, pusti modu into a delightfully retro electro dance ecstasy. At the end of the album there’s also the track Bez prevod a cover of the Macedonian band Bernays Propaganda, where Ida’s vocals are joined by the Macedonian band Bei the Fish. The track has a particularly dark and alienated atmosphere, arching over a lazy, sleepy rhythm on which lies a chillingly icy yet majestic synthesizer blanket. This one, among the album’s three bonus tracks, is the oddball of the record, and that’s why it’s placed right at the very end. The track is taken from the compilation “Igraj slobodno!” (2012), which brings together covers of Bernays Propaganda songs by various artists.
The third studio album doesn’t hide its step up in maturity, but it doesn’t go out of its way to win over wider crowds either. Still, it’s hard to find fault with it. Not in terms of artistry, let alone the sound production, which is phenomenal. It deepens the band’s retro character, which is relevant again these days; Lollobrigida by no means come across as provocative with it, the way they could have if they’d hit the market in 1980, while holding on to a share of their own distinctiveness, which in its message focus is even more mature and defined, and hits even more concisely in the songs themselves.
Line-up
Ida Prester – vocals
Petra Cigoj – vocals
Kleemar – keyboards, electronics
Jernej Šavel – bass guitar
Marko Turkalj – guitar, drums
Production
Gregor Zemljič
Tracklist
1. Ja se resetiram
2. Sex on TV, Sex on the Radio
3. Fast Food
4. Malo vremena
5. Pusti, pusti modu
6. Pilula
7. Kompjuter
8. Bivša cura
9. Stroboskop
10. Frik
11. Pusti, pusti modu – Boby Dooks remiks
12. Sex On Tv – Torul remiks
13. Bez prevod
