Where a cup of coffee is sometimes not good for you. Take for example the Polish band RAM Zero. The creation of this band has everything to do with that. Three ex-members of the band Zero Stopni decided in 2023, while enjoying a cup of coffee in the Polish city of Tychy, that they wanted to continue making music, but without using a vocalist. Pure instrumental music was what they had in mind after Zero Stopni broke up with them. But the problem was that Adrian Kiszczak (guitars), Robert Majbroda (drums) and Marcin Malinowski (bass) needed someone who could play on the keyboards. After three months search on the internet they found Arkadiusz Kulawik to do the job of playing some atmospheric keyboard parts. And so, RAM zero was born and two years later their debut Moment is on my desk for a review! Why is it titled Moment you may ask yourself? According to the band the name of the album refers to its character - to quote the performers - "there are moments". On the other hand, the space left by individual compositions and the stories they refer to concern individual moments in the history of each of them. Moment lasts a little over half an hour. Moment allows you to switch off. Moment does not impose, it only suggests. Moment is only a backing track - to what story? It's up to each listener to decide. These four musicians created almost 37 minutes of music which can be defined as post-rock or cinemanic-rock. On the seven tracks that are included it is Kiszcak's guitar playing that takes the leading role. You can hear that he is an excellent musician that can come up with some great riffs and rhythm parts. Kulawik's keyboards have mainly an accompanying role in the whole picture but occasionally he gets the chance to do some nice synthesizer parts like you can hear on Arka. As for the rhythm section they do their job very well. But are not playing really spectacular parts because the music doesn't ask for it. Malinowski bass lines sometimes come to the foreground and that's really nice to hear. As said before the songs are instrumentals. However, on Professor you can hear some Polish talking voices. Here we can hear Piotr Fronczewski's voice saying "Ladies and gentlemen, this is professor Rafał Wilczur" and Jerzy Bińczycki saying the line "I don't help the poor or the rich, I help people". These are fragments cut from the dialogue list of the 1982 film Znachor directed by Jerzy Hoffman. As for the musical highlights on Moment I certainly do have a favourite. Namely the track Chmury. Here the combination of excellent atmospheric synthesizer parts with melodic guitar parts works perfectly. The (fretless) bass parts that go throughout the song is the icing on the cake. Also Last Friday is one which has to considered as one of the best songs together with the album ending tune named 7. On those tracks the fresh and crystal-clear sound of the band comes to the surface. All in all, RAM zero is album that keeps you entertained all the way. Don't expect long compositions with different time signatures and lots of solos on the electric guitars and synthesizers together with parts played on the Bass pedals, Mellotrons, Minimoogs and Hammond organs. That's not what the musicians wanted to do with their instruments. They just kept it rather simple. The purpose of their music was only to dream away and to relax on their post-rock music. And they succeeded very well with it. *** Henri Strik (edited by Dave Smith) Where to buy? |
