Label: Kapa Records & God Bless This Mess Records
Release date: 17.01.2019
Production: Jure Vlahovič & Dario Solenicki
Album length: 35.11 min
Genre: Post-Rock / Jazz / Alternative Rock
Want instrumental music that carries you off to a pantheon of otherworldly realms, far from the rational? Or do you prefer to stay with the logical, yet still want a simple album that’s instrumental but also incredibly accessible and easy to listen to? ŠKM Banda and their new album »Nouvi sad« deliver both! It kills two birds with one stone, tempting demanding music gourmets as well as those of you looking for the sacred simplicity of easy listening, even though ŠKM Banda are far from simple. Put bluntly: post-rock with a hefty dose of jazz elements mixed in, a heap of constantly flowing layers of sound that grind now toward an unbridled mass of humming, oscillating racket, which can occasionally even give the band a noisy flavor, now toward delicately swaying motifs, where the geographic roots of true Prekmurje pathos readily spark, and everything in between. In short, an excellent album, full of eclecticism, provocative and original adventures of ideas, and an extremely tight interplay of mutual awareness, rooted in the studio by recording the tracks played the way they would be at a concert, and that »in one take«. It’s an approach the band maintains and carries from album to album, one that guarantees the listener contact with the pure, authentic purism of musical expression, as generated by the artist’s sense for transmitting tangible sonic aesthetics. A striving for the perfection of the magical intoxication of a freedom-loving artistic stance and truthfulness. As organic as it gets! A musical landscape woven with the purism of merging natural shades of sonic collages. Those damn Prekmurje boys! Damn in the sense that they’re so bloody good again.
This time there are a few more distorted moments. Listening, you realize that the flirtation with Prekmurje folk-melos roots doesn’t land quite so squarely in the center as it did on the no less excellent predecessor “Panontikon” (2014), while some of the new phrases grab you a notch sharper and more rudimentary. At least that’s the overall feeling, even though the melos of Prekmurje origin is noticeable in certain phrases, especially in the opener Puščava and the closer Belji.
What has always been the biggest appeal of this band’s musical vision is its deft walk between fragile excursions into dreaminess and that aforementioned, at times abrasive, rock-heavy stance. These swings of mood, built up into a crescendo by layering sonic pastels within a given motif, gravitate through repetition toward a state of “entranced consciousness.”
In the middle, the gentle Brina calms the album down, deepening its cerebral side with its mysticism, serenity and depth. The moment of hypnosis grows stronger in such sweet sound. In the track Avgust, the band stages a superb theater of fusing post-rock phrasing with jazz approaches. In places the two guitars are set into an electric-acoustic, sonically experimental “complementing,” and in this sonic duality they communicate throughout with the breadth of great playfulness and mutual awareness. They’re led there almost by instinct, by the moment of translating the melody. That’s why the album carries a strongly emphasized sense of spontaneous development, an element of surprise. Yet there’s plenty of conciseness in all of it, because ŠKM Banda pack an incredible wealth of musicality into this whole dynamic passion of picturesque sonic collage-making. That’s the band’s main trump card, the one that enchants any listener. Whether demanding or less demanding, that is, the kind who bets everything on easy listening first and foremost.
Even though the tracks are hugely loosened up in the compositional glue of stringing motifs together, you can feel a red thread throughout, one with which ŠKM Banda keep them compact, or, from the consumer’s point of view, a kind of arrangement-level traceability of how things develop. The band allows itself a “collapse of the system” (motif fragmentation) only once on the album. On purpose, of course. Shortly after the fourth minute of the longest composition on the album, the closer Belji, in a passage of saturated racket they tease out a few noisy feints before the song slowly returns to the acoustic milieu of post-rock waves of manifold repetitions, which is how the album wraps up.
With the new album »Nouvi sad«, ŠKM Banda prove they’re considered some of the most refined tightrope walkers in Slovenia, deftly balancing between motivic looseness and tangible substance of phrasing. That kind of momentum is incredibly hard to achieve in rock’n’roll in general, but ŠKM Banda carry an innate gift of instinct and a feeling that the dose of ideas woven into this thrilling musical watercolor is just right, so they keep creating that balance, much to our gratitude. A good 35 minutes of superb music lie ahead of you. Unique, provocative in ideas, original and eclectic through and through. Boundless in scope. With »Nouvi sad«, ŠKM Banda have soared straight to the zenith of their creativity, delivering an album we can already call one of the best Slovenian rock releases that 2019 has given us or ever will!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 10 / 10
Track list:
1. Puščava (06:08)
2. Romantični (07:58)
3. Brina (04:49)
4. Avgust (06:24)
5. Belji (11:29)
Lineup:
Iztok Koren – guitar
Mitja Sušec – guitar
Jernej Koren – bass guitar, keyboards
Jernej Sobočan – drums
