I have a pretty good memory: I was 11 or 12 when Karel Fialka broke the UK singles chart with ‘Hey, Matthew’, a song I appreciated more in hindsight than at the time. Then, it seemed rather dull; later I came to really understand its sardonic observational lyrics and detached delivery. I’m guessing that as he only has a handful of credits of writing or producing songs for other artists, he’s spent the majority of his time earning a crust by other means. It’s not exactly rock ‘n’ roll, but I rather respect that, and like the idea that he’s still striving as an artist in his more mature years. No, I don’t meant that in a remotely patronising sense: music is sadly lacking in sincere grafters and is full of vapid careerists and kids aspiring to celebrity.
Kael Fialka’s hardly had a conventional or prolific musical career in commercial terms, with only three albums to his credit (1980, 1988 and 2009), and seven single releases, his last being ‘You Be the Judge’ in 1988. Karel Fialka clearly is no careerist; he’s not a celebrity and isn’t milking any kind of nostalgia gravy train with this release. Having hooked up with Kevin McGowan and Richard Rodgers, aka Racecar, Fialka uses this album to encapsulate the frustration of the disenfranchised generation, and reminds us that not everyone over 50 is riding high on the baby boomer wave of wealth.
Fialka’s voice is a gritty growl along the lines of Leonard Cohen’s later work. He’s straight on the attack, calling out corruption and greed on opening track ‘Political Animal’. It’s a fitting launch, and could be taken as a summary of Fialka himself. Not that this represents a change of direction: I’d even suggest that Fialka’s tendency to focus on the socio-political has been one of the impedances to his wider success. It seems something of an injustice, but I’d like to think he cares less about that than artistic integrity. Moreover, it’s much easier to take an album like this seriously when it’s not coming from some overprivileged Bono or Chris Martin type.
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The bleak images come thick and fast, at times becoming almost a sensory overload of Sky News / tabloid headlines cut and spliced into a dizzying blizzard. ‘Horror crash details emerging / Come on down bi-sexual virgins / Gonna be a riot in Dingley Dell / Typhoon cyclone heatwave hell / Third world debt conglomerate con / You get ripped off as you sing along / Senator lies in the House of Congress / Another fist in the face of progress’. It’s not dystopia, it’s the world in which we find ourselves in the here and now.
If the album title suggests binary positions and cultural polarity, the music it contains is a much broader church in stylistic terms. Fialka moves from the sparse reggae groove of ‘Scratch the Surface’ to the desolate piano-led ‘White Gold in the Aral Sea’, grimly depicting climate change apocalypse in tone that’s as baked as the Sahara.
He steps back from main vocal duties on the slow rock out track ‘Synthetic Sin’, before coming on like a cross between Tom Waits and Ian Dury on ‘Calvary’, Fialka is parchment dry, cracked and sage. He’s seen it all, lived it. And now he’s distilled it all into a dense document of life in the 21st century.
Karel Fialka Online
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