Artist: Beat Fleet, The (TBF)
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 2011
Length: 53:12
Rating: 4.5/5
Here come the guys from Split, The Beat Fleet! They’re back with just their fifth studio album, and their first after a four-year break from studio releases. Last year brought the excellent live album “Perpetuum Fritule”, a much-wanted release especially for anyone who doesn’t know the band and/or has a hard time getting hold of the original studio records, since it’s a killer cross-section of the band’s discography up to 2007.
“Pistaccio Metallic” has been simmering for a full four years. Even the packaging of the first “limited” crate-shaped edition gets the point of the title across, wrapped in one seamless pistachio-green sheen of glossy paper, though it’s less likely that the designer was inspired by the colors of the cockpits in American World War II warplanes.
The Beat Fleet remain true masters of their craft. Their way of setting verses to music, and of course the poetry itself, is totally distinctive and one of a kind. These guys are excellent musicians, and most of the elements that make up the core of the arrangements come from actual playing. The sampling is still there, of course. It’s essential and very welcome, since it’s great at stirring up the moods The Beat Fleet want to put across at particular moments on the album.
At every step of the album the band is immensely lucid and sarcastic. They wrap the deadly reality of their poetry masterfully in a juicy package of rich, metaphorical prose that never runs out of insight or sparkling ideas. The verses are delivered in a preacher-style, hip hop way. Here The Beat Fleet literally bury the listener in rich information through their stories. In the choruses the “tension” lets go and the hip hop delivery turns into a vocal melody that melts into the melody of the music underneath. That music wanders constantly between pop, jazz and blues, with a cosmetic layer of tight, groovy funky lines and a natural-born talent for sampling on top.
The arrangements backing the verses are simple, but in their organic sweetness they’re put together from lots of building blocks that fit together perfectly, so the full spectrum of the sound is used to the max. Optimized. The basic building block for shifting between moods is the vocal duality, which The Beat Fleet achieve with two vocalists with different timbres.
The poetry, of course, still gets top billing and takes center stage on the album. The Beat Fleet are so effective at it that they could hold their own even with far weaker instrumental chops and much more slapdash arranging of the lead motifs and how they fit together. Just as much as Tompson is a boundless “patrio-idiot” who nationalistic, small-brained landowners in Croatia fall for, TBF are an example of boundless intellect on the Croatian pop music map, opening eyes wide with plenty of truthfulness through the prism of all-around sarcasm and the “shock element” it creates. Lyrically they’re the real deal, true geniuses, who manage to pour out lyrics through music with a healthy, down-to-earth humor, wrapped in the juiciness of Croatian metaphors, slang coinages and phrases of authentic Dalmatian, the product of the wide-open, razor-sharp minds of the sextet.
The lyrics aren’t printed in the booklet, since The Beat Fleet, with their juicy truthfulness, could become the target of condemnation from those who’d recognize themselves in their sermon and just aren’t up to facing the truth.
So yes. With the new album The Beat Fleet once again embody the pulse of life in Dalmatia. In a tragic way, through a bagful of exuberant comedy. The first track Tragični junak is really a reflection of the state of the social spirit in Croatia. If that one is immensely lucid, Grad spava is a seriously grounded take on the pulse of the streets of Split, and it has the most gloom. The vanity of girls marketing themselves to the highest bidder in new times, when moral values and chivalry in relations between men and women are mostly trampled, gets a hefty slap in the face in the song Mater. That one came out as a single and, with its juicy seasoning of verses, is also one of the album’s highlights. It’s even the hardest track on the album. All the anger poured out in Mater is quickly forgotten once we make it to the totally cheeky Veseljko, which once again very intelligently lays bare how the female mind works. The endless lessons keep coming in the album’s top performances. One that stands out in terms of quality, is without a doubt the song Vrag (Dobar dan profesore Voland), and I doubt The Beat Fleet got their inspiration from listening to old editions of the show “Vraže urice” on Slovenian Radio Študent. Vrag has plenty of healthy, “Alan Ford-style” mockery of the daily pulse of the city of Split. Dalmatino is an ode to building the highway along the Adriatic coast, while the sheer grimacing of the rhythmic textures, along with the deliberately dissonant duet singing in the chorus, directly mirrors the mockery and parody of the dimwittedness of the local “šlager pevaća” (schlager singers), whom our moms and dads in particular are hopelessly hooked on, born in the carefree post-war era when milk and honey still flowed.
“Pistaccio Metallic” was made over four years. So it’s an exceptionally varied piece of work, which means The Beat Fleet have reached a new point of musical maturity. The songs stand side by side as equals in structure and poetry on this album and are wonderfully varied from one to the next. The album never stops impressing with its poetry. “Pistaccio Metallic” deepens the band’s expressive sharpness, turning more and more to organic sound structures played with flesh and bone. Of course there’s a clear touch of trip hop cosmetics in how the sound structures are layered and sampled, as an extra seasoning to round out the overall sound. I dare say that “Pistaccio Metallic” is one of the best music releases ever launched onto the soil of our southern neighbor, and in terms of its own artistic sharpness it will be hard for any other release there to top it this year.
Line-up
Mladen Badovinac – vocals, keyboards
Aleksandar Antić – vocals, samples, scratch, recorder, keyboards, accordion
Luka Barbić – vocals, keyboards, samples, scratch, harmonica
Nikša Mandalinić – guitar, mandolin, xylophone
Ognjen Pavlović – bass guitar, percussion
Janko Novoselić – drums, percussion
Production
The Beat Fleet
Tracklist
1.Tragični heroj
2.San
3.Spin doktor
4.Uvik kontra
5.Mater
6.Grad spava
7.Vrag
8.Dalmatino
9.Veseljko
10.Pozitivan stav
11.Uspavanka
