Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Big Foot Mama
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 2007
author: Daniel Pavlica
Big Foot Mama are heading back into the embrace of the airwaves in a guise that, time-wise, is already pretty well chewed over. Which isn’t necessarily wrong in itself, but sadly it comes with a thoroughly mediocre product that, judging by the current roster of Slovenian top 20 acts, should be miles beyond the imagination and mindset of your average Joe. So where are Big Foot Mama aiming with Važno, Da Zadane this time? At the heart, as the guys might put it, and maybe they really are, but the album’s dryness and its mostly headless, almost arrhythmic swings in creativity have already knocked that out in round one. That Big Foot Mama, despite their not exactly dewy years, still stay faithful to slang-laden poetry about rebellion and youthful carefreeness surprises no one. And while the band’s wider target audience probably remains hordes of rebellious teenage girls and their cocky, rooster-like escorts, Važno, Da Zadane sadly doesn’t reach any further than an adolescent take on pubescent intrigues, periods, pimples and all the other indispensable problems of every teenage boy or, of course, girl. In short, those of you hungry for something more concrete in the way of rock & roll, the thing that supposedly sets our big-footed friends so far apart from the overbearing competition, will have to bury your heads in the sand one more time and hope for the best.
“Važno, da zadane” offers nothing shocking, let alone anything overly thrilling. All that’s lying in wait for us here is a bundle of nine fresh, let’s call them rocker kicks, plus one vaguely conceived cover of extremely dubious quality, the point of which keeps getting lost in a whirl of predictable insincerity. It’s not that the guys shy away from uncompromising rock music, but when it comes to, say, the meaningless teenage swagger and the more-or-less moronic lyrics of Mal Premal, otherwise one of the album’s musical highlights, you just can’t bring yourself to believe them. But let’s take it from the top! Big Foot Mama open with the title track, a simple rock riff heavily modeled on the infectious minimalism of those recognizable Cult-style moves. It’s mostly thanks to the latter that the melodies of Važn, da zadane will quickly find the coziest spot to hibernate in your ears. Its sister track Pomlad storms our senses with the same trump cards, definitely one of the more listenable songs on the album. Unlike those two numbers, though, for the rest of the album the guys walk us through things in a kind of disinterested way, with no fire and no energy: a bluesy/pop rock crossbreed in Narava Gre Po Svoje, the already mentioned Mal Premal and the predictable Razjeda. Then there’s the mysterious Ona Je Samo Za Mene, backed by (too) bashful backing vocals, a fun rendering of debauchery for one-time use. Tornado and Men Se Trga radiate an energy worth envying, a pair of cheeky, rhythmically punchy bouncers worthy of the egocentrism of Skočir’s well-seasoned vocals, where Big Foot Mama shine at full blast for the first time in a long while.
“Važno, da zadane” is sonically an extremely well-polished affair, with a production that’s often as aggressive as a volcano that’s been dormant too long and, after centuries of uninterrupted sleep, can now barely keep up with its own eruption of seductive, communicative primal rock & roll. Big Foot Mama do bring the latter’s carelessness in abundance, but caught in the clutches of sharply dictated commercial views, it never manages to get the final word. Taken as a whole, the album is extremely compact, and in musical terms it really doesn’t allow any big departures from its sharply conducted, hard-edged guitar rhetoric, which, along with the resulting lack of flexibility, often counts against it. Still, Važno, Da Zadane is probably one of the most direct approximations of primal rock & roll in the last few years, within the Slovenian music space, that is, or rather the apathy of the local music scene. Sad but true…
Line-up
Grega Skočir: vocals, backing vocals
Daniel Gregorič: guitar
Zoran Čalić: guitar
Alen Steržaj: bass, backing vocals
Jože Habula: drums
Production
Dejan Radičević
Track list
1.Važn’ Da Zadane
2.Mal Premal
3.Razjeda
4.Ona Je Samo Za Mene
5.Pomlad
6.Tornado
7.Vse Se Mi Upira
8.Narava Gre Po Svoje
9.Men Se Trga
Bonus:
10.Moja Mama
