Ukleti Dukat – Dva dukata za poslije
We have the tendency to talk about rock music as something that has grown terrifically old. After all, it came to life back in the 1950s, and it’s been assembled and broken down into any format that is imaginable.
However, rock music is still relatively new if you compare it to traditional folklore music. Sure, some readers may have images of Woody Guthrie playing folk music to American workers going on strike. But that’s really young, too.
Traditional folk music in Europe is older than we can know for sure. It is tied to the traditions and way of being of people who’ve been here for hundreds of years. And while it changes constantly, and sometimes for the worse, it continues to be endorsed because of and about the people still living in those lands.
Balkan folk music is particularly rich in history and style. Croatian group Ukleti Dukat takes up the challenge of blending traditional Slavonian music with modern rock elements. Most importantly, “Dva dukata za poslije” isn’t performed as some kind of novelty or an aggressive attempt at educating those unfamiliar with these sounds. It’s presented naturally. This is a living, breathing thing that continues to change.
Across the Balkans, many modern groups are trying to inject some elements of folklore into pop and rock songs. Most of them are awful and cynical, too. That’s not the case with Ukleti Dukat, a group that won’t need to force their sound on you. Just hearing it should be convincing enough.
Rosetta West – Ready To Go
The life cycle of the pop star is pretty short, and because we’ve seen it many times before, it’s pretty easy to tell which stage they’ve reached at any point. Toward the latter part of these short-lived experiments, manufactured pop stars are asked to talk about their interest in music. Inevitably, they’ll use interview opportunities to speak about how diverse their music collection is these days.
It’s just as inevitable that they’ll speak about the myriad of influences that their new music contains. Have you ever heard the Justin Timberlake album was supposed to mix elements of Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan? Sure, you haven’t. That only existed in the mind of the PR person who wrote down his interview answers.
As it turns out, blending styles is a much trickier process and one that leads to powerful, dangerous, almost unpleasant-sounding music. Rosetta West’s “Ready To Go” is a marvellous song because of the way it puts together musical styles and the way that it describes the descent into madness of the character. But this isn’t music that is easy to listen to.
Somehow, Rosetta West seems to have managed to blend European Medieval music with the American blues. Add fever dream-inspired lyrics, and you will get something eerie and otherworldly. I doubt that a pop star would know where to start with this kind of material. And that’s why alternative music continues to be interesting while pop radio has been boring for a really long time.
