Release Date: May 10, 2011
Balkans are a surf-rock/punk hybrid band. They use quick and repetitive down-stroked guitar and basslines like the Drums, but they feel more alive. This is because Balkans are bursting with energy, but it’s a controlled and harnessed energy that never gets so wild that the band sounds sloppy.
You’d imagine Balkans breaking a string or two on stage, but never smashing their guitars or kicking a hole in the amps or the bass drum because they’ve got a pop-rock feel to them that keeps them under wraps. They don’t sound like they are using the surf-sound as a gimmick. Their self-titled album also has its very fine tuned moments where the lead guitar speeds or slows down the tempo of the entire song, or plucks the catchiest little riffs that will have you rocking out.
Balkans take the garage-band aesthetic and bring as much life as they can breathe into a song. Even on the softer ones such as “Troubled and Done,” where both guitars and bass are EQ’ed and working in sync with each other, chugging along at a constant pace that doesn’t change throughout most of the song. This, contrasted against the long vocal lines being drawn out, makes for an interesting song.
This album isn’t without a few tracks that don’t stand out, but the ones that do are bursting out of the pop-rock song formula that they have used on all the songs on this album.
“Dressed in Black” has many transitions and bridges that make you forget that you are indeed listening to verse/chorus/verse. The band explodes their tempo at the last 10 seconds of the song and takes everything into double time. It’s this energy throughout the album that you can feel dripping through the speakers.
This come through especially on songs such as “Black Swan” where Balkans stop the song’s fast tempo dead in its tracks and turn it into a marching garage-rock anthem. However, other songs aren’t as strong and simply serve as tracks to keep the momentum and flow of the album.
The impact of this album as a debut is like a small rock being thrown into a pond: it wasn’t a pebble, and it definitely wasn’t a boulder, but they got some waves and ripples coming back to them. Now, it’s just a matter of how they follow up.
Balkans – Balkans tracklist:
- “Edita V”
- “I Can’t Compete”
- “Zebra Print”
- “Dressed In Black”
- “Black Swan”
- ‘Troubled and Done”
- “Flowers Everywhere”
- “Let You Have It”
- “Georganne”
- “Violent Girls”
