Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Siddharta
Label: Finis Mundi
Released: 2011
Length: 53:53
Rating: 3.5/5
When Siddharta drop an album, the rule is that the occasion comes with at least one oddity, if not a whole bunch of them. Siddharta love to surprise people when they hand out a chosen bit of information. They’re one of those bands you could say is pretty much the only Slovenian act that wins over the wider Slovenian masses while still carrying that special touch of eclectic artistry, a homegrown authorial streak that always stamps what they do with something special, a unique one-of-a-kind quality. They’re a big band. A real band. A band that operates in Slovenia with a truly professional approach. We’re talking about a rock band. The rock mainstream band of Slovenia. Their unbending rock face has earned Siddharta the freedom not to bow to trends, to soak up a universe of ideas spontaneously and translate them freely through their own expressive body into a unique musical language that stays broadly palatable to the masses while taking a new step in the band’s artistic maturing.
First off, the album “VI” has a double-meaning title. It’s the sixth one in a row, but write that six as a Roman numeral and it’s easy to read it as “vi”, Slovenian for “you” (plural), meant for the crowd. As the paragraph above says, though, the album “VI” isn’t enough on its own. Fully taking it in necessarily goes hand in hand with the double DVD “Stadion Stožice”. You may already be starting to see what this is about. “Vi” is the crowd that gathered on 18.06.2011 at the stadium in Stožice, when Siddharta played a concert there, the first of its kind in the story of Slovenian rock. It’s no longer news that Siddharta have a lot of good experience with Slovenian stadium venues. We all know that after all the miles they’ve clocked, the band is oiled up like a true perpetuum mobile when it comes to stage interpretation, so they carry themselves with serious self-confidence. And since the lineup has stayed unchanged for quite a while now and the chemistry between them has settled into its optimum, music with this much bubbling energy is always worth capturing on a recording. So the band decided to record the concert. This time, though, it wasn’t the usual setlist. Alongside the iron-clad classics, the guys slipped in 12 completely new songs they had never officially played live before. That’s a first for Slovenian soil, since nobody before Siddharta had tried it. And there’s more. Besides the double DVD that documents the whole concert, the band decided to release the new songs as a studio album, picking their Stožice stadium performance as the originals.
Yes. Absolutely. The new album delivers a robust, raw and daring rock sound. Live. There’s no other way this time! How much “filtering” and “ironing” came afterward is hard to imagine unless you interview Ross Robinson, yet the hullabaloo unleashed during the show by the 10,000-strong crowd has been stripped from the album entirely. So the “touch-ups” don’t jab you in the ear. This kind of production had the following consequences. The rhythm section gained the most, and the taut, tense, rattling, fat bass guitar of Jani Hace stands out in particular, which together with Boštjan’s drums gives superb support to the wall of sound formed by the massive riff smear of Primož’s and Tomi’s guitars. So that element came out breathing triumphantly in this kind of environment. In such a soundscape, however, Tomi’s vocals this time work more than usual sunk into that massive riff structure, and they don’t hit with the expressive impact that was a trait of past albums. That move has also left its mark on the reach of the keyboards. They sound very raw, and under such conditions often mostly inferior, which at certain points holds back the development of real atmospheric hunger. But that only happens occasionally. In small doses on the album. Take the intro of Nora Terra, where the vocal steps aside and the keyboards get room, but they by no means take the lead over the guitar riff, despite an excellent idea. This arrangement of the building blocks of sound, on the other hand, works great for Bonsai or Bel labod. Such a sonic environment also proves a perfect fit for the excellent opener Postavi se na mojo stran, which delivers one of the album’s peaks right from the start and has the pedigree to grow into a classic of their iron-clad repertoire. In a predominantly ass-kicking environment, the milder inferiority of the keyboards is a perfectly fitting factor, since it’s a hallmark of raw live-album recordings by fiery rock bands. How the keyboards behave on this album in relation to the guitar phrasing is effectively revealed by the opening motif of General. Postavi se na mojo stran gives an immediate answer: the band hasn’t run out of inspiration for weaving punch together with an infectious melody that instantly crawls under your skin. Siddharta’s triumphant poker of aces, in other words. The ones that really get under your skin are the solemn Sam, Spet otrok, Bel labod, Bonsai and General. Still, in terms of arrangement the album’s quality wavers, and the melody isn’t always woven into the machinery of rock punch with the same effect. So there are a few points on the album that are less interesting and don’t stick at all, such as Malishka or, just before the end, Indian Boy.
The new album doesn’t have the exploratory, experimental, challenging note of sound-testing that its predecessor “Saga” had, which means a pinch of eclecticism has been sacrificed. But this is a live album and it needs to be looked at differently. “Saga” was enriched with lots of little extra minimalist tricks in the form of additional sampling, doubled lines, harmonized motifs and so on. The contrasts between mighty choral chants wrapping around Tomi’s vocal stood out. Here there’s none of that. You get one try, in one place, at one exact hour. What’s done is done, and there’s no resit. Since Siddharta were aiming to make a different album, a directly cranked-up rock record that forms the first bond with the listener by knocking on the associative cortex with a surplus of adrenaline rock n` roll rush, choosing to use its concert performance is actually ideal. It’s a method that was common knowledge in the studios of the seventies, and that’s how the best albums in rock history were recorded. Some surviving rock dinosaurs still record new albums in studios that way today (Uriah Heep, Nazareth). It speaks to the exceptional quality of the musicians as well as their great experience, self-confidence and courage. That’s why this hunt for an authentic sound by Siddharta deserves all the respect.
Still, if you look in the songs themselves for that artistic seasoning of “Saga”, you’ll surely miss something. In terms of the band’s artistic development, “VI” is almost a step back toward “Petrolei”, even though the sonic arrangement structures are lifted from “Saga”, only here we get the stripped-down, onstage sound of “Saga”, without decorative ornaments and touch-ups. The song Sam recalls the opener of “Saga”, Narava, with the same solemnity, filled to the brim by Tomi’s warm, pleasant, velvety vocal, without which we simply can’t imagine Siddharta. Along with the simplified arrangements, the lyrics get somewhat simplified too. At moments even banal, as in General, which in terms of character moves “VI” noticeably further from the depth and metaphorical insight of the poetry on past albums, especially the first three.
The mysterious title instrumental “VI”, placed at the end of the album, is the band’s only real point of experiment. The first part of the track, as it builds toward a “crescendo” (this is where the stadium crowd’s racket and the band’s greeting come in), would have been more effective if the band had included it in the introductory “warm-up” before the album’s “big bang” with the opener Postavi se na mojo stran, whereas the crowd noise kicking in at the close with Tomi’s “Lahko noč!” carries all its meaning.
“VI” is an album that’s worth tasting in combination with the DVD. That way you can feel how the songs behave in their original form in sound (and film), set within a repertoire of over 30 songs. You’ll experience two completely different adventures of the same story, two sides of the same story. Only that way will you put together the real picture of Siddharta’s new releases, and only that way can you get to the very bottom of the album “VI”. You have to understand the album’s basic message. Vi, the crowd, is an additional member of the band, interacting with the group to generate an energy flux that feeds the lineup, which, fired up by the crowd, creates a new energy picture of its own and sends it back to the crowd, and the electric circuit is closed. To repeat: enjoying the CD and the DVD together is essential if you want to give “VI” its true value. Its own value.
“VI” arrived remarkably fast after “Saga”. In a bizarre, caricature-like way, it’s really a stripped-down, rock-cranked version of “Saga”. Despite the band’s excellent move of once again offering something new on the Slovenian rock scene, this time Siddharta didn’t take any special step toward upgrading and enriching the content of their own art rock calling card, but still. “VI” is a very good album by a band full of its own distinctive expression and special atmosphere, and even though it comes across as more banal than Saga, it’s just as inimitable. If only because it was played in its entirety in a single take, in front of a one-of-a-kind stadium atmosphere. And that fact in itself gives it the dimension of a special album in the band’s discography.
Lineup
Tomi M. – vocals, guitar
Primož B. – guitar, backing vocals
Tomaž O. R. – keyboards, backing vocals
Jani H. – bass guitar, backing vocals
Boštjan M. – drums
Production
Ross Robinson
Track list
01.Postavi Se Na Mojo Stran (03:04)
02. Malishka (03:53)
03. Noraterra (04:06)
04. Arena (04:54)
05. Bel Labod (03:51)
06. Bonsai (05:21)
07. Sam (04:53)
08. Spet Otrok (03:39)
09. General (04:35)
10. Hollywood (04:49)
11. Indian Boy (04:25)
12. Vi (05:21)
