kagablog

Artist: Die Plesier Parade
Album: Plesier Parade
Label: N/a
Year: 2007
Reviewed By: Woodstock Slim

As I was handed this masterpiece I was also told that they broke up last year. So there goes my chance to have caught them live. They sound, at first ear, like the remnants of Raaskopleef. Only because one could not imagine a kind of band like this with a kind of music like this, song structure if you please. Ok, what does does it sound like?
Mmm, like the Sound Track to Twin Peaks B-sides and then added mystical Afrikaans lyrics about the truth, life, women, hardship and dissolving from the inside out, 911, the responsibility of looking after your sperm, …but I’ve gone too far already. The album is completely home made and hand distributed and home recorded and a great job on the home computer with a stick of Prit and desktop printer and a felt tip pen.
The Album opens with the crack of thunder and a warning. The album has you wondering from the beginning if you would actually ordinarily like this kind of music? But you carry on and find a new dead body round every corner and under every bridge in the music. I am really too afraid to translate the music to you. The music is haunting and just the way I like it. One track, lo-fi and untouched by fat record producers. This stuff is raw, yet beautiful and sensitive and goes places in your mind music ordinary never takes you. Sort of in the way Beheerkamer Onbeman does,
reaching issues never covered by bands trying to sell records or get laid or get expensive implants, hell… I don’t’ know.
The guitar comes in phat and a sax hauls in now and then. There is no real indication of band members so it’s hard to tell who does what. The peacefulness Plesier Parade creates are all false for they long only to slice it wide open with a single note from a injured guitar or a bleating sax and sometimes a grunt from the vocalist. Apart from the sax and the guitar there is little else and that flows in and out unannounced. It bleeps and whales now and then but it holds together well.
This will cause a knot in your throat when you realise the importance of this album for South Africa. All the other bands suddenly look shit and without emotion and with pride you turn it back on and give it another listen. After listing to this, it becomes clear what is shit SA Rock and what is awesome SA Rock.
This album is a lesson to us all.

There is nothing wrong with music and bands that strive toward making money and
getting laid. It’s just shit.

this review originally appeared on woodstockslim