Artist: Dance Mamblita
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2009
Length: 35.23
Rating: 2.5/5
Dance Mamblita remain atypical, and at a time when the typical is still very much in fashion, with our ears exposed daily to a bombardment of all sorts of musical junk. Which of course doesn’t mean the two guys are all that inventive, so much as, first and foremost, “unadjusted”. Lucky for them! The coastal duo, made up of the comely bodies of Andrej Šik and Boris Beštjak, still feeds on an admittedly not exactly spectacular two-hander of simple bass guitar drone and basic drum racket, sometimes upgraded with engraved vocal outbursts. That way they simply stay true to the musical “masochism” they set in motion with their self-titled debut “Dance Mamblita”.
“Reciklejšon” is in many ways the logical continuation of this expansion of minimalism, which feeds without a shred of regret on the sturdy derivatives of rock & roll! Shared genre denominators are plentiful here, from unobtrusive and therefore accessible alternative rock, through chains of nods in the direction of hard core, all the way to the obligatory punk workout. A fiery genre mix, though one whose considerable stock of life energy gets sapped by a rather conciliatory production polish, which puts “Reciklejšon” in the category of less earth-shattering studio efforts. A more spontaneously secreted cry of musical purism, one that would tickle the erogenous zones of the mostly unadjusted listener more intensely, certainly wouldn’t have hurt here. Instead, the flimsy twanging of the bass skin tries in vain to convince us of its rawness, serving up the sterility of some below-average demo recording rather than the garage aftertaste we wanted. Even the eager kneading of the bass strings, quickly rinsed in a distortion effect (as on the steely charger “Robert Smith”), fails to get rid of the bitter aftertaste in this respect.
Let’s not forget that “Reciklejšon” is still the work of a duo, which means that “Mamblita’s” dance floor (read: the room for musical-expressive maneuvering) understandably stays cramped. The aforementioned pelting with multicolored genre shades is certainly one of the tricks the two guys use to predictably dodge the dry spinning in circles around repetitive song forms and shapes. This kind of always risky tinkering only catches fire here and there, with the most memorable decor already on the opener “Reciklirani”, where the multilingual vocal stucco adds its bit too. A proper fireworks display of musical highlights (given the circumstances) comes from the fleeting “Žvrkanjao” and the no less frantic “Extremizam”. Numerous other flowers, which more or less indifferently bivouac on the rest of the album, sadly aren’t so lucky. Worth singling out here especially are the content-orphaned “Matija” and the boring banality of “Bmk” (colloquially, “I don’t give a fuck”), neither of which manages, even after intense chewing over, to squeeze out anything more than a vague, frankly tasteless musical abstractness, soaked on top of that up to the neck in the puddle of typical Slovenian cynicism.
Line-up
Andrej Šik – vocals, bass guitar, keyboards
Boris Beštjak – drums, vocals
Production
Bojan Babić
Tracklist
1. Reciklirani
2. Smeče
3. Robert Smith
4. Matija
5. Hajde pleši
6. Bonanza istriana
7. Žvrkanjao
8. Extremizam
9. Bmk
10. Čekanjada
11. Punkey
12. Pazi
13. Lažeš
14. Komarjev bal (1.del)
