Owlspotting

In 2000, a couple of friends and I were looking for an unknown Romanian rock band to book for a party we were throwing at school. Someone gave us a demo CD for a band called ab4. We listened, we liked, we paid $300 and we let them rip. At the time, ab4 was nothing if one of the two great Romanian alternative rock bands (sad but true). Omul cu Sobolani was the other one.

In 2003, ab4 released their sophmore album, recorded in English. Because by then I had sort of become friends with the band, I wrote their press kit (my name is on the record-yay!). Then, the band more or less dissapeared. My friends back in Romania say they don’t remember having heard anything about ab4 since 2003 (which in a way is not all that bad considering what happened to OCS’s music).

And then the suprise. This Sunday, in Bucharest, ab4 will be the opening band at the Placebo concert. ab4 lives and will come to Arenele Romane to rock. We are currently playing their songs, some of which are now six years old, and we are ready to rock. You can listen to some songs from their two records below.

Roka on, as the band used to say.

“Toxic” was released in 2000. The sound on the record was pretty poor, but with the amount of local rock available, who gave a damn. Here are two of the hits from the album:
>> ab4 – Sa.mp3
>> ab4 – Hol.mp3

“Broken Trust” came out in 2003 and it was ab4’s attempt to make it big outside Romania. Not the most inspired song writing, but good enough:
>> ab4 – Born to learn.mp3
>> ab4 – Break.mp3