Scary Love Stories
Milorad Pavić wrote his Scary Love Stories as a cycle of novellas held together not by a single plot but by a shared eros: sensual, dark, at times cruel, always mysterious. East and West, the Middle Ages and the present, tenderness and violence, dream and waking sit alongside one another. B-Vox seem to have taken this not as a constraint but as permission, building an album around the same principle of radical variety within a single concept.
Scary Love Stories is the most stylistically diverse of B-Vox's three known releases. Its twelve tracks span lo-fi hip-hop, folktronica, ethno-house, cyber-folk metal, industrial rock, space ambient, progressive bluegrass and hip-hop violin. Yet the album feels less like chaos than an anthology: a collection of short stories, each told in its own language but all about the same thing.
The album begins in darkness. «Constrict» is pure chillhop/lo-fi: Rhodes electric piano, a soft boom-bap beat and vinyl noise in the background. There are no vocals, only a melancholy melody and the city at night beyond the window. It is a deliberately modest, almost silent opening — the first page of a book before the author has shown their hand. Pavić might have described its mood in one word: expectation.
After that quiet entrance, «Must Have» arrives like a fist on the table: folktronica in the spirit of Go_A and Onuka, with folk-inflected female vocals, piercing violin and an explosive EDM drop. It is one of the record's most energetic and memorable tracks — a pagan ritual translated into rave culture. Its contrast with the opener is not merely sharp but dramatically exact, like a move from prologue to the first novella.
Tracks three through six form an informal Eastern cycle, though each takes a different angle. «Pool in the Hidden House» is ethno-house, with guzheng or koto as the lead instrument; its prickly, percussive playing weaves around a powerful house beat to create the hypnosis of a neon temple. «Fish-scale Hat» develops the same idea with concrete kick drums, virtuoso string passages and minimal synth layers: if track three is Tokyo in motion, track four is Tokyo in meditation.
«A Bed for Three» suddenly shifts toward cyber-folk metal: distorted heavy guitars, stadium drums and a violin that becomes the lead voice, moving between weeping sustained phrases and aggressive staccato. Its title evokes one of Pavić's darkest stories, and the music matches it — the sound of epic, slightly anxious resolve, a final battle or great ritual. «Tamed Hair» closes the Eastern sequence by returning to contemplative downtempo: Asian strings, a boom-bap beat, shakuhachi flute and synth pads make a Silk Road through a nocturnal megacity.
The seventh and eighth tracks, «The Enchanted Spring» and «Two Iraqi Students», form an industrial pair: industrial rock/cyber-blues with distorted guitars, dry claps, stamping rhythms and glitchy electronic inserts. Both are music of revolt, resolve and a marching stride. Their titles point to opposite emotional poles in Pavić's work, which makes their similarity feel like a deliberate conceptual gesture: the same force drives different stories.
«The Long Night Sailing» is among the record's most unexpected and beautiful moments: space ambient/chillhop with analogue pads, breathing synths and a slowly gathering lo-fi beat. After nearly a minute of atmosphere, it begins an unhurried, weightless voyage among the stars. It is the pause in the middle of the album — the silence between chapters in which Pavić leaves the reader alone with an image.
The last three tracks are joined by the violin, though each uses it differently. «Is It Enough?» is folk-industrial rock, its violin crying out and groaning against distorted bass and heavy drums: the final movement's fiercest voice, a question thrown into emptiness. «The XI Digit» softens the tone with hip-hop violin and neoclassicism — a self-assured, urban dialogue between violin, hip-hop beat and sub-bass. Noir gleams in wet asphalt; it is no longer a question but a statement.
Finally, «Something Else» closes the album in a wholly unexpected way: progressive bluegrass/modern acoustic folk with mandolin, violin, acoustic guitar and double bass. There is no electronics and no city noise — only wood, living instruments and the jazz-like freedom of improvisation, and for the first time an impression of sun and open space. It is an exhalation after all that darkness: simply music, living people playing together on a veranda. Pavić, too, knew how to end a story with unexpected light.
Scary Love Stories is B-Vox's most ambitious and conceptually coherent album of the three. Its diversity is structural rather than chaotic: an anthology in which every track is a separate story with its own genre, mood and logic, but all read as parts of one whole. The Pavić inspiration is felt not in quotations but in the underlying principle — nonlinearity, contrast, sensuality, darkness beside light.
Its greatest achievement is sustaining attention through constant shifts of register without losing its inner logic. You never know what will come next, and, as with Pavić, that is the central hook. Strengths: conceptual unity amid maximal stylistic variety, strong polar tracks («Must Have», «The Long Night Sailing», «Something Else»), high production standards throughout and a literary foundation felt in the structure rather than imposed upon it. Weaknesses: tracks seven and eight sound overly alike, and the Eastern pair of tracks three and four risks repeating its concept. For listeners who value literary album-anthologies, Pavić admirers who want to hear his prose in sound, and anyone drawn to genre diversity within one concept.