Artist: Ana Never
Sub-genre(s): Post-Rock/Math Rock
Formed: 2001
City: Subotica (sorry: sounds like some made-up city from a porn universe, don’t it?
)
Members: Srđan Terzin (electric & lap steel guitars, bass, keyboards) Dejan Topić (guitar)
Boris Čegar (keyboards, glockenspiel)
Goran Grubisić (drums, guitar)
Discography: Ana Never (2006),
Small years (2012),
Long Turning (2016)
This time we have a band who have at least, it seems, had some half-decent success. Three albums (though quite a gap between the first and second) and lo and behold! They’re on Spotify! So let’s take their third, and latest album here and give it a spin.
(Apologies for the huge picture, but Google isn't exactly straining at the seams with images of this band's albums, so I had to go with the only one I could get)
Album title: Long Turning
Artist: Ana Never
Nationality: Serbian
Year: 2016
Chronology: 3
The Trollheart Factor: 0
Track Listing: Tomorrow is the Livelong Day/Long Turning/I Saw You Today/Martha/Tomorrow is the Livelong Day 2
Comments: Only five tracks, but one is a seventeen-minuter, so this will either be great or boring. As it’s post-rock/math-rock, no vocals so the music will have to stand on its own. Let’s see if it does. Well the first track is very ambient, not quite but almost drone, not much change in the melody, but pretty cool anyway. A good start. The next one is, I note, also an epic, coming in just short of ten minutes, and seeming to bring the guitars more to the foreground this time, and again I have to say well done, great job. Always hard to point out different things about post-rock of course, much of it tends to sound quite similar, but I certainly like what I hear on this album so far.
The addition of violin to “I Saw You Today” really makes a difference, giving the piece a melancholy, haunting feel, and a certain Nick Cave shape too. And now we’re into that seventeen-minute track, which goes under the simple title of “Martha”, and certainly starts off slow and almost morose, acoustic piano and sharply ringing guitar kind of plodding along. Strange thing is, it’s been nine minutes of pretty much the same thing now, and I don’t mind. I could listen to this forever, so for once I’m not going to say it’s overextended and why is it seventeen minutes long? Rather, my question is, why isn’t it longer? Just stunning.
There are lap steel guitars used by Ana Never, and it’s possible that’s what I’m hearing, though it has a kind of mandolin-y sound so I thought maybe balaika or oud or something? It’s very effective either way. Could probably, on balance, do without the screeching guitar feedback right at the end, though! That leaves us with one track to go, the reprise as it were of the opener, as “Tomorrow is the Livelong Day 2” takes us out with a sort of staggered tape loop thing, a little hard on the ears but the music behind it is lush and symphonic.
Track(s) I liked: Everything
Track(s) I didn't like: Nothing
One standout: Hard to say
One rotten apple: None
Overall impression: Very impressed
Rating: 9.3/10
Future Plan: Will try to make time to hear more of their music.