Author: Urban Bolta
Artist: Let 3
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 2008
Rating: 3.5/5
A good twenty years after Let 3 got started, the Croatians have finally decided to record, release and launch onto the market their first product where the sound comes with pictures. Why do I say “release” and “launch onto the market” — isn’t that the same thing? Back in 2000, Let 3 indulged in a bit of silliness and drew a big line between those two verbs. They put out the album “Jedina” in exactly one copy, and since they kept that one copy for themselves, getting your hands on the material was impossible for a long time. That’s just one prank from the bottomless well that is Let 3’s career, and you can find a rich body of this and other kinds of nonsense on the DVD “Živa pička” too.
Whoever makes it through the filter, which flaunts itself in the form of Mrle’s Adam costume on the back of the DVD case, gets to enjoy a concert recorded on June 14, 2007 at Hartera in Rijeka. Picking Rijeka to record the release was no accident: it’s Let 3’s home turf, and it’s also a rock city with a strong scene and a rich rock tradition, the one Let 3 emerged from long ago and drew their ideas from. The songs from the Rijeka show are interrupted by incidents filmed backstage at Hartera or on roads all over Europe. The DVD also includes footage from gigs in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and our very own Cvetličarna in Ljubljana.
Let 3 keep changing costumes throughout the show, and their wardrobe holds a thousand and one different pieces: sailor caps, masks in the style of a Peter Gabriel upgrade, folk costumes, carnival outfits in the Teletubbies style, muzzles and mustaches — basically everything on the shelves of your average department store, pet shop in the basement included. Let 3 are a band for whom the stage show is crucial, and only through it can you grasp the band’s existence in full, so it’s maybe a little surprising that we had to wait a long twenty years for “Živa pička,” which carries the atmosphere of a Let 3 gig into our living rooms. “Živi kurac,” the (audio-only) live album released in 1996, gives the listener just one dimension of the Let 3 philosophy, leaving them shortchanged on the full picture of this Croatian outfit. So it was only a matter of time before “Živa pička” happened, which you can see as an upgrade of the earlier audio-only “Kurac.”
Breaking down the set list from the recorded Rijeka show vividly illustrates the Croatians’ wandering through different musical waters and their search for an identity of their own, which they’ll probably never actually find. They started out as dyed-in-the-wool alternative art rockers, and “Fuck famiglia” or “Ne trebam te,” with their cranked-up guitars, are the real deal, bright spots in the mix of all sorts of sounds that Let 3 songs bring. The folksy “Zurle Treštat” or “Sokol” bring a typically Balkan, temperamental rock shindig to the stage, at odds with the values of rock’s rich traditional legacy. Then there are tracks like “Kurcem u čelo,” dominated by electronic sounds and having nothing at all to do with a healthy rock mentality. So “Živa pička” offers a look at twenty years of Let 3’s legacy, with an emphasis on the latest studio album “Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačka” (2005), while the early albums are (sadly) overlooked too much. Over the two-hour recording you can notice a move away from the band’s early alternative sound, which was already being replaced in the nineties by an all-too-cheap mixture of other influences. In the confusion of all of Let 3’s sounds, even deliberate sloppiness adds something positive to the overall sonic picture, which for devotees of the pursuit of musical perfection may be more than just a off-putting fact. The bizarreness and craziness in both Let 3’s outfits and their music know no limits, which makes them popular above all with free-spirited youth, and finding the face of an older attendee with a high tolerance for music in the sold-out Hartera remains mission impossible. The atmosphere is excellent from the first moment to the last, since Let 3 have incredible energy that binds the band and the crowd into a single entity, and plenty of guests, from backing vocalists to a mixed choir, keep the rhythm dynamic. Hartera was shaking and bursting at the seams on this day in mid-June 2007!
“Živa pička” is a gold-plated document for the band’s devoted fans, but the casual rock connoisseur won’t keep it in the player for long. Still, there’s a fact I can’t deny: there are a lot of these fans, because it’s precisely through their quirky, bizarre approach to music that Let 3 have become a phenomenon of their own, pulling an enormous number of party-hungry people to their gigs back home.
Lineup
Zoran Prodanovič “Prlja” – vocals
Dražen Baljak “Baljak” – guitar
Matej Zec “Knki” – guitar
Ivan Šarar “Faf” – keyboards, samples
Damir Martinović “Mrle” – bass guitar
Branko Kovačić “Husta” – drums
Production
Goran Lisica Fox
Track list
01. Rado ide Srbin u vojnike (pička)
02. Riječke pičke
03. Ne trebam te /el desperado/fuck famiglia
04. 999
05. Kontinentio
06. Alam iđazi
07. Mamne baneta
08. Ha ha ha
09. Profesor jakov
10. Dijete u vremenu
11. Nafta
12. Zurle treštat
13. Sokol
14. Ero s onoga svijeta
15. Drama
16. Kurcem u čelo
17. Splet
18. Droga
19. Ženu varam
20. Izgubljeni
21. Vjeran pas
22. Sam u vodi
23. Artemida
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Bonus DVD with 13 music videos
