Label: Pivec
Release date: 19.01.2019
Production: Same Babe & Hrvoje Nikšič
Album length: 50.14 min
Genre: alternative rock / chanson / cabaret / parody
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Listen to the album on the band’s official BandCamp profile!
Same Babe keep dangling “same vabe”, nothing but lures, in front of us. With no expiry date. You’d be hard pressed to find a parody this piercing anywhere in the music world on Slovenia’s pint-sized patch of land. They’re far from alone, but with their punch and bite, loaded with boundless scandalous clowning and cutting sarcasm, they quickly snatch the crown from the competition. There’s NLP, Duhovi, Nula Kelvina, Melanholiki (in their newer era), Olfamoštvo and Brecelj of course, and N3L… N3L? Now we’re getting warmer…. Each in their own way. The mentality of the little Slovenian everyman, wrapped up in a caustic, wake-up-call sermon. You simply won’t find a more authentic, sparkling and thoroughly tragicomic snapshot of the collective Slovenian soul for 2019 anywhere on this planet. When you read all those heavenly paeans from music critics gushing over Same Babe’s creations, all that (at times downright excessive) handing out of superlatives is, in the end, no surprise at all.
The whole confessional “circus” served up by this devilishly titled album could be a sublime answer to the band’s hidden pact with the devil. The artistic growth in the punch of its message is plain to hear. So «Vražji bend» is very much a welcome expressive deviation from its predecessor «Dobri možje», released in 2014. Above all, the guys have widened the reach of their genre-blending on the new album, stretching their musical pose (already well defined, mind you) from folk-cabaret chanson parody all the way out toward the wide-open spaces of tangible, chiseled rock phrases, which makes for a bolder, more provocative and more stimulating listen. The feel and instinct for working a jazz contour into this kind of musical recipe is still very much there, and the alter-ego stance that runs through this music is just as noticeable on the new album. At the same time there’s a bigger helping of shock theater, with which Same Babe, through their colorful confessional dramaturgy, infect the listener almost proverbially fast and lead them hypnotized through their musical visionary trip. Thanks to its “lovingly placed” moments of rock distortion, the new album also brings more flow and is even easier to listen to than its predecessor, which was a bit stiffer in its arrangements and more predictable. Considerably more love for plugging in is a hugely welcome move. The album sounds even more caustic, “earth-shaking”. It doesn’t lack for uncompromising edge, and at times it even has a punk character. Same Babe as a musical-poetic concept, with the eclecticism of their parodic circus act, are hard to pin down, let alone tame.
How do you make the ultimate “heavy” album? Ask the Slovenes. We’re real geniuses at it. At this point, hitting bizarre confessional extremes is no problem. “Heavy” in the sense of a proper balance of the load-bearing pieces, resulting in a gripping expressive appeal, where the poetry reaches its maximum range in the expression of its message. On «Vražji bend», Same Babe keep teasing with their unbridled sense for witty banter, building a solid backdrop of high-intellectual posing with a keen confessional fire. Through the roguish swagger of a poker hand full of aces of triumphant eclecticism, it keeps the listener constantly thrilled, endlessly entertained and busy with juicy mockery. In other words, it’s just bitter enough, bitterly biting in its sermon, and boundlessly sarcastic at the same time. Imagine merging NLP and Same Babe by listening to both of their latest albums back to back. You’d get a proper yin-yang combo. Both bands are black, cynical and razor-sharp in their preaching, but each hits the target in a different way. If the hero in an NLP story is invariably brutally doomed in the end, in a Same Babe story he stays the little God-fearing drudge, who contritely takes every blow of utter humiliation, diligently, conscientiously and in silence, and carries on.
On «Vražji bend» you honestly never know where Same Babe will turn next, so it surprises you at every step. Starting from their alternative chanson, and in dressing up their poetry and sermonizing in inventive ways, Same Babe have also made some bigger jumps in their choice of rhythms (Latin, arabesques) and conciliatory detours into country, blues, Balkan melos and more. The album is dead solid and grabs you with its compactness, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if a fully worked-out concept stood behind it. It plays like a story with a crafted beginning and end, where all the building blocks are sensibly defined in the arrangements and, in contrasting dialogue with each other, are constantly felt full-bloodedly and complement one another. The harmony between them, led by all the vocal interpretation, narration and other vocal pranks (including through multi-part vocal harmonies), and in reaching a tangible expressive juiciness, just never seems to end.
The album is played and arranged with great fire, driven by a primal feel for the sharp plasma of boundless intellectual cynicism, in a format that has few parallels in Slovenia, or indeed in the wider galaxy. With Vražji bend, Same Babe confirmed that, on top of their usual mastery of the sermon, they keep widening the reach of the vision behind their musical perception in composing and arranging too. This is proven by the greater flexibility in the genre-blending of the new album’s creative maturity, which means the band is still far from having said its last word.
Alongside fresh original material and a fun cover of Matko’s Pleši, pleši dekle, the new album also features settings of poetry by acclaimed Slovenian poets Tomaž Šalamun, Ervin Fritz, Janez Menart and Frane Milčinski – Ježek, and in two of the settings Viki Baba tackled translations of works by the Czech poet, writer and philosopher Egon Bondy. All this rich load of message-driven awakening, more topical than ever in a time of general social and moral decay, spiritual and emotional dystrophy and the apathy of a crumbling system that reaches for extreme absurdities just to hold out after two millennia of famously silly deeds, couldn’t have asked for a better showcase than «Vražji bend». «Vražji bend» is a masterpiece and one of the most insightful album releases on the Slovenian music scene this year. There’s simply no doubt about that.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 10 / 10
Tracklist:
1. Vražji bend (04:12)
2. Balada o pivskem bratcu (03:07)
3. Smrtek (02:44)
4. Hudobec (02:18)
5. Sistem v glavi (02:47)
6. Lepotičenje (02:29)
7. Pleši pleši dekle (03:23)
8. Pismo za Mary Brown (03:37)
9. Nor (…blues na navaden dan…) (04:34)
10. Videl sem Kitajca (01:31)
11. Komentar strica Fritza (00:20)
12. Žalostna pesem za kontrabas (01:41)
13. Vlak za Koper (02:49)
14. Krinko razkrinkaj (03:49)
15. Mušnice bele (03:02)
Line-up:
Marko Voljč – vocals, trumpet, shaker
Miha Nemanič – vocals, harmonica, tambourine, shaker
Matjaž Ugovšek “Ugo” – vocals, acoustic and electric guitars
Uroš Buh – vocals, drums, bongos, acoustic guitar
Marko Jelovšek – vocals, double bass, acoustic guitar
Viki Baba – vocals, acoustic guitar
Guests:
Maja Predatoria – vocals (Žalostna pesem za kontrabas)
Ervin Fritz – recitation (Komentar strica Fritza)
Rok Hozjan – double bass (Vražji bend).
