Monolith Cocktail Blog

LP  REVIEW
Words: Dominic Valvona

Vukovar   ‘Fornication’

In case the latest album title from Vukovar left you in any doubt, the smutty postcard fanny cover art will confirm that Fornication, quite literally, twats and fucks around with its source material of inspired cover versions. After releasing the stunning visceral debut proper, Emperor, in 2015 (featured in our ‘choice albums’ feature of that year), which romantically but despairingly soundtracked the fall of Olympus, fiddling in melodic melancholy whilst Rome burned, Vukovar followed with a more withdrawn and challenging harder edged LP the following year, entitled Voyeurism. For their third effort, they’ve chosen to bastardize an eclectic but not altogether surprising number of songs; often-gelling two separate songs together in their inimitable signature style of miasma post-punk and caustic shoegaze to create something even more esoteric or melancholic.

The opening opiate injection shot, Forbidden Colours, aligns Japan’s famous broody, romanticized crooning indulgence with hints of progressive intoxicants Gong’s Princess Dreaming. The results: a haunted Bossa nova preset Suicide shuffling beyond the ether with David Sylvian’s astral projection. Just a couple of tracks later, Vukovar listlessly expand Laurie Anderson’s groundbreaking avant-garde vocoderised O Superman; adding traces of the obscure French composer and soundtrack artist Jean Claude Vannier‘s L’enfant Assassin Mouches (taken from his 70s debut solo album of the same name) to the mix. Strung-out with only a penetrating resonating single snare shot to wake the listener from the amorphous malaise, the group languishes in a tragic mood until a brief shimmer of twinkly hope emerges near the end. However, one final bombardment sends the light packing as a meltdown approaches. Elsewhere they tether the experimental White Noise workshop with a ghostly schmooze-y finger-clicking Billy Fury on the Wondrous Place/Love Without Sound hybrid, and match Lila Engel by the motorik doyens Neu! with Soft Cell’s Meet Murder My Angel – imagine Bernard Summers instead of Michael Rother , fronting the Neu!.





In a singular mode, but by no means less strange and beguiling, Vukovar play, comparatively, straighter versions of songs by the House Of Love (Destroy The Heart), The Birthday Party (Loose) and The Velvet Underground (Lady Godiva’s Operation). Highlights include a smeared, hypnotic version of the highly influential Oh How To Do Now by the legendary US-airman-abroad-in-60s-Germany, The Monks; which sounds like Can and the Dead Skeletons slurring and removing the urgency from the original’s rampant (Model T) garage banjo march. They also do a killer drug-y haze cover of The Shangri Las’ Dressed In Black; reimagining the original as a Mogadon Downliners Sect sharing a car ride with The Fall on a one-way journey over the ledge at dead man’s curve.

Fornication is a curious covers album, an extension of Vukovar’s cult status: The malcontent outsiders totally at odds with instant gratification and a 24/7 all-immersive connection to their followers. If anything they’ve retreated further into the gloom as their reputation gains more attention and welcome acclaim. In an atmosphere of haunted languorous despair then, they’ve removed their influences even further away into often darker and worrying recesses of the psyche to produce not so much homages, but re-appropriate, reexamine and dissect the originals to offer a glimpse into our worryingly unstable contemporary times.