Usually, I feel confident that regular listeners and/or readers have come to recognise the direction and slant of my taste, and that a recommendation of an album of the month will be consistent with what I have recommended before.
This record defies my own expectations of my usual preferences, so I can’t be confident about anything, only report my reactions to it. I like its playfulness, its capacity to surprise without trying to be silly or quirky just for the sake of it. There are many flavours, with vocals, guitars and saxophones leaving the longest-lasting taste and any number of tunes which confirm their catchiness each time the album is played again.
My World Service producer Radek Boschetty, who is himself Czech, reports that DVA means Pair in Czech, reflecting that there are two protagonists, who refer to themselves as He and She, no names. The songs appear to be sung in a made-up language, something between ‘Bad Hungarian’ and ‘Imaginary Inuit’, as they convey the experiences and thoughts of people who live inside the Arctic Circle.
On first receiving an album, I usually work my way through it with a series of asterisks against the contenders to be played on the radio. On an album of 14 tracks, three or four stars would normally be a good score. On this one, most of the tracks earned stars and have been played one by one, with ‘Dua Dua’ earning repeat plays after its melody got stuck in my head.
Not much more to say, except I have also been listening to Moondog’s two Honest Jons compilations recently, and the three albums are more or less interchangeable.
As we area about to enter September, this is turning out to be my album of the year.
There remains the difficulty of getting hold of a record with no UK distributor, which is simply solved by visiting the website of the group’s label, Indies, where there are links for purchasing the CD itself and downloading songs one by one: http://www.indies.eu/en/alba/214/fonok/?idn=1
Charlie Gillett
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