Sometimes you browse the internet, click on things, and occasionally you find something worth a bit of time. Something was naggingly familiar about the link I followed and ended up finding this album - The Colossalist - by Vukovar. I pressed play.
‘There must be more two Heaven than This’ begins with disembodied voices, clanking transport noises, as though we are listening to traffic, then an insistent Gang of Four sound bites through the melee, like the Clash in the more experimental parts of Sandinista, emotionally distant like voices from the past calling.
‘Here are Lions’ is subdued, thrown away but insistent melodies backed by chugging rhythms and 80s pop laden synths and then the brief ‘The Higher Law’ full of eerie arpeggios slowing and speeding up again until psychedelic noise-storm close the piece.
Three tracks, or pieces as I’m now calling them, in and I’m not sure what I’m listening to but I’m still listening. ‘End of Life Delirium’ builds on a constant two note synth bass riff with strong vocals slowly becoming absorbed into and then fighting back out of an unsettling psychedelic dystopian soundscape.
Then ‘A Danse Macabre’ shocks with its fast jagged synth riffs providing a sparse rhythmic backdrop to the lonely vocals, as though the singer is marooned light years from home in some Hawkwind universe. Haunting and inside itself, it’s truly strange and beautiful.
‘Vukovar (The Double Cross)’ throws us nearer to home albeit some decades ago, the experimental post punk is now fully fledged 80 synth pop - though with more of a Dark Wave edge to it. There is more softness and almost a gloss to the sound here but still on the edge of somewhere dark. As if Neu! or OMD had written songs with Joy Division.
‘The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time’ is hardly present as a song, this is no conventional album track, this is an experiment a music that is subdued and disembodied.
‘Silent Envoy’ with its slow funereal rhythm and rising synth notes with a fragile yet haunting voice fragmenting into echoes feels like a description of a life spent searching and maybe finding. The melodies burn into your mind, these are simple yet not, contradictory yet feel right.
‘In a Year of 13 Moons’ wraps synth pop around a staccato cemetery drumbeat. The rising cello/synth (who knows in such a constantly evolving garden of sound) Then ‘I’m Becoming Yourself’ continues in the same mode, presenting a musical idea, diverting to something else seamlessly, simple keyboard melodies shift us into a different place.
Hearing Voices, the track listing states is a rewritten cover version of a Galaxie 500 song. It’s different but retains the pathos of the original but wraps it in a blur of voices and echoes. It pulses and shifts repeating the refrains layered onto of each other, hypnotic,
As this album and band are unknown to me but I’m finding myself interested in it I find I need to know more, and start looking Vukovar up. I read with sadness that the vocals are by the late Simon Morris of The Ceramic Hobs and this was amongst his last work.
This album grows more compelling with repeated listenings. The innate sadness, its wistfulness, gets less disembodying with each piece and each play until the entirety washes over the you. As different as it is intoxicating, not mainstream, not for everyone, experimental, a must listen to essential album.
Words: RBY, Images: Vukovar Media
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VukovarUK
Bandcamp: https://vukovareeh.bandcamp.com/