Pro-Pain Blow Through Metelkova in a One-Hour Storm (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Gala hala (Metelkova) / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: September 3, 2009
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: €18.00 / €22.00

September is here again. The start of everything new. Kids have to go back to school, people have to go back to work after their vacations, and bands have to hit the road on headlining tours. The bulk of the festival season is over for 2009, too. Ringing in this new era in Slovenia were the legendary New York hardcore punks Pro-Pain, whose shows, as always, deliver an extreme demonstration of playing built on brute force, speed, instant impact and the violent release of unbridled rage, all driven by this one-of-a-kind quartet in their musical expression. The band is special in every way, well-oiled, and after almost 20 years still indestructible. After last year’s visit to the MetalMania Open Air festival in Komno, here was one more chance to relive that unique Pro-Pain beat in the more intimate setting of the little Gala hala hall at Metelkova in Ljubljana.

In The Crossfire are a great hardcore outfit from Laško who have been around since 2003. Believe me, I get around to a lot of gigs, and I’d never caught them before. Clearly they’re not exactly regulars on the stage circuit. The members are experienced, seasoned musicians. In The Crossfire are a band with a recognizable character of their own. They’re a very tight, compact five-piece, and they got great sound from the Gala hala stage crew. It was a pleasure to listen to them. Singer Vladi has just the right vocal tone for extreme singing. It’s not so low that it drifts into death metal growling, and not so high that it veers into some shrill, grating screech. The songs have a nice dose of mid-tempo rolling rhythms, where the style and color of the vocals work especially well, and they build a musty, suffocating, gloomy atmosphere that’s closer to death metal or even doom metal bands than to your average “core” prefix band. At their foundation, I.T.C. are hardcore to the bone. The guys crowned that fine grounding with a tightly coordinated performance of material that also demands some witty switching between basic rhythms and riffs. The band’s debut album is finally coming out at the end of this September, and we heard pretty much all of the songs from it. A lot of dust was kicked up by the rampaging See You In Hell and especially NWO, which the guys closed with in an extremely convincing and charismatic set. This probably wasn’t their peak, since they don’t play out much, but if someone gave them a proper tour, believe me, In the Crossfire have some seriously fierce growth potential. They’re a well-oiled machine that comes across on stage as very credible and convincing, standing behind everything they do. You can definitely feel death metal influences in the riffing and the double bass drum work, and that puts In The Crossfire in a special spot on the Slovenian hardcore scene!

Vengince are a band that just released their second studio album. What makes them special is that they have keyboards in the lineup. Mind you, the keyboardist mostly handles backing vocals, but still. The band plays a kind of modern metal take that owes a lot to core foundations. The vocals sit in extreme, much higher registers than those of their valiant Slovenian predecessors. Extremely brutal and fierce, with the aggressive fury of a turbulent, light-speed assault of riff and rhythm artillery. Then, out of nowhere, a chorus in clean vocals can follow, which strips away a big chunk of the credible aggression the band had just unleashed on the room, and in those parts you can also sense the veil of the keyboards in the background (Failure To Flee). I think that’s what suits the band least. It’s clear the guys don’t want to end up like a horde of bands from Suicide Silence to Becoming The Archetype, but still, in core and modern metal with extreme vocals, mixing in clean singing with an overdose of melody has no business being there. Guys, please don’t accidentally turn into Bullet For My Valentine! Still, there’s something here. The sweat was pouring off these guys in streams. They played their hearts out, and watching it from the floor was a real joy, even though most of the crowd ignored the band from a distance and waited for Pro-Pain.  We got another interesting crossover moment in Torch The Trophy, with a black metal keyboard intro, hellish double bass drum pounding, and vocal duties split between the singer and the keyboardist, and once again some clean singing in one of the transitional parts. A song with a nice dose of experimentation. Vengince, too, gave it everything they had and put on a confident and above all thoroughly sweat-soaked show. One more thing! Vengince use seven-string guitars tuned down low, which pushes the wall of riffs in their live sound even further to the front.

Drone are fascinating German extreme metallers whose riffs basically owe a lot to Machine Head and Pantera. In the transitions they weave in melodic flourishes of three-part harmonies that make them sound European, or rather German, and that would make even our good old Michael Schenker smirk. What really works is the lead vocal of guitarist Mutz, who has a distinctive color to his voice. It’s extreme, piercing, and hugely effective at coaxing out all that catchy guttural bite in the mid-range. The band needlessly turns its choruses toward softer territory by focusing here on clean vocals, which is a real shame for the development of that wonderfully catchy aggression and the uncompromising arrogance of their riff fury, which they establish so convincingly in the songs beforehand.  So, guys! You absolutely have to strike the melodic and clean (whiny!) vocals from the menu. Otherwise, though, it was crazy playing, with incredible chemistry between them, stringing together a witty regatta of riffs that must have fascinated every Machine Head purist. With heart, streams of sweat and excellent tightness, Drone showed themselves to be a highly cohesive and reliable crew that’s a real pleasure to follow on stage. Songs like Theopractical and Welcome To The Pit blew the soul right out of the body! The guys allowed themselves a bit of a joke when they played their own version of the main riff from Survivor’s hit Eye Of A Tiger at the start of one of the songs. With a third album called “Juggernaut” in their pocket and live shows as intense as the one we got in Ljubljana, the guys are definitely on the right path to wider recognition.

What can you say about a band that was a bit of a letdown on this visit to Slovenia? You’d be hard-pressed to find a more sincere heart than the one beating in the chest of Gary Meskil, the unmistakable boss, bassist and singer of the band. Every time this hugely charismatic figure shows up on stage, plants himself in a wide stance behind his mic stand, and starts tearing and digging at the bass strings while snarling angrily in his mile-wide, detonating, extreme voice, there’s no brave soul who wouldn’t feel at least a touch of awe for the man. The band is unique, and over a career nearly 20 years long they’ve developed a distinctive approach on the New York hardcore scene, where you can feel a garage-punk and rock ‘n’ roll undercarriage with strong leanings toward thrash metal riffing. Combine that with a voluminous rhythm section and commanding double bass pedals, and you get that trademark “groove” feel!

This time the band dragged its feet a bit and came on almost half an hour later than first announced. So at 11:30 PM the Gala hala finally went dark! We waited through a taped intro, and the band kicked into gear with Three Minutes Hate. Besides the new album “No End In Sight” (2008), the boys were also presenting a new drummer on this tour, Rick Halverson. Down in front it finally started boiling, hands went up in the air, some of the wildest heads got tossed around in the mosh pits and later cut loose enough to pull off a couple of beautiful stage dives, without any earth-shattering crashes from the unlucky souls who might have taken a tumble. Who wouldn’t get fired up by the catchy punches of Fuck It, UnAmerican or In For The Kill, which Pro-Pain rolled through in their set? And why wasn’t the show as thrilling as we expected? Encore included, it lasted barely an hour. Hello?!

The blame probably falls on the low turnout, with barely 70 people showing up. That’s pretty sad, and explaining this Slovenian phenomenon of not going to good, quality live shows would take an Einstein. It’s not as if the nation were sick of everything. People elsewhere, north and west of us in Europe, and even south and east, can say that, which is a sad enough reality as it is. It mostly comes down to people going to shows to drink and hang out, to show off, and less to listen to the music, to listen in the sense of identifying with it on a deeper level, call it fan and supporter identification, which in Germany alone, for example, is a given. And to make the irony even bigger, it’s not hard to guess that by now the whole Slovenian nation has probably sharpened its teeth for the Josh Stone show on September 4, 2009, which will play completely free in the middle of Ljubljana, so they can blow the money that would normally go on concert tickets on hectoliters of booze instead. That’s just how we Slovenians are, and honestly, we should be pretty ashamed of it. We’d rather stay home and get wasted than pay for a ticket and get wasted at the show. It works out cheaper, right? Village idiots, the lot of us.

Despite that sad fact, a handful of loyal followers of “distorted groove” and Pro-Pain together put on a fantastic, dynamite-packed mix of revelry down in front, which sadly didn’t last long, but Pro-Pain’s appearance once again justified their reputation as one of the most energetic bands in human history, firing at their audience from all barrels. Let the Blood Run Through the Streets was the only song we heard from the new album “No End In Sight” (2008), and the band played a set list (sadly too short) mixed from old and new material, lining up, besides the ones mentioned, Can You Feel It?, No Way Out, Full Taste Of Freedom, Make War (not Love), Get Real, All For King George and Shine, among others.

So Pro-Pain played a short set charged with thrilling energy that kept the entire crowd on high alert and right there with the band, bleating along with it the primal ABCs of the Pro-Pain original. It confirmed that the guys are in excellent form and that Gary’s voice is still incredibly durable! My only hope and wish for the guys is that they get bigger crowds elsewhere on the planet. I’d also like to thank the brave and unshakable heart of local promoter Dirty Skunks, who keeps backing great music and sailing relentlessly against the destructive currents of mainstream music. In his place, and especially in Slovenia, the vast majority would have given up long ago!

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