Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Hadalin, Aleš
Label: Celinka
Release: 2012
Length: 46:30
Rating: 3/5
By now, Aleš Hadalin is a firmly established name on the Slovenian music scene, the one that strives to keep traditional Slovenian folk culture alive across the many colorful landscapes of reinterpretation. He made his name first and foremost because the rules of his art game put the voice front and center. Only the voice, and he has already tested it more than successfully throughout his career, in all kinds of roles and harmonized singing techniques.
His new album »Stoj tam gora Limbarska« is a kind of logical continuation of the path Hadalin has traveled up to the album »Jaz imam pa pridno gospodinjo« (2009). He put that one out with a backing crew, Petzapet, but this time around he performs the songs on the album entirely on his own.
Just another track that’s neither the first nor the last in reinterpreting Slovenian folk songs, you’ll say. The differences lie only in how each artist picks their own expressive path. Hadalin’s is simply specific, and that’s what makes him special and downright interesting. If a vocal talent with a pleasant, recognizable timbre is laid in your cradle, it’s worth capitalizing on that gift. Hadalin is a vocal chameleon, and by convincingly slipping into different roles with his own vocal characteristics of sermon-like singing, he comes across as fun, authentically fresh, and out of the ordinary. This time he mostly sticks to clean falsetto singing, and only touches on throatiness in one of the album’s most interesting arrangements, the remix of the song Marko skače.
Hadalin’s exceptionally beautiful, full, vibrant mid-range voice is deftly and delicately dressed with backing harmonies, even with drone tones, when the accompaniment under the lead vocal melody holds the base note of the tune. In the refrains the man masterfully, and knowingly, layers the melodies through nonsense syllables too, which is of course a trademark of plenty of Slovenian folk songs. Okay, you can’t exactly expect Bobby McFerrin from Hadalin, but he does also use his voice to create extra rhythmic loops that the harmonies of the lead melodies stand on.
Given the elementary, not-at-all-enigmatic mold of the melos of Slovenian folk songs, where two guitar chords are enough for accompaniment, the only thing that occasionally bothers on this album is too much repetition, like in the endless Bratec iz Ljubljane, which, with its repetitive growling of the basic verse melody, gets downright irritating by the end.
It’s also interesting, and a real realization, that Hadalin keeps his distance from any instrumental accompaniment. He fully trusts his vocal abilities, and in the “nakedness” of his vocal play, which is defined by elementary care and doesn’t tolerate being surrounded by additional effects, he brings the message of the sermon to the listener even more intensely and directly.
Anyway, an album that’s interesting for all lovers of traditional Slovenian folk messaging reinterpreted in a thousand and one ways, as well as for everyone open-minded who’s looking for something out of the ordinary and likes to surprise themselves, when, while consuming the all-powerful magic of the musical universe, you know how to lure in a bunch of exciting little spices.
Lineup
Aleš Hadalin – vocals
Petra Trobec – diatonic accordion
Bojan Jurjevčič – vocals
Blaž Medja – remix of the song Marko skače
Aleš Berkopec – remix of the song Marko skače
Production
Aleš Hadalin & Boštan Jurjevčič – Jurki
Tracklist
!. Marko skače
2. Jager je na štandu stal
3. Stoji tam gora Limbarska
4. Kermu se dremlje
5. Prišli so štirje jagri
6. Sveti Miklavž in hudoba
7. Bratec iz Ljubljance
8. Pegam in Lambergar
9. Dva pregrešna Italijana
10. Po cesti gre en stari mož
11. Štajeriš o plesu
12. Marko skače (remiks)
