Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Kontrabant
Label: Self-released
Release: 2013
Running time: 48:16
Rating: 3.7/5
Even a few years ago I couldn’t have imagined that you could slip so easily out of rock saturated with electricity and eclecticism and into the dominion of older, more old-timey rhythms and tunes, the stuff that’s marketed these days as ethno, whatever that is. After a more intense plunge into internet waters and nodes, the world has noticeably shrunk over the last few years: influences from the music of the south, the north, the great Pannonia, Istria, the Karst, and also from beyond the borders of our small country (always rich in music), everything past the horizons of continental Europe all the way to Ireland and even further – to the shores of the New World – that’s the baggage you hear in the influences of bands like Terrafolk, then Fekete Seretlek, and last but not least in the charming rhythmics of a band that has been plowing musical virgin soil for a good 20 years and goes by the name of Kontrabant. What is kontrabant? Musical smuggling of ethno-party music, says the web, but beyond the contours of Slovenian, Romani, Pannonian, Balkan and Mediterranean ethno music there’s something more hiding. Kontrabant is an idea and a realized aesthetic ideal of universal artistic expression, of the poetry and sentiments of more than just one person, even though the centers, the concentric circles of change, transformation and music, spin around a gentleman by the name of Béla Szomi Kralj, while the rest of the soldiery keeps changing constantly. Kontrabant are smugglers of everything good, and beneath the collage of melodies and tunes an impressive twenty-year path has taken shape, crowned by their latest superb album, a record titled Sladki bes. It’s an easy way to start getting deeply acquainted with the erupting, restless selves of the Kontrabantars, and falling in love with their fragile yet so eclectically perfected music, which breathes with natural, acoustic lungs rather than a ton of electronic crutches, is so natural that the leap from the decibel embrace of noise into the warm shelter of soft caresses of homegrown sounds isn’t even surprising.
For their sixth album in a row, they borrow the words of the Lendava-based Hungarian poet Lajos Benc as their essence, which puts lyricism and poetry up front, with musicality and the previously familiar explosiveness in the second row. Sladki bes is a little record faithful to the principle of popularizing the musical treasures of world music, and with its musical pluralism it breathes into your ears a lyricism of suggestive hypnotism, which makes you happily climb down from the peaks of a self-absorbed artificial world along the paths of metamorphosis toward people with a different way of life, a different way of understanding the world. All the excess specks of dust of inflexibility get shaken out of a compendium of thoughts full of prejudice, and you soon get closer to the notion of a true musical cosmopolitan. In a world blinded by the artificial postulates of nationalisms and conspiratorial thinking, Kontrabant prove themselves as initiators of a spiritual revolution, who never claim to be flawlessly perfect or aesthetically one hundred percent, even though there is something beautiful and so very necessarily human in the tiny slip-ups. The opening track Barva oči scatters a handful of Latin rhythmics and acoustic guitars into your palm, over which Geza’s whisper-soft vocal arches, showing its range of height, strain and effort after the chorus, though it doesn’t kill the music despite a slight tightness in the strained vocal cords. Love in unbelievably beautiful eyes, a meditation on the scent of summer, the colors of blossoms and images of an ideal world of lushness, fertility and well-being are just pieces of the mosaic that Kontrabant sensually glue into a whole. The continuation is more decisive and more melodic. The song Morje carries the listener into the lyrical world of Tomaž Pengov. »Our fragile love / water lily / They steal nectar from the chalice of your beauty. / Dragonflies,« sing Geza and Kontrabant’s riders of rhythmic swaying to the sound of firmer drums, acoustic guitars and a sweet accordion. The gorgeous lyrics and melody glide across the contours of a soft horizon of perception, and already the second ace promises a smooth ride. The Kontrabant train is all-encompassingly rhapsodic, colorful and so damn familiar, already heard, which this time doesn’t bother you and doesn’t kill the desire to dig in deeper.
Srčno brezsrčen is a Prekmurje mix, a sneaky cheerful number smelling of the Mura, which this time, with its story, flows straight into the summer-heated Adriatic Sea studded with pearls. »Žüžek, sleep with my love / in dreams, fly with the seagull,« Kontrabant suggest meditatively, and in the images of heartfully heartless sinfulness there’s plenty of sensibility, softness, sweetness, deceptive dreaminess. A gorgeous sweet swing extension with the more chanson-like Sladki bes breathes a bit of the scent of France and Mediterranean shores into the story, while Geza hides something defiant, threatening, a spirit still held back under the sweet glaze, hungry for a clash with a world that isn’t quite right. The moment isn’t right yet, Geza adds, so he gives himself over a little more to love lyrics and to gliding into a metaphorical universe of hidden meanings. Zima comes even closer to the singer-songwriter pain of the aforementioned troubadour of meditative resistance to the world, Tomaž Pengov. »Lord, give us an eye, so we can drown, / in the window for an exposition … / Lord, give us such a winter, / A magical exhibition …« Geza crumbles sweetly, while in the background fractals of little hills weave together with the smell of the wine tubs of Pigl’s sonic universe. The song Kakor sonce adds something that can even sneak a bit of Kreslin into the whole, and Kontrabant, with a soft line of tenderness and love of life and Love itself, simply sail into the harbors of the approaching close of the poem. Together as a pair, with the quickened rhythm of the balladic dreaminess of a wonderful love realized in eternity and in twosome, Kontrabant, with acoustic guitar, drums and accordions and sweet waterfalls of phrases and metaphors, invite to the dance the audience they’ve been bound to tightly and inseparably for the last twenty years. One of the album’s more decisive moments is the philosophically deepened song Kdo ve, which asks about the very essence of life and death, courage, time and rebellion. »Every day it flares up anew, / Pulsing in us and burning, / An ancient hot flame, / A hot flame smolders,« is the send-off with which Kontrabant accompany us like lost Odysseuses returning to the safe shelter of our own sense, the shelter of our birthplace. The end is again with the beginning and the beginning with the end, but before that Kontrabant slather us with the rain, heavenly tears and chill of Predjeseni, spin us around and Irish-poison us with the Istrian melodiousness of the gorgeous counting-rhyme 4 Wake, drive us to the revolutionary trenches with the western-style sarcastic Proletarc and, with the Irish-Slovenian drunken Napitnica, bow to better times with a nod to the worthy doggerel of Zdravljica.
Plenty is left over that I hope Kontrabant intend to plow into even more decisively next time, but Sladki bes, like a molasses glaze, has softened the aching chill of a world and an era ripped up by recession, a part of which we all are right here, right now. Kontrabant use music as a universal language, as a tool for upgrading, as a construct for crossing into a better age of joy and warmth. Kontrabant smash the negative patina and the stereotypes of an aimless world, and keep alive the charge of love for our forgotten little corner of the universe, which some of us have deliberately started to write off ourselves, since we got no consolation here. Sladki bes serves up positive sentiments, but at the same time, beneath the softness of a more tolerant and patient portrayal of the world, there’s still enough revolutionary spirit, waiting for better times to materialize in the form of music and lyrics on the next record, which, I assume, is already in the works. With its message of positive change in the world, Slovenia has received a message with which Kontrabant, in a more whispery, soft way, suggest the main tenets of the world our ancestors bled and died for. The question is whether, in a world of crisis messaging and media saturation with negativity, uncertainty and hopelessness, there’s even enough ear left for the message of tolerance and carefreeness to be heard in all its fullness and beauty. Maybe that’s why you can sense something bitter and negative that Sladki bes carries with it despite all its sweetness …
Lineup
Pal Szomi – acoustic guitar, drums, barrel and cymbals, vocals, backing vocals
Janez Vrenjak – drums and vocals, backing vocals
Peter Žnidaršič – acoustic and electric bass guitar, vocals, backing vocals
Matjaž Medvešek – violin, violin, charanga, backing vocals
Béla Szomi Kralj – classical guitar, accordion, bouzouki, ambient (synthesizer), vocals, backing vocals
Dušan Železnikar – acoustic guitar, bouzouki, vocals, backing vocals
Production
Grega Samar & Béla Szomi Kralj
Track List
1. Barva v očeh
2. Morje
3. Srčno brezsrčen
4. Sladki bes
5. Zima
6. Kakor sonce
7. Skupaj v dvoje
8. Kdo ve?
9. Na predjesen
10. 4 Wake
11. Proletarc
12. Napitnica
