Songs Of Faith And Distortion

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2019-03-29

Label: Not On Label

This 10-track retrospective encapsulates the reunion of the band, which occurred between January 2010 and September 2014. It captures the band in a period of deliberate search for conventional song structures, as opposed to their experimental feats from the late 1990’s. The title of the album, “Songs of Faith and Distortion” is suiting to the mix of irony and earnestness that permeates the content. The cover of the album is also indicative of the state of ruin, or perhaps structural incompleteness of the material, i.e. those ruins being on an elevated plain from which something better and more beautiful is about to emerge (but never does, haha).

This eclectic presentation begins with the first 3 tracks being in Bulgarian language. The opener, “Old man punk”, was inspired by a live gig by the Sofia punk band “Razvrat & Pokvara” and the lyrics are a partial tribute to the pathetic drama of “Going Blind” - covered by The Melvins in their Houdini album.

Immediately following is “Buksur”, a song with a nickname that emerged from a misnomer that caught up among the band members. Structurally, the song begins with the vocals starting immediately with the instrumentation and continuing as a rant in the good tradition of Sorry Rock.

Number three is “Scorn the words”, recorded live in the rehearsal studio. Lyrically, it deals with the theme of writer's’ block. Originally written in English in 1998, the words were adapted to Bulgarian for this recording.

Opening the sequence of English-language songs is “A”. The title is derived from the foundational status of the song for BAHUR – it was both the first traditional rock song they ever wrote in the 1990’s and the first song that they played upon reuniting in 2010.

“Clismatic” is another song that deals with writer’s block, which emerges as a theme in the body of work of BAHUR, opening up a fundamental question whether they should be using lyrics at all if it’s causing such a stir. A similar foreboding question looms when it comes to the music. Why bother?

“Lamansha” is named after the multi-year project of constructing a tunnel below the English Channel (La Manche). The song took many months to construct and rehearse and nobody knew why. Why did this bloody song was such a pain, when it’s nothing special, really? It is the last studio recording of BAHUR to date.

“Russian Journalist Killers” came to life from anger and frustration following the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya and a number of prominent Russian journalists in the 2000s.

“The Silence is Sickening” was also nicknamed “By Lemons Be Driven”. It was constructed around a bass riff with a longer guitar riff extrapolated over the repeated bass figure. It’s one that sure was fun to play.

The remix of “Old man punk” was done by our long-time friend and collaborator The Scum, who records under the ARMED moniker.

Lastly, the album closes with a piece that reveals the new direction of the BAHUR sound shortly before their dissolution in 2014. “Für Aneta” was composed for a literature project of one of the band’s long- time friends. Structurally it employs silence and minimalism within an eclectic structure that includes a bluesy central part. In a way this is a return to form to BAHUR’s more experimental past.