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I’ve been fighting the depression demon lately, so I’ve been struggling with that feeling of looking at my “new arrivals / recently listened” stack and feeling unexcited, like there’s no music I really want to hear. One nice thing about having a few thousand records, though, is that when this feeling strikes, I can usually dig through the stacks and find something I haven’t revisited in so long that it has become new to me again. That’s what happened this week as I flipped through my M’s and landed on this album from Croatia’s Majke (translation: Mothers). This album originally came out in 1988 on cassette only on the label Slušaj Najglasnije!, but my copy is the first-ever vinyl version, which came out in 2022 on the Šareni Dućan label.
While I couldn’t remember what Majke sounded like when I pulled this off the shelf, I remember exactly where and when I bought this record. In fact, I already wrote about that night in a previous staff pick back in 2022. Scarecrow had just played a gig at the MKNŽ club in Ilirska Bistrica, Slovenia, and my then-new friend Simon had a distro set up that was heavy on punk reissues from his part of the world. Some of it I recognized, but most of it I didn’t, so I basically said, “here’s how much money I have… tell me what to buy.”
This self-titled record from Croatia’s Majke was one of his recommendations, though in retrospect I’m surprised I picked it up because it has two pretty big strikes against it: it’s often described as garage-punk (a type of music I don’t hate, but also don’t really seek out) and it’s from 1988, which is a bit close to the 90s for my taste. I’m glad I took the recommendation, though, because this rips! While the group often gets the “garage” tag online, to me this album has more of a ’77 punk sound, both in the songwriting and the production. Specifically, Majke reminds me of the more rock and roll-influenced, pub rock-leaning bands of the ’77 set like the Lurkers or Eddie & the Hot Rods. When they get particularly high-energy and inject a little Buzzcocks-esque melody into their Chuck Berry-via-the-MC5 riffing, they can even sound like a rawer, nastier version of the Saints, which is not a comparison I drop lightly.
And don’t even worry about that 1988 recording date, because this has absolutely none of the sheen I associate with the 90s. It sounds like my favorite 70s recordings… raw and live, with minimal studio interference, but enough fidelity to appreciate what each musician in the group brings to the table. If you played me this with no context, I’d guess it was from the late 70s, which is clearly where this music lives spiritually.
While this record is an isolated blip to me, its only association with a beautiful Slovenian evening (actually, I recall having a lot of fun the next morning, too…), a little research reveals Majke has a long and storied career that continues to this day. While founding guitarist Marin Pokrovac was killed in a car accident returning home from rehearsal in 1989, the band soldiered on and in 1990 released Razum I Bezumlje, which seems to have been their most successful album artistically, if not commercially. I checked out a little of it online (it’s on streaming services and YouTube) and it’s definitely in a similar style to the debut, but with clearer, heavier production. I got some Laughing Hyenas vibes from parts of it. On the wantlist it goes! Sadly, the Balkan wars of the 1990s flared up shortly after _Razum I Bezumlje_’s release, which scattered Majke’s members across the newly established borders. Vocalist Goran Bare has kept a revolving-door lineup going since the early 90s, but the cover art and the number of wants these records show on Discogs do not indicate they are worth checking out. If anyone knows differently, please let me know.
And since I don’t have a proper ending for this, I’ll just say fuck war, fuck imperialism, fuck capitalism, and fuck the US government.