Avtor: Aleš Podbrežnik
Kraj: VPK / Media Park
Datum koncerta: 18.06.2006
Število obiskovalcev: 0
Cena karte: 30.05 EUR
The gig scene this year is absolutely nuts. You barely turn your head and you’re already at a different venue with a different band up on stage in front of you. The Sisters Of Mercy are playing Slovenia for the first time in a good 15 years. A great milestone, well worth showing up for and being curious about. Considering how little this show was advertised, over 500 people turned up at the VPK hall, which was seriously encouraging. At least there was enough oxygen left in the room for the whole show.
FATHER: 20.35 – 21.20
The young, up-and-coming metalheads from Rijeka were an excellent choice for a warm-up. Word has it that The Sisters Of Mercy frontman Andrew Eldritch personally vouched for their quality and even picked them as the support act. The band is a bullseye for all fans of current stuff. Father sound recognizably clear and modern-fresh. Their style fascinatingly blends elements of funk, thrash, hardcore and classic heavy metal, a sort of harmonious patchwork made of bands like: Faith No More, Tool, Deftones, Pantera, Alice In Chains or Machine Head. Technically complex and tightly honed, but with an adrenaline-fueled explosiveness that grabs you right away. If you listen to their music with the right amount of “depth”, you’ll have no trouble discovering the genre richness of the band’s style. They hit uncompromisingly with all the artillery they had on hand and started kneading their massive, energetic, fat riffs. Father are in excellent form. The vocals are strong and resolute. Convincingly raging, yet incredibly explosive in every melodic register. And all that while keeping every ounce of masculine potency! The riffs were well crafted, the groove was outstanding. The rhythm line was witty and “jam session” exploratory, and often with riffing in counter-rhythms it traveled through the seasoned passages, completely unexpectedly, back into a totally different tempo and toward a new mood.. There’s incredible quality hiding behind the name Father. Lyrics in English, which is the only right way to do it. Still, the crowd just couldn’t warm up, no way, no how. There were obviously too many “alternative types” among them, and even though the singer kept generously inviting people to come closer to the band by the stage, folks preferred to dodge the detuned heavy metal sounds from a cautious distance. Still, Father reaped thunderous applause and general approval from the crowd at the end of every song. But in a very polite, almost formal, “cold” way. Father won people over with spontaneous stage presence, a great dose of humor and a polished image, in the spirit of “clothes make the… band”, which Slovenian bands, for example, absolutely far too often lack. Among the songs, Emon was the real fire-starter, with oriental scales delicately woven into the three-part harmonies of both guitars and a “Bosnian march” on the drums. Father are a band you can bet 100% on, and they absolutely won’t let you down. The sound during their set was excellent.
THE SISTERS OF MERCY: 22.00 – 23.20
It was great to see them again, fifteen years after their visit to Ljubljana’s Hala Tivoli. Well, the situation that vocalist, creator and mastermind of the “religion of the merciful sisters” Andrew Eldritch and his two new guitarists, Chris Catalyst and Ben Christo, find themselves in today, at least as far as Slovenian soil goes, showed that The Sisters Of Mercy are now a typical club band, which fits their alternative sound perfectly. You didn’t have to look hard in the crowd to find “good old darkwave fetishists”, and the sight of them was a real attraction, bringing back to life during the show a music scene that thrived through the eighties into the early nineties, then suddenly vanished from the rock horizon. This was their day. Eldritch has also changed “a bit” over the years. The mop of hair is gone, replaced by a peroxide brush cut. Still, the guy didn’t forget to put on his sunglasses and stick a cigarette between the index and middle fingers of his right hand, while “elbowing” his way around his microphone to hide his face, which is his old trademark, and so the esteemed gentleman wasn’t hard to recognize in the end. The show kicked off in the spirit of the band. Gloomy! Thick fog flooded the stage and then you could hear it. The guitarists are up! The guitars hit, and the drum machine behind them with a sound that could convince someone it was a creature of flesh and bone on stage dictating the tempo. Solid, very solid. At the start Eldritch was set too low in the mix and the vocals got lost behind the guitar riffing. The repertoire was surprisingly made up of quite a few novelties. Still, the first minus goes to the frontman for not introducing the tracks during the set. It’s hard to accept that you haven’t released a single new album in over 15 whole years and yet you play “new” stuff that the masses simply can’t get officially on any record. Especially not in Slovenia, where you show up once every 15 years, if at all. England is another story, where the English can probably hear the tracks Crash And Brurn and Still every year. The songs Summer, Slept, Alice, Anaconda We Are The Same Sussane and Romeo Dawn also totally surprised plenty of people. The first part of the show was represented by a few demanded classics like Ribbons, then a medley of Docotr Jeep/ Detoantion Boulevard, When You Dont See Me, Flood I., Dominion /Mother Russia, after which they vanished from the set list, and with them the crowd calmed down quite a bit overall, when the bass guitar carried the main motif of the song Romeo Down on stage, which was a very interesting touch in a show that ran at a very similar frequency for its entire running time. Still, the sound was very decent throughout the show. The “Sisters” were heavy, seriously heavy, heavier than I expected. The anger has been piling up over all these years and has to burst out somehow. The peak of the show was actually its final stretch with This Corrosion, which seriously fired up the crowd. After that song we even got the first two words of the night: “Thank you!” from the frontman, who then left the stage through the fog.
After a few refreshing minutes they’re back and fire off what the crowd had been waiting for. The classics Something Fast and Lucretia (My Reflection). The crowd doesn’t hide its delight! Then back into the backstage again. Is the show over? Well, the “roadie” who put the microphone back on the stand, the only thing on stage poking out of the fog, proved us wrong with his move. After a few moments of rest, the two guitarists are back on stage, without Eldritch. They fired off an instrumental, which is also a new song. Speaking of new stuff, I can put “new” in quotation marks, since the “Sisters” have been playing them since around 1993 and yet still haven’t managed to record them for a new album. Interesting that they didn’t put a single song from their debut “First and Last and Always” on the set list. Anyway, The Sisters Of Mercy closed the show with their famous cover Temple Of Love and made the Slovenian fans immensely happy. It’s also interesting that the band left the famous hit More off the set list. They’ve probably grown a little tired of playing it.
Either way, a solid but taciturn show, solid sound, a massive curtain of guitar riffs and, in contrast, a proven convincing copy of drums rather than a selection of “drum samples”, which a “roadie” diligently looked after in the stage background by twiddling knobs during the show. Still, they could have lifted “little Hitler” Eldritch a bit higher in the mix of the sound picture, and the band could have “practiced” the “backing vocal lines” a bit better, which both guitarists contribute during the show, otherwise it’s better to use sound sampling for that in the future too, since it’s the band’s unique trait, which should be clear as day in the live sound. The fans witnessed the creation of that familiar atmosphere, which pulled them back to the band’s golden era from a good 15 years ago, but with much less pomp. Anyway, the “vomited-out” fog on stage didn’t hide the desire to create Eldritch’s personal myth as a cult figure of The Sisters Of Mercy, behind which supposedly lurks the anarchist ideology of the darkest apocalyptic visions of his mind, which of course is also reflected in the melancholy of The Sisters Of Mercy’s music. In short, a routine, well-oiled approach. No “wasting excess energy and time”. The little over an hour and 20 minutes also came down to the fact that the band simply “stamped out” songs one after another, practically without any breaks in between. A dead heart in a dead world. Once more they pulled off making sense of it.
Setlist
Father set lista: 1. Cynosure 2. Chigva Pegla 3. Hiroshima 4. Never Come Back 5. Machina 6. Sayana 7. Emon 8. Outro The Sisters Of Mercy set lista: 1. Crash And Burn 2. Ribbons 3. Doctor Jeep/Detonation Boulevard 4. Still 5. When You don’t See Me 6. Flood I 7. Giving Ground 8. Summer 9. Dominion/Mother Russia 10. Slept 11. Alice 12. Anaconda 13. Romeo Down 14. Neverland 15. (We Are The Same) Suzanne 16. This Corrosion — prvi dodatek — 17. Something Fast 18. Lucretia (My Reflection) — drugi dodatek — 19. Top Nite Out 20. Temple Of Love
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