2024-08-29 22:55:26
Summer beckons to explore the world, even if it means traveling just a short distance from home. On her recently released second album titled Thanks, bees, Czech singer-songwriter Kvietah takes listeners to various places from Prague’s Sparta tram stop to New York’s wide boulevards and the peak of the Austrian Grossvenediger Alps to war-torn Ukraine.
Rather than a tourist guide, she plays the role of a storyteller, engagingly sharing the feelings that places leave or awaken in her. The different nature of the individual stops is reflected by dozens of songs alternating distorted guitars as in alternative rock, catchy pop melodies, electronic beats and clean ballad piano. It’s a journey between genres and influences.
“I’ve always liked bolder productions, even on the Czechoslovak scene, which I consider to be one. That’s why I really enjoy Katarzia in the singer-songwriter category or last year’s album by Jakub König,” comments the twenty-six-year-old Kvietah on her shift to a richer sound compared to her debut album, partly influenced by folk A pack of black cats from 2022.
Although we can understand her primarily as a singer-songwriter, the richness of the arrangements for new songs was also foreshadowed by the founding of the band The Kvietas. It is with her that the musician, whose real name is Magdalena Fendrychová, will present the album at a concert on September 25 in Prague’s Bike Jesus club. She will perform alone, unaccompanied, at the renewed Folková Lipnice festival the same month.
The resulting form of the recording was influenced by the fact that she had been listening to guitar music a lot lately. For example, the composition Grossvenediger resembles the mountain of the same name in the way it gradually rises and then culminates in a rock chorus. A bit of unsolicited longing in the verse “I have to live it out, that it’s collapsing solid inside us, and I miss you, miss you again” itches similarly to the catchiness of the melody.
From Bezruč to Kundera
Producer Nikola Šolaja made a significant contribution to the sound variety of the album. “I’ve always enjoyed writing songs of different genres. One often arranges in such a way that it is close to the things one likes. Nikola brought the album to the end, he strongly respected the expression that the individual songs initially had, as well as their message. In my opinion, it is not necessarily always only the text, but also the energy radiating from the harmonies,” thinks Kvietah.
Kvietah sings about New York boulevards and war-torn Ukraine. | Photo: Kristýna Černá
She is now starting to produce in collaboration with Amák or Michal Šťastný, an important personality of the Czech alternative scene. He understands it not only as another way to make a living from music, but also as a supplement to performing concerts. The singer-songwriter attributes her interest in the sound side to studying composition at the Prague Conservatory.
At the same time, her path to music first led through words. She recalls how her parents led her to literature and that she always enjoyed writing lyrics in addition to playing instruments. The interest was also reflected in the single from the current album called Lucie, in which a short introductory post-rock noise is soon interrupted by a stomping country rhythm. According to the annotation, the composition was inspired by Milan Kundera’s books The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but at the same time, similar novels often remind the musician of situations from her own life. “It seems to me that Kundera aptly describes romantic and interpersonal relationships in general, even though I partly agree with the criticism of his female characters. He reminded me a lot of my own relationships. I think that when we read, we all tend to project ourselves into those stories.” the author comments on the composition, the refrain of which also reads “with fingers stiff in iron”, an allusion to the poem Ostrava by Petr Bezruč.
Alone in the big city
With its closeness to literature, Kvietah continues the local songwriting tradition, which it further develops by interweaving influences from other genres. “Differences are being erased, who is the male or female singer, despite typical representatives such as Jaroslav Hutka or Karel Kryl. Bard is a terrible word in this respect, but actually apt for the Czech reality,” says the musician, who depicts not only personal feelings and experiences , but also social or generational difficulties.
The opening song of this year’s recording Linka, which surprisingly features a rhythm reminiscent of the popular reggaeton genre, shows Kvietah’s peers lonely in the big city.
“The model of the classic family has pretty much stopped working in our generation, and at the same time, relationships are also very complicated for most of my friends. I think that a person has nowhere to return to is a fairly common phenomenon,” assesses the musician. “Families may not have functioned before, it was just more common to stick to them tooth and nail. Today, the family is starting to expand to include friends as well,” he continues.
Biolit from the previous record is a sample song expressing personal frustrations that spill over into the public space. It contains passages that could be labeled with the English word rant: an affected monologue about a certain topic that intensely annoys the speaker.
In this case, Kvietah was upset about Poland, “where people are locked up for wanting to live their own way”, as she sang during the time of the government of the Law and Justice party there. Or that “you’re going to make out with girls in bars you don’t know because it’s easier than actually talking to me”, or that “burning fossil fuels is a bigger sin than not teaching you what you need in school”.
The current album Thanks, bees also contains political themes, albeit rendered more poetically and subtly. In one of the strongest moments, the song Regime, the titular regime of the dark sky does not become concrete, but nevertheless presents a coherent and evocative image of despair. It features barricades, dark spring snow, rising sea levels and a gradual decline, as well as a cracking undertone, a rustling beat, undulating horns and a graduated associative rap passage from guest singer-songwriter Cermaque, real name Jakub Čermák.
The song Regime from the new album Kvietah. Photo: Kristýna Černá | Video: Indies Scope
Experiencing distant things
Another piece called MPJ may sound like a fleeting personal memory of New York, but it tells primarily about American queer rights activist Marsha P. Johnson and her best friend Sylvia Rivera (“And by day you’re a mom to those stray lights from the streets, they don’t mess with us”).
It is the sample of her voice that ends the composition. “I was struck by one interview with her. In it, she is already older and seems terribly exhausted by life when she tells how she lost her partner, how she had to walk on the street to survive, how she tried to commit suicide,” explains Kvietah.
Thank You Bees album cover. | Photo: Indies Scope
The stone wall in the text refers to the riots that began in 1969 in the New York company Stonewall and subsequently started the tradition of pride marches by members of sexual and gender minorities, such as the recent launch of Prague Pride.
“I feel that I can experience things that are very far away. I always see someone who is similar to us, whether it is a refugee, a homeless person or an addict. I often see this, for example, at the One World festival,” says the musician, who she also perceives thanks to her family background – her father is a former dissident and Aktuálně.cz commentator Martin Fendrych.
He does not insist on a single correct interpretation for his personal or political songs. The space for different interpretations remains limited only in the final compositions Herojam sláva and Mami. Both relate to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Especially the second one, only accompanied by a piano, works with pathos. Few places seem as appropriate as in a track reminding that someone’s loved ones are still dying on the front, for whom the fighting took away important moments and sometimes even the possibility to return somewhere. The form of both songs was influenced by the contact with a Ukrainian mother and her son who stayed with the Kvietah family shortly after the beginning of the Russian invasion.
Even thanks to the powerful title song at the heart of the album Thank you, the bees are worth the pain in a way. But it is covered by many emotions, it meanders and returns in all kinds of ways, similar to the author’s other motifs, for example various herbs or Jesus. “Sometimes faith helps me, other times I fumble,” admits the musician. Her melody offers good company on life’s branching paths where we wander, even on those with a destination in sight.
Video: They solve stupid things in Slovakia, it’s exhausting. They even cry over politics there, says Katarzia (27/05/2024)
“It’s hard for me to come to terms with what’s been happening in Slovakia for years, that’s why I haven’t lived there for so many years,” singer Katarzia said in the Spotlight show. | Video: Team Spotlight