Kurve-Su Bolje Majke EP (2012)

I've come to expect good things of a strange kind whenever eastern European punk* winds up on my review pile. For whatever reason, these bands rarely sound like they're simply stealing Mick Jones' ot Greg Ginn's best ideas and ruining them.  It's possible that isolation and lack of automatic attention have a roll in this. When no one outside your language group's gonna listen to you simply because of American cultural hegemony and Anglophone provincialism, that gives you the freedom to do whatever you want.

If they were from the States, Zagreb's Kurve would be huge. The band specializes in massive, tuneful guitar riffs bolstered by an airtight rhythm section. The result is five tracks falling somewhere between Leatherface and heavy blues. In other words, this is great rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll made for singing along to. Rock 'n' roll made for getting drunk on a Saturday night and puking on your parents' couch, then throwing bricks at cops on Sunday morning. There's a more intelligent undercurrent to Kurve, though:"Ravno U Srce" opens with a idiosyncratic prologue part-dub, part-a capella hymn. Then the usual chaos begins. Mayhaps they've been studying up on their Grazhdanskaya Oborna LPs?

This woulda been on my Best of 2012 lists, if I had known about it. You should give it a spin (you can download it for free HERE) then BUY IT, here. Like the person who recommended them to me said, "this band would be huge if they weren't from here [Croatia]."

*Of course, this is a broad term. I use it to refer to bands from the European part of the old USSR, the countries of the Warsaw Pact, or those in what once comprised the non-Austrian parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know what that is, lunkhead).