East-Ra – Substitute 3 album review

This album is low-fi noise rock at it’s absolute best

As usual for the guys our lovely editor sends my way, I knew absolutely nothing about East-Ra before I started this review, and perhaps this is for the best. Certainly, it frees any ideas of pretension or previous successes or failures give you a path to listen and concentrate on the music. I’m going to say right now, this album, Substitute 3, is incredible. I’m shocked, with my sort of tastes, that I haven’t heard of these guys. In fact, not very many people have, which is a shock.The fact this is true saddens me. The top indie reviewing sites like Pitchfork should be shouting their names from the rooftops. Anyway, it turns out they’re from Croatia. Who knew!

This album is low-fi noise rock at it’s absolute best. In no particular order, here’s a rundown of a few of the tracks. Your Highness sounds like Nina Simone invented psychedelia ten years earlier then it actually came up, by way of the roots blues music that I absolutely adore. Another one, St. George Went To India, feels like we’re in a weird Berlin-Era Bowie by way of the The Doors. This is as sinister as an early-Cave song, and twice as trippy. The bird calls and the Indian-flavoured guitar screech around you as the chants of the band create a claustrophobic, jungle-filled space. The music is trance-like, strange, and worrying. Shizmu & Hitis is a journey back in to the sonic jungle that the band inhabits, and very faint elements of electro subtly undertone this track. Suddenly the music switches to freaked-out jazz in Apocalypse Party, breaking free of the jungle for a minute or two. The whole album manages to walk the dangerous tightrope of musical similarity, making the sound recognizable enough to blend in to a full, working album, and making it different enough for the music to stay fresh and interesting throughout. However, the most effecting track, for me, was the last.

This track, incidentally the last, deserves a whole paragraph. A welcome and weird ‘relief’ from the rest of the albums relentless experimental journey, Spring In To Relief is eery and ethereal. It’s the Fleet Foxes first album, this Anglophilic folk-psychedelia, with Syd Barrett tacked on. It’s entrancing, it’s almost-indecipherable lyrics leave you floating in the music, with no anchor or haven. As a half-snatched lyric says, ‘Got some time to float in space’. This haziness, voices hitting crescendos and descending again, repeated chants of ‘hazy, hazy’, and ‘shivers’ sum up this song. It’s a space-odyssey, or, to quote David Bowie, a space-oddity, but it’s moving. It connects with something, guttural chants and noises create an almost spiritual feeling, discordance and harmony swell together in a captivating way. Beeps and blips come and go through a wall of reverb and echo. It flowed through me and left me feeling strange and a bit shaken, especially the descent in to overpowering noise at the end. Whatever it is, it’s without a doubt the centre-piece of the album, and perhaps a minor masterpiece too.

It’s clear East-Ra have a mastery over their sound. This album is like a throwback, to use a cliche, to when an album was an album, and crafted so that themes flowed through the music, songs connected and felt interrelated, an overall feeling was achieved through-out. A feeling is definitely achieved here. It’s an unsettling, enthralling and weirdly beautiful affair. It really does feel like a journey through a thick jungle, strange noises and glimpses of ancient ruins permeate the experience. The music infusions and inspirations I think I can feel here are The Doors’ strange psychedelic mysticism, deep-seated root blues music, not to mention jazz. I get Syd Barrett vibes, and a touch of Nick Drake as well. However, this is not to belittle the achievement of sculpting a strange and unique album, but recognizing that East-Ra have managed to incorporate a whole world of music and style and influence and bring them together in a brilliant album, tinged with the benefits of the Balkan and Slavic influences of Croatian folk music. Though I feel like I say this in most of my writing, as I usually take on the very obscure bands here at Muzika, these guys need to be bigger. Not to mention their music is free to download.

East-Ra Substitute 3 album, which was released in 2011. and their previous two albums Sutra (2009) and Cold Summer (2008) can all be downloaded for free from their website http://osa-media.blogspot.com/

 Author’s note: I am aware I have reached new levels of pretension.