Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: GHB (Grega Habič Band)
Label: Nostromo Records
Released: 2009
Running time: 40:18
Rating: 4.5/5
Grega Habič is a lone independent rider. With his independence in preaching music, plus total immunity to the jingle of coins and the rustle of green hundred-dollar bills, he might just give the genre prefix “indie” its legitimacy back. Grega Habič is a guitar virtuoso, a guitar hero who doesn’t want to be one. A guitar hero who “tiptoes” in the footsteps of Joe Satriani, Jason Becker, Paul Gilbert, etc… In Slovenia that’s a fairly rare breed, though not totally unheard of. Over its history our country has had quite a few flirtations with rallying up and down the guitar neck. The first generation of such guitarists in Slovenia ran from Marko Lemer to Andrej Janežič, followed by a second, slightly younger one with Andrej Gasar and Grega Habič.
“Self Destruct Sequence” is Grega’s third studio album. Sadly, I haven’t heard either of its predecessors, so as far as comparing the albums goes, this review (critique) will be a bit crippled. On the other hand, that’s one less burden to carry, which leaves me freer to focus on “Self Destruct Sequence” itself.
The creator of the album in the “brainchild” sense is Grega, of course. In the hands-on sense, too: Grega played most of the instruments on the record. Serbian bassist Miša Tricković contributed a few bass lines (the title track, Voodoo Sex Thing), and so did American Jesse Adams, who, besides handling vocals on Scars, chipped in some keyboards and rhythm guitar. On top of guitar in every possible variation, Grega also picked up the bass, played keyboards, and had fun with drum programming. The drums sound unbelievably alive and are hard to tell apart from the sound created by the flexing and extending of real muscles in a studio. A successful move, and one worth learning from.
So Grega is his own studio master. He’s able to make an album entirely on his own (and release it, too). The sound has exceptional volume, width and dynamics, with strong contrasts between the building blocks. The rock-solid drum production is very important, as is the raw sound of the cymbals that fill out the picture, especially in the “stripped-down” guitar parts of Grega’s single-voice solo escapades. Then there’s an active bass line on top, which keeps the album’s sound away from the danger of falling into one-layered sonic suffocation.
This guitar album carries a typically American approach throughout, with a vibe that flirts with the American. Some pointers toward Joe Satriani are obvious but absolutely not bothersome, since Grega walks in his own recognizable shoes as a musical artist, cultivating his own vocabulary. That’s why “Self Destruct Sequence” isn’t a clone born of copying from world-renowned guitar heroes who can live off their work and enjoy great reputations, driven by a need to prove he can be as good as S. Vai, J. Satriani, J. Petrucci and the like… No. Grega doesn’t care about that and simply listens to himself. That’s why the leading ideas, the leading motifs, the transitional tricks and the solos he frames them with in the songs are fresh, inspired, special, and, simply put, entertaining from start to finish, keeping the listener at high alert and locked in on the material.
Let’s take a quick flight over the material. The album opens with the jerky Razor’s Edge, with dynamic, adventurous wah-wah that, after a few moments, gets wrapped in white-hot metal riffing, and the album quickly and successfully surges into high riff-driven punch. Flashback, as the closing track, is a typical, classically guitar-configured epitaph, and between those two songs there’s a high dose of expressive, motif-driven seasoning that reflects Grega Habič’s exceptional musical breadth, vision and expressive power as an artist. The album also has moments of higher experimental flirting. The outro of Voodoo Sex Thing is especially like that, or A Little Love Song, for example, while the keyboard passage right after the jazzy solo escapade in the middle of Beyond Redemption could be tagged as leaning prog. Wonderin’ doesn’t hide its jazz fever, successfully flirting with a “dreamy” acoustic atmosphere (especially the intro) before veering somewhere in the middle toward bluesy territory. The contrasts between the bass, the voluminous drums and the clean, natural guitar tone work wonderfully in this song. They’re not missing from the lazy, funk-gazing Scars either, where Jesse Adams’ rapping proves an excellent and very tasteful (very welcome) choice. Maybe it’s exactly the blues waters that are the biggest thorn in the side of classically schooled guitarists, as shown by the rather sterile-sounding intro to Vicious Circle (a Hendrix-style whisper of guitar phrases straight from heaven), which is quickly dispelled by the rest of the song, serving up everything else, of course. Great development and unfolding, stringing together varied but witty motifs that the guy shakes out of his sleeve in layers. That last sentence, of course, characterizes most of this record, which carries, at every step, a quality we find less and less on albums today: shockingly unpredictable development and thrilling creative wit. And Grega Habič is also a man who knows how to keep an absolute common thread running through the songs, so they don’t suffer from the fragmentation syndrome he could have easily fallen into had he given absolute priority to firing off ultrasonic-fast solos from every possible position! That’s why “Self Destruct Sequence” is wide open to all ears, not just the gourmet ones – the most spoiled.
Grega Habič has zero motive to reap any kind of commercial success. This work is the fruit of complete honesty with himself, so you can be sure that what’s written on “Self Destruct Sequence” is the most this musical artist can offer. If the whole thing carries a deep sense of expression, a strong essence of the spirit of a form created this way, serving up a unique and hard-to-repeat stamp of the moment captured by the developmental step that is “Self Destruct Sequence”, then you can be sure this is yet another standout in Slovenia that will most likely stay deeply overlooked on our turf, while abroad labels and the critical music crowd would be tripping over themselves for it! Hats off to Grega for his huge courage and for going in with balls fully loaded!
Lineup
Grega Habič – guitar, bass, keyboards, drum programming
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Jesse Adams – vocals (track 4), rhythm guitar (track 2), keyboards (tracks 2, 4, 7, 9, 10)
Miša “Tricko” Tricković – bass (tracks 2 and 3)
Production
Grega Habič
Track list
1. Razor’s Edge
2. Self Destruct Sequence
3. Voodoo Sex Thing
4. Scars
5. Revolution
6. Vicious Circle
7. Beyond Redemption
8. A Little Love Song
9. Wonderin’
10. Flashback
