Postfolklor

As the album title suggests, Ponk, a Czech acoustic power trio of cimbalom, violin and double bass, take a powerfully subversive approach to the sung folklore of their homeland, both in their arranging of texts, and in their rethinking of textures associated with their instruments. They do not exactly play them against the grain, but violin lines suggesting soprano sax or metal shredding, and the clean melodies or obsessive riffing of the cimbalom are fresh and unexpected in a folk context. Power chords and other slightly worn rock tropes lend their music a sound that is unnervingly in our present, yet not quite of it.

What Ponk give us is a set of Moravian murder ballads so unrelentingly grim that they become almost comic. The protagonist (often enough named Janýčko) is tragically killed in multiple ways: hanged, shot, stabbed, drowned or slaughtered by bandits while crossing borders and buried below a black cross to warn the unwary. Yet the lyric force of the folk poetry and the darkly bitter charm of ‘Bude Večer’, or the concentrated venom of ‘Bros’, sends an authentic shiver up the spine.