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Every Record I Own - Day 695: Kovadlina ŽIVOTY TĚCH DRUHÝCH

I have no shortage of musician friends. Sometimes I like their music. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out how I actually feel about their music... like I’m too close to the source to really be able to listen to it objectively. But sometimes being close to the source means it somehow makes even more sense and wields even more power. And that was the case with Kovadlina, a short-lived Czech hardcore band featuring a couple of my friends of mine. When I was handed this copy of ŽIVOTY TĚCH DRUHÝCH, I expected it to have a certain baseline punk appeal, but I was not prepared for it to be one of my favorite records of 2016. Maybe it’s friendship bias, but this short-and-sweet slab of melodic hardcore satiated a desire for gritty hooks and gruff energy that hadn’t been satisfied in years.

On the surface level, I’d describe Kovadlina as sounding like a stripped down version of Fucked Up. Take away two of the guitar players and all the auxiliary guest musicians. Cut all the songs in half. Get a vocalist that sings in Czech. That should give you some idea of their sound.

But I think part of the appeal of the band stems from knowing a little more about their band members. Their guitarist Libor is a huge Lungfish fan who usually devotes his time to playing in the also-excellent post-rock ensemble Tomáš Palucha. Their singer Banan once fronted a hardcore band called Hanba that won the Czech version of the Grammys. They declined the award, stating that they preferred to remain out of the limelight and to keep their music in the domain of their tight-knit underground community. And maybe by knowing those things, I wind up hearing this album a little differently. I hear a deliberate austerity in the guitar playing---a distillation of ideas boiled down to fundamental riffs. I hear a penchant for strong melodies deliberately dirtied up so that it takes a discerning ear to hear them. I hear anthems disguised as short bursts of fury.

If nothing else, I think “NA PLOVÁRNĚ” is an absolutely perfect song... something that ‘90s melodic hardcore bands like Avail or Lifetime would have been completely jealous of. Great record, great band.

#kovadlina #everyrecordiown

Every Record I Own - Day 696: Kovadlina / Pakkosyöttö split LP

I’ve been slacking at keeping up with these posts. Or maybe slacking isn’t the right word... I simply haven’t had time. Life seems to have accelerated dramatically ever since things started reopening. After it felt like the whole music biz went into hibernation mode in 2020 and early 2021, it now feels like everyone is scrambling to get their plans in place. There’s the These Arms Are Snakes reunion to prepare for, a new Russian Circles album to finish writing and future tours to plot out, all the behind-the-scenes stuff for the Torment & Glory record and reissuing the Botch catalog... and that’s on top of the freelance writing stuff and all the normal day-to-day business. My days are full.

This all felt like it came at a good time. I spend a lot of time thinking about music from a variety of angles, and one of the constant things I grapple with is whether it’s a better use of my downtime to listen to music versus writing/practicing/playing it. And during COVID I leaned heavily into listening. After all, there was no tour to rehearse for and no studio time looming on the horizon. I mail-ordered more records in 2020 than ever before, partially because it felt important to help support artists and labels, but also because new records arriving in the mail gave me something to look forward to.

But I hit my saturation point. There are records that have been sitting in my recent arrivals shelf that are still unplayed, unopened. And as more and more of my time has been devoted to writing, demoing, relearning TAAS songs, and tightening everything up with practice, there’s less and less time to listen to these records. I’d say it’s sad, but it’s not. It feels good to switch gears and to go back to playing music as opposed to merely listening. I feel like I took in a lot of new sounds and I considerably expanded my musical appreciation in the last year-and-a-half. But goddamn does it feel good to get the creative wheels in motion again.

And there’s a side benefit to the listening angle too. Hitting that saturation point meant feeling a little jaded. I wanted to hear something new and exciting, but I was struggling to get the goosebumps. Even old favorites weren’t doing the trick. But now that there’s a dearth of listening in my life, the few records I spin on any given day have taken on a new life. Take this split from the Czech hardcore band Kovadlina and Finnish punk band Pakkosyöttö. When I first got this LP four years ago, I appreciated it, but I wasn’t fully enamored with the Finns, and if I was gonna listen to Kovadlina I was gonna listen to their excellent full-length. But my recent spins of this split LP have been supremely satisfying. Kovadlina picked up where they left off with their LP, cranking out gruff melodic hardcore à la Fucked Up with the stripped down arrangements and barely-distorted tonality of a ripping garage rock band. Pakkosyöttö play a more blown-out and balls-to-the-wall brand of hardcore punk, clinging to just the barest semblance of melody and leaning into pure sweat and adrenaline to get their point across. It was an invigorating way to start my day.

Now I gotta go play some music.

#pakkosyöttö #kovadlina #everyrecordiown