(Text author: Nenad Baraković)
Just as there were early indications of dark romanticism and the transition to Gothic in literature, only for Henry James's "Turn the Screw" to hit the gong and mark the beginning of true psychological Gothic, so the album "Myths and Delusions" by Noir Vibes marks a turning point on our music scene. This release brings dark romanticism and gothic from the dark directly to people's music platforms, speakers and headphones, but also what is more important to the city streets, making it live, tangible, close and of course urban music that can correspond with a young man in the 21st century, because this album is about a man and his life in the twenty-first century, even though the themes of the lyrics are universal.
Led by Damjan Deurić (alpha and omega of the band "Demether"), this band has two other members: Darko Višković on guitar and Viktorija Milošević on drums. And the sound of "Myths and Delusions"?
If we go back to literature, this team created a musical Frankenstein: to strip it down and trivialize it, let it be that HIM, "Type O Negative" and "Ekatarina Velika" met (which the followers of Deurić's previous oeuvre have noticed for a long time), although you can also hear vocal melodic lines that could easily slip into dark wave from the eighties, when the soundtrack of those melodic lines would not be music based on solid and clear sound.
Damjan & Noar Vajbz, foto: cover art, promo
There is much more to it than that, because mere influences are for nothing if there is no innovative approach, and here exactly that happened and it exists. There are ten songs on the album that are both thematically and logically connected as one compact whole, and we can approach the album by listening to it as a whole as if it were a panorama, but what is good about this release is that all ten songs can be extracted as a single and ten different phrases or collages and again there will be no mistakes.
"Perhaps the most important thing when it comes to this album is that it can be a kind of bridge between mainstream music and the underground, because it can perfectly reconcile these two supposedly irreconcilable currents, which is basically a wrong view of music and the world of music, because it was albums like this that changed music: at first glance, hermetic, mysterious and closed, but actually accessible to the audience, and it's up to the audience to throw away their prejudices and understand that metal music can also be pop music, because pop is short for popular" - Damjan Deurić told us.
Lyrically, the album demands careful listening. Deurić instills a rich assortment of mythological motifs and characters in his songs that seek foreknowledge. Additional footnotes that may be interesting to a young listener, where rock and roll stops being just entertainment and becomes education. Although the lyrics seem claustrophobic, bare and deeply imbued with the theme of isolation, there are sometimes sudden flashes that actually offer a solution. Unlike most art that stops at asking questions and leaving the listener in the dark, this hermeticity ultimately manages to reach out and communicate unexpectedly beautifully with the audience. It will take place there and he will pay tribute to some songs through verses, such as "A happy dream you dream alone", as well as a direct address to mythological and historical characters ("Morana", "Narcissus", then the whole constellation in the song "Euridika").
"Myths and Delusions" is a bold, mature and production-flawless debut that provided the Balkan rock scene with a modern yet deep-rooted gothic rock that rings long after listening.
Myth or delusion? Time is the best indicator!
The author of all the songs is Damjan Deurić, and the album was released for the publishing house "One records". The songs "Only sometimes" and "I know" have already seen the light of day in the form of a video that you can watch on YouTube, and the band's frontman Damjan Deurić announces that the entire album will be video-documented by RetroMetro&JohnDoeProduction.
