Venue: Orto Bar / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 09.11.2006
Attendance: 90
Ticket price: 3.990,00 SIT
Friday night is the perfect time to clear your head of all the commemorative duties of the daily “game” of dealing with what the “majority” gets up to, in an alternative way, at a place where you can let all your rage out in peace. By 10:20 PM the room was decently full, not packed, just the right turnout for Orto Bar you could say, since even the air held up through the whole show at the quality level just on the edge of normal cigarette-smoke saturation.
Nick Oliveri and his The Mondo Generator, a band you could roughly pin a few influences on: Black Flag, Roky Erickson, The Ramones, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys and of course the fathers of evil, Black Sabbath. The guys were a guarantee of a top-notch garage punk rock / post stoner-rock lesson, which came to raise hell in Orto tonight. Why, there’s hardly any need to explain in detail. Oliveri has outstanding musical talent and plenty of experience, having matured in Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age and the punkers Dwarves before devoting himself primarily to The Mondo Generator.
This time, though, the hour-and-a-half set went by without the provocations and onstage meltdowns from the band’s boss that people were expecting. Those are probably what quietly made this gig especially tempting for those in the know, who showed up even more impatient and fired up to watch the birth of some eventual onstage “burlesque” in the middle of the set! But what you got was exactly the opposite! The boss and his three sidekicks were, for most of the show, super passive toward the crowd, with obligatory friendly smiles. Oliveri came across as downright shy, to put it mildly, and rather reserved, and mostly addressed the crowd with “Thank you”… As you’ve probably guessed by now, Oliveri did not strip down to nothing during the show, which he reportedly loves doing at gigs.
The guys kicked off with a song carrying the unmistakable riff of All Day And All Of The Night (The Stranglers), pointing to their punk rock roots. The rest of the show, though, was wrapped in a proper serving of wild stoner “rush” and “banging”, and the mostly young crowd of school-age kids and students went numb in the megalomaniac rhythms, stoned out of their minds, with many individuals swaying around as if in a trance during the set. That was proof that Oliveri and the gang were “burning”. Despite that reserve, Oliveri was convincing in reviving his own anger and agony as far as his approach to the material went. He screamed with animal fury as if they were skinning him alive, bassing away with fervor, and a few times he got so deep into it that he was literally shaking onstage, as if he’d been hooked up to 220 volts. Drummer Hoss, with his devastating drumming technique and aggression, provided a real foundation for a first-rate “jam”, which Oliveri and his guitar partners in crime Spud and Ian Taylor were in no way indifferent to! So The Mondo Generator staged a scorching stoner post rock fire that truly had no equal in performance and stage presence. The gig just rolled along on a massive “riff sawmill”, ventilated by the cannon-like charm of the drumming and Oliveri’s untamed, hateful, enraged screeches and frenzied shouting.
All I missed was the far too “in-your-face” routinely reserved attitude toward the crowd, which was reflected especially in the level of ignorance, with practically no talking to the audience in any of the breaks between songs. The sound was balanced right within the limits of volume that’s still credible for Orto Bar’s small hall, before the walls would start cracking from an accidental overdose of decibels, so there was really nothing to complain about there.
After an hour and 10 minutes the band took a 5-minute break and came back onstage at 11:45 PM, blasting through two songs as an encore before vanishing into the “backstage”. How symbolic. Slovenian heads cooled off just as quickly, so the fleeting feeling of missing The Mondo Generator, waiting for another encore, evaporated in an instant, and the crowd scattered fast to the other business of a feverish Friday night.
The sound and the band’s playing were absolutely in favor of perfect tightness, but with a whiff of “you get what you pay for” routine, which left mixed feelings after the show, since Oliveri flat out refused (even though he knows how and has what it takes) to use his demonic charisma, which could have given The Mondo Generator incredible chemistry and an electrified live atmosphere by firing up the crowd, something they definitely have down, and brought into the performance a sense of untamed rebellious authenticity, which is the essential companion of alt rock. So the crowd too, with the exception of a few individual “stoner – zakucanih – hammered” diehards, was pretty reserved, to put it mildly, and rightly held up a mirror to the band. On a scale of 1 to 5, this time it’s 2 and three quarters for The Mondo Generator.
Setlist
1. Basket Case
2. Here We Come
3. I Never Sleep
4. Gonna Leave You
5. Shannette
6. All The Way Down
7. Lie Detector
8. So High So Low
9. Like A Bomb
10. She Only Owns You
11. Life Of Sin
12. Autopilot
13. F.Y. I’m Free
14. High Love
15. Mental Hell
16. Sonicslowmotion
17. Wake Up
—-encore—
18. Open Up
19. 13th Floor
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