Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: All Strings Detached
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2017
Length: 49:19
Rating: 4/5
All Strings Detached is a Slovenian all-female alternative rock duo, and three years after their debut »Heavy Rain« they’re back on the scene with its follow-up, »There’s Something Painful About The Pearls«. The two musicians and vocalists behind the name, Vesna Godler and Jana Beltran, stick with the musical and creative vision they laid out on their studio debut, and they carry it over to the new record.
All Strings Detached are seasoned musicians with some serious mileage in the music business, and on the new album they hold on to the basic starting point for arranging their songs, which is minimalism. But watch out. The new material is once again armed to the teeth with poetry that carries a lot of weight, and with a fresh, lived-through, passionate and unbridled delivery it grabs your attention in an instant. That’s why it fills in the “gaps” of the otherwise minimalist sound so effectively, all the way through.
So the strings are attached. All of them. The bare jangle of the guitar strumming, with its captured rawness, is melancholic and dark. In the sound production, the guitars develop an occasional element of dissonance. The songs unfold from minor keys, and they capture the real charm of alternative music, in the truest sense of the word. Vesna and Jana bring real difference, and this album, their second in a row, earns a place in the league of the most interesting releases on the Slovenian “underground” music scene. It speaks without pretension as it invites you into the wide, confessional bosom of the depths of women’s emotions.
The two female voices are once again stretched across a whole series of emotional states, delivered with incredible vividness and the glow of seething passion, torn between the tenderness of yearning longing on one side and eruptions of fury on the other. The lyrics are strictly personal and confessional, and with a sensitive, deeply feeling approach they openly paint the vulnerability and fragility of the human soul, which too often becomes a prisoner of the invisible shackles of today’s life principles, the ones we sometimes follow and fall for almost “robotically”. When it comes to developing drama through so-called “black-erotic” poetry, both authors are masters, and they deliver their English with a skillful use of meter. The vocals are interwoven again and again, and within the arrangements they are also the main generators of melody.
So dive back into the inner world of women, and feel the intuitive storytelling, the boundless depth and all the piercing force of the black-erotic theater of the duo All Strings Detached. The new album effectively deepens, nurtures and expands the confession of the studio debut. Remarkably genuine, special and unique. With the new album, All Strings Detached stay firmly in the saddle of authorial creative artistry, which they handle with great skill and where they feel most at home.
All Strings Detached – I Feel (official audio):
Lineup
Jana Beltran – vocals, guitar
Vesna Godler – vocals, bass guitar, drums
Production
Vlado Lešnjak & All Strings Detached
Track list
1. I Feel
2. Wait
3. Superwoman
4. In the Night
5. What to Do
6. It’s Been a While
7. Move On
8. Loverboy
9. Parallel World
