Few Croatian rock bands could truly be said to be masters of their genre. More often than not, local acts end up sounding like Croatian versions of something done better elsewhere. The one exception to this rule is surf-punk band The Bambi Molesters, an act so steeped in offbeat Americana that they frequently do a better job of setting it to music than the Americans themselves.

The Molesters were certainly Croatia’s most internationally exposed band in the early 2000s, supporting REM on European tour dates and gaining international distribution for their albums. Now back with their fist studio album in seven years (As the Dark Wave Swells), the Molesters are once again showing their contemporaries how it should be done.

A four-piece comprising Dalbor Pavičić (guitar), Dinko Tomljanović (guitar), Lada Furlan Zaborac (bass) and Hrvoje Zaborac (drums), the band was born in 1995 in the industrial town of Sisak – hardly the most obvious location for a group playing music more commonly associated with the sun and sand of the Californian coast. 

The Molesters have remained true to the surf template throughout their 15-year career, although they are a long way from being a show band reeling out retro classics. For a start they write the bulk of their material themselves, using the conventions of surf as a base camp for further musical exploration. Gritty garage punk, spacey psychedelia and lushly arranged passages of spaghetti-western soundtrack all serve to fill out the sound. A handful of cover-versions help to anchor the band’s set in the conventional surf canon – the Surftones’1964 classic Cecelia-Ann (also memorably covered by the Pixies) is an enduring live favourite.
 
“There are plenty of surf purists who are disappointed if you don’t wear Hawaiian shirts and stay true to the original sound of the early sixties’” says Dalibor Pavičić, the band’s main songwriter. “However we wouldn’t seriously want to be pigeon-holed as a classic surf act anyway. If you ask me we are basically a rock and roll band, who blend surf, Ennio Morricone and Sixties’ psychedelia to produce a sound that can be ultimately be identified as our own.”

The fact that the Bambi Molesters are a largely instrumental band allows them to draw out the cinematic elements of their sound to the full. “In the beginning we wrote a lot more in the way of songs” Pavičić explains, “but Dinko was largely responsible for the lyrics and he simply ran out of things he wanted to write about. We filled up our repertoire with instrumentals in order to compensate, and friends told us that we actually sounded better that way.”

It was a fortunate development. The new album in particular sounds like the soundtrack to all the pulp-noir films that no-one ever got round to making. “As the Dark Wave Swells was thought up by Dinko and immediately gave the album a film noir flavour”, Pavičić continues. It’s a theme that is summed up perfectly by the album’s cover image, provided by American night photographer Troy Paiva, in which a girl in a Fifties’-style prom dress floats enigmatically in a disturbingly dark swimming pool.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Bambi Molesters to English-speaking audiences remains the name itself – although the explanation of its origins turns out to be far less bestial than anticipated. “It started out as an internal joke about a friend of ours who was obsessed with a girl nicknamed Bambi” says Pavičić. “Sometimes we feel that we’ve saddled ourselves with a silly name, but for a band that started out playing Sixties’ garage music it somehow seems appropriate.”


The Bambi Molesters will be performing at Zagreb’s In-Music festival on June 22.