If you look up Bulbul on Wikipedia you’ll discover it’s the name of a family of monogamous songbird species; no one has yet written an entry for the Austrian band of the same name. Having listened to their new album Bulbul 6, I can only conclude that’s because no one can think of what to write. Intrepid music hack that I am, I’m not going to let that stop me trying.
Bulbul aren’t an easy band to pigeonhole, and that’s a great start from where I’m sitting. The surrealist sleeve art hints rather neatly at what you can expect, however – a skewed and random take on reality that rarely goes where you expect it to. At its core, Bulbul 6 is a rock album, but it throws in some elements of dancefloor disco with a big handful of WTF.
I can’t even be sure of how many records Bulbul have made before now, though the discography page of their website suggests they’ve put out a fair bit of material. To my shame and disappointment, I’ve never encountered any of them, so whether they’ve slowly worked their way up to the wide-eyed mania of Bulbul 6 or been doing this all along. But I can assure you that if you’re bored of run-of-the-mill music and you’re not averse to a bit of dirty spooky funkiness, you’d be well advised to get hold of this album right away.
I’m not kidding. There’s something incredibly refreshing about the wilful weirdness on display, a welcome diversion from the workaday output of the easily-marketed masses. While there’s plenty of bands who make their music weird, Bulbul’s trick is a discipline and focus that ensures there’s a core of meaning in every track – no matter how hard it may be to determine what that meaning actually is.
And every track is different, too. Album opener “When Sun Comes Out” is crazy metal-disco stomper with an arse-shaker of a bassline, crazy squelching sounds that sound like some bizarre hybrid of guitar and synthesizer, scattered and shattered vocals and a big sleazy riff. It’s followed by “Lack Of the Key”, which features distant crazed screeching buried behind a monstrous anaconda of fuzz bass, and if Bulbul had just done a whole album of this sort of stuff I’d have still been pretty impressed with it.
But there’s much more to come - “Shuguang” is an analogue synth-noodle interlude that feeds into the sinister slouch of “Shenzhou”, featuring the languid nihilist tones of Carla Bozulich and a notable lack of guitars, and later on “Changzheng” comes across like an acid trip in a Tibetan temple, with muffled percussion and subliminal moaning tones.
That pretty much covers the two fundamental ‘modes’ of Bulbul; the little atmospheric interlude sketches interspersed between the more fully-fleshed songs provide a piquant contrast. But it’s those full songs that’ll stick in your mind for the rest of the afternoon - the moody grooves of “Tighten” and “Tighter”, the spectacular crescendoing uber-funk of “Daddy Was A Girl I Liked”, the frantic itch-scratch of “The Song’s Name”, the drunken glam of “Dust In My Zimmer” … hell, it’s all good.
Although, at the risk of sounding elitist, Bulbul don’t make music for everyone. Theirs is not the realm of the standard song structure and pop narrative; instead, they’ve wandered off the path into the hedges, thickets and forests at the margins of the established routes, dragging back anything that looked interesting like men with magpie minds. If your taste in heaviness leans toward the strange and unusual, Bulbul 6 will reward your time many times over.
Related articles:
Posted in Music reviews |
