ZABRANJENO PLAKATIRATI

This review of ZABRAJENO PLAKATIRATI is coming from a different perspective than what has been written so far. It's coming from an American who was about a year old when the Berlin Wall fell and knows nothing about the Soviet Union other than through history classes. If you want to gain more insight into the history surrounding Buldozer and this album, check out the other reviews. I am going to try and focus on the music and boy, does it satisfy.

ZP sounds as if you took Captain Beefheart and THE YES ALBUM and cross-fusioned them, but that description still doesn't do justice. This is about as wacky as a Beefheart or Zappa or Gong album without the name recognition of any of those outfits. The vocals are not really gritty but not really clean, they have this humourous tone to them, and they're done tremendously well too; anyone that was repelled by the Captain might want to sit and listen to one Marko Brecelj. Easier to digest and not much effort is needed to spot the humour tone in his voice.

The key point is that Buldozer know how to rock without sounding blatantly commercial (or at least the Western Hemisphere version of it). They seem to know how to keep a song going even if there are parts that seem to just dissolve. Take the big ''Dobro jutro, madam Jovanovic''; the song is littered with the strangest guitar riffs you've ever heard, but it wanders off into some jamming before an alarm clock sound brings the song back into place. These guys can sound like they wreck a song and make it sound perfectly okay, even warranted at times. It's almost perfectly constructed as if the band knew how the notes were supposed to go, even the wandering bits. Put that on top of a layer of Hammond and pulsating rhythms...indescribable joy.

And that is just the longest track; I can smell the humour coming off of ''Helga'' and ''Doctor'' even with the handicap of not understanding a word they're saying. The mostly psychedelic ''Jeste li...'' is the only track that is slightly different, but the psychedelic tone is very warm and juts fits with everything else.

Sometimes you get tired of hearing that cliche, ''It's really great because nobody knows about it''; ZP can validate this cliche mostly because the music holds up well. It's perfect for the fan of Zappa/Beefheart/Gong without going into clonish territory. I know it's just over a half-hour, but we get a quality half-hour of music. It's RIO where the ''R'' and the ''O'' really mean something.