Reviews of the Kries Half the World show on Thursday Jan 24th:
The Guardian, Monday Jan 28th, by Robin Denselow:
http://music.guardian.co.uk/live/story/0,,2247834,00.html
Charlie Gillett (BBC Radio 3 and BBC World Service), Monday Jan 28th
http://www.charliegillett.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6150
or read them below:
Kries
Pizza on the Park, London
Robin Denselow
Monday January 28, 2008
The Guardian
Ever since the first experiments in folk-rock in the 1960s, some of the finest new music around the world has come from artists who mix local, traditional styles with contemporary influences. Kries are an original Croatian band who set out to take the process to its limits, throwing in so many influences that each song is a surprise.
Their starting point is the folk music and wedding songs of Croatia's villages, and the band play traditional instruments including local bagpipes made from goatskins, wooden flutes, and the small lijerica "knee violin". But then there are a couple of impressive percussionists, playing anything from a conventional kit to hand drums, and there's bass, electric guitar and delicate violin work from their Scottish producer, Martin Swan.
Kries are led by a singer who deserves to be a new European celebrity. Mojmir Novakovic is tall and thin; he sports long hair and a traditional sash around his waist, and speaks enough English to demonstrate a fine sense of humour. He apologised because the band were exhausted after all-night sessions in Glasgow, following their appearance at Celtic Connections, but then led them through a lengthy set that veered from sensitive and stirring ballads to a frantic post-punk thrash - and for the most part, it worked.
He started by showing his expertise as a traditional singer, helped by sturdy harmony work from his colleagues, then hypnotic percussion kicked in as the band switched from stirring bagpipe and violin workouts to gentle, mournful ballads and furious guitar passages, with the theatrical Novakovic falling to his knees like a male Adriatic answer to Patti Smith. At times it seemed Kries would topple over in their exuberant rush to change direction repeatedly, but no matter. This is a band to watch.
Charlie Gillett writes:
Robin's review ends, 'this is a band to watch' and he could have added, 'literally and figuratively speaking'.
Lead singer Mojmir ('Moy-meer'), a gentle giant, tall, thin, almost always smiling, at one point mentions that he is the only member of the (eight-piece) group who knows nothing about music, and one of his great achievements is to have drawn seven evidently gifted musicians around him and somehow persuaded them not to show off their prowess at every turn. So the guitarist seems to hold the same chord shape, about midway up his fret board, for most of the night, using it as a sort of hi-tech washboard, scrubbing rhythms that occasionally made me think of Canned Heat. But whatever reference point might have seemed apt for one song would immediately be wiped out by the next.
I'll admit to having been alarmed by the sight of dead goats draped on a stand before the band came onstage. Bagpipes are among my least favourite instruments of all. But the musician in charge of playing them soon won me over, his angelically innocent expression melting my heart along with everybody else's.
Most songs had no discernible musical gear shifts from verse to chorus, but trundled along in one mode with the singers joining in around Mojmir, many of them quite doleful in a surprising contrast to the smile on the singer's face.
Listening to the record afterwards, it sounds better than it did before seeing the band, but Kries (pronounced Kreeze) is definitely among those outfits which are vastly improved by having them play in front of you, preferably only six feet away as the Pizza on the Park allows.
As Ian A has observed more than once in this forum, this is far and away the best small venue in London right now, much better than both the refurbished Ronnie Scott's and the too-small-to-see-what's-happening Momo's, and better than Darbucka, whose small stage and sound system are fine for a two-to-three piece group but could not cope so well with a bigger combo such as this one.