Translated article about Alexander Veljanov
Edit: OK guys, I was sleepy when I translated this so I see I made some really stupid mistakes and such but I'm going to somehow put it together now. If I missed some problem let me know, please!
Côté Jazz/Pop/Rock
Premium Records
Dark Wave and avant-garde ...
http://www.resmusica.com/article_5971_cote_jazz_pop_rock_premium_records_dark_wave_et_avant-garde_.html
par Christophe Le Gall (11/11/2008)
Porta Macedonia. Veljanov. 1 Der Kongress 2 Nie Mehr ; 3 His vita ; 4 We Can’t Tuen Back ; 5 Mein Weg ; 6 The New Order ; 7 Königin Aus Eis ; 8 Dirt ; 9 Lily B. ; 10 Your House On my Hill ; 11 Zwei Vor Und Drei Zurück. 1 CD Premium Records. Réf : LC 13305 PRE 021-2. Code barre : 4 046661 135329. Novembre 2008. Durée totale : 1h 08’14’’.
Alexander Veljanov, the leader of the band Deine Lakaien, has been performing on the European and mainly on German scenes for more than 20 years up till now and has gained a great and increasing fame. His style is quite bizarre and is defined by mixed current of Dark Wave (or more precisely Cold Wave as we call it in France) and of anvantgarde.
This former student of Theatre and Cinema has a characteristic voice that touches the hearts of those affectionate to music, just a while back warm and gentle, it can become agressive and impressive. If the first album of the artist of Macedonian origins, Secrets of the Silver Tongue, created with the Berlin band Run Run Vanguard, accentuated the acoustic music and mainly the guitar, in the second album The Sweet Life he finds his own style where the electronic music has a completely different place. For this album he cooperates especially with Dave Young (producer of John Cale and David Bowie).
It suffices to see him on the stage (I’m not familiar with the expression „en tenue de scene“, I’m sorry) for understanding that Veljanov is completely untouched by the manners of showbussiness, he confirms/maintains his original personality, supported by his beautiful voice and sense for an unique show. The album Porta Macedonia is the result of a project that unites him with his origins - Macedonia. Strongly affected by the war that struck and teared Yugoslavia in the nineties, he decides to return in the country in 2003 - alone and also without any help of labels, in order to create an album where he offers his own idea and vision of what Europe became to him with all of its contradictions. A paradoxy is that he uses more willingly German than English as the medium of expressing his feelings. Which can be sometimes more forceable since it is said that his English isn’t really academic and it could merit from a few lessons of diction (see, how a Frenchman can say this?).
On the other hand, his music takes us back to groups such as The Cult, Sisters of Mercy, which gave us a lot of shivers in the eighties. The enthusiasm of young French lovers of music to learn German after the success of bands such as Tokyo Hotel (somehow I think that putting TH in the same sentence as Veljanov is kind of musical ignorance…) has made the barrier between the two cultures disappear a few years ago. (The following sentence is weird, I can’t find the expression „dieu que se fut“.) And the God knows it took a long time to achieve this, because the German language goes with a great elegance and efficiency together with the Dark wave style that can be re-discovered by the young people. Alexander Veljanov presents with Porta Macedonia an album that is very well composed as a complex creation where his personality and his origins are tangled in a flow of electronic Dark wave which is wisely well-balanced and in its whole also seductive.