Label: Nika Records
Release date: May 7, 2018
Production: Peter Penko and Vojko Šintler
Album length: 38:26
Album rating: 9.0 / 10
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Seven Days in May are a Slovenian alt rock quartet who, with hardly any media “hype” beforehand, suddenly shot onto the music scene out of nowhere. The Slovenian rock scene is forever underfed, but judging by what their self-titled debut delivers, we can quickly conclude that Seven Days In May are shaking things up on the Slovenian rock scene with incredible success and daring, enriching and expanding it (its culture) with their sharp expressive instinct. When a band like this turns up on the Slo-rock scene and stands behind what it does, as is the case with the debut from Seven Days In May, it’s always a huge win for the home music scene. We’ve already seen quite a few oddballs in indie alt rock culture. The first ones that jump to mind are, say, The Tide, The Toronto Drugbust, John F. Doe,… Each with their own recognizable musical identity. All of them alt-aesthetes of their own kind. Now Seven Days In May join that crowd, bringing a completely new musical story to our scene, one that sounds awfully “familiar” and, compared to global rock, thoroughly road-tested.
Seven Days In May “bring the heat”. They’re rock’n’roll alternative guys. The debut carries a punk subversiveness (garage-y, organic). It carries a rawness, but with the remarkably concise and considered production and the refined structuring of the compositions, that rawness grows into a work of true indie rock predatoriness. In their expressive contours, some tracks even carry a pinch of space psychedelia or dystopian alienation. Thanks to the rustling backdrop of a layered sonic culture of deliberately emphasized repetitions of guitar phrasing, and through the distinctly dark, atmospheric pomp that certain moments of the album reach, the music can also have a hypnotic effect (a cerebral trance). On top of that, we absolutely have to add a post-Britpop element that sneaks into this whole brew very slyly and often even steps into the foreground. That’s also thanks to the incredibly boldly internalized English accent that the band’s vocalist Vojko Šintler coaxes out so skillfully in the meter of his verses.
The sonic “racket” is put together very concisely and with great care. A massive wall of riffs takes the central position, but alongside it are a bunch of sonically minimalist tricks that create a charming duality. On one side the album has a real punk core, on the other it craves the art aesthetics of expressive perfectionism. There are, for example, trivial, single-note “pull off” turns (half-step bends) in the underlying guitar ornaments, just one of the elements Seven Days In May use to slyly break up any possible riff monotony. Beneath the guitar phrasing there’s a pile of other additional lines too, coming either from the oscillating feedback of “unplugged” lines built on consciously measured tricks with reverb, stereo chorus and echo delay effects, which achieve a special effect with deliberately dissonant decay as well. Then there are the cunningly slipped-in sampling tricks. The band deepens the dark atmosphere in the available sonic space by adding extra vocal lines too, which take on the role of an additional instrument. But none of it pierces through the voluminous tension created on one side by the bristling guitar electricity and, on the other, as a contrasting counterweight, by the hugely confident and deeply penetrating rhythm section. The superb production is what gives this record its weight of extraordinary artistic appeal and interest, along with a refined use of the “less is more” axiom, which deftly combines rock rawness and art escapism, and with that Seven Days In May achieve a great sonic aesthetic.
Even though the band sounds fresh on the scene, there’s an experienced crew behind them, offering a real dose of intellectual sharpness, both in the poetry and in the proven skills of sonic and compositional fine-tuning. Some song titles are provocative and deliberately grab attention. The track Sasha Grey isn’t a tribute to the notorious porn star, but it’s definitely tied to the band’s aim of recreating in it the feeling of a unique, liberating pleasure that we constantly crave, rarely experience and even more rarely relive. Still, Sasha Grey is no stranger to the music business either, if only because she appeared in one of the videos of alt rock titans Smashing Pumpkins. And the track Paul Weller should really be heard by Paul Weller himself. He’d be thrilled. Probably by most of the album, in fact. Toward the end of the album there’s the excellent MM (the abbreviation refers to Marilyn Monroe, not Manson J). Then there’s the track Trip with one of the catchiest lead guitar phrases on the album, which the later track She challenges and chases just about as well. Every track has a fully formed musical character, and the album closes with a stop at the last open diner in the middle of three in the morning, directed by (singer-songwriter-leaning) Money.
Seven Days In May are a special, one-of-a-kind band. They’re building their own unmistakable musical dossier. They draw their inspiration from the heyday of mid-’90s alt rock and translate it into the present incredibly well in their musical mission. This is an album that David Bowie would have liked today, and certainly the aforementioned Paul Weller too (Seven Days In May would make a perfectly fitting support act on one of Weller’s tours),… It carries the internalized British self of the vibrant, artistic pool of acts from the British Isles, from Blur, Osasis, Placebo, even The Moons, if you know roughly what I’m aiming at, but those labels are too loose, just for orientation. Seven Days In May can evoke these associations in the listener, but at the same time they transcend them, which they achieve with their self-made musical character, and so, already with their debut, they come across as extremely mature and penetrating, giving the sense that they know exactly what they’re about. A band with a fully formed art character, then, that knows precisely what it wants and stands behind what it does with great confidence. A band that has to break through abroad. And I’ll immodestly add that Seven Days In May have, with vehemence and right from the start, decisively outgrown the Slovenian rock scene.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Kate Moss
2. Trip
3. Paul Weller
4. Ready To Fight
5. Why Love
6. She
7. Window
8. Sasha Grey
9. MM
10. Money
Lineup:
Vojko Šintler – vocals, guitar
Jani Klavora – guitar
Rok Cizelj – bass guitar
Damjan Lebeničnik – drums, percussion
