Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Orto bar / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: December 9, 2009
Attendance: 25
Ticket price: €5.00
Before the new year, a breath of December wind crept into the Slovenian capital, the kind currently picked up by the rock barometers tuned to the buzz around the Croatian rock scene. In Ljubljana, under the fatherly eye of the Dallas label, two bands got the chance to promote themselves: the young punk rock outfit Diskurz from Rijeka and the somewhat more seasoned rockers Vatrene ulice from Zagreb. The caring organizer, Dallas that is, also made room on the bill for the freshly resurrected Grrizli Madams from Sevnica, who played sandwiched between the two Croatian bands.
I don’t get it. Actually, I do. The facts are clear, I just refuse to accept them! An empty Orto bar, that is! In fact, I don’t accept any empty club where proper, witty rock is being played. Okay, we can blame the emptiness of Orto bar on Elvis Jackson playing at Kino Šiška at the same time, which potentially siphoned off a few people who could have gotten to know Diskurz or Vatrene ulice, who, let’s be honest, don’t exactly play in Slovenia every day.
So I counted heads, and the crowd swung between 10 and 25 people in the club room, depending on how many of their own fans each band had dragged along. In the case of Diskurz and Vatrene ulice, you couldn’t exactly expect busloads of fans to roll in from Croatia. And the Slovenian punters, who know neither Diskurz nor Vatrene ulice, came only to see the Slovenian act Grrizli Madams, let’s be honest, the least interesting band of the night. After that, they scattered God knows where.
At 10 p.m. three young guys step onto the stage. That’s Diskurz from Rijeka. Added together, the lads surely aren’t even 60 years old, so they’ve only just crossed the threshold of adulthood. Never mind. These boys are armed to the teeth! Not just in their playing, but in charisma and a polished look too. The Sex Pistols of Rijeka for the new millennium, with a sloppy-chic makeup job inherited from some New York Dolls. Did you catch the hint? It was a set loaded with the energy of untamed youthful wildness, with no shortage of straight-talking lyrics that pull no punches. The good thirty minutes the lads had to present their first studio album “U protivnom” (2009) – RockLine review HERE, went by with the boys basically playing to an empty club room. That didn’t faze them, let alone throw them off, though they did come across as a bit more reserved. Only logical when nobody is firing them up during the set. Considering that today’s young generation, raised on McDonald’s products, doesn’t feel any lack, while at the same time getting served “fake” punk, even on MTV, through the utterly tasteless approach of the music industry’s new-age philosophy, Diskurz are real miracle workers in this respect, because they come across as if their fathers had fronted the main bands that created the Rijeka new wave way back in the distant past.
Diskurz are a true continuation of the pride of an era that left its mark on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and that still shapes the healthy rock culture of the city of Rijeka today. Diskurz can be immensely proud of that, and I sincerely hope this remark boosts their confidence and their faith in their own essence. The songs Želite, Debela glava, Polet, Isto je sve, Na stranu, Nitko i ništa, Repelent, Obskura, Prazan hod and Razgledi all hit the real heart of the healthy punk tradition. In this respect, we truly don’t have to worry about the future of punk. Here’s wishing Diskurz a bright future and a firmly established name on the scene.
Grrizli Madams took over the stage for the next half hour, or more precisely, a little before eleven in the evening. The trio, playing Orto bar for the first time in five years, is back after a three-year break. They used to play thrash and/or death metal, but what we heard at Orto bar was a kind of groove mix leaning heavily on the legacy of doom metal. A down-tuned guitar of rolling riffs, with heavy reliance on sound effects meant to build an even more massive sonic picture and create a stuffy, atmospheric haze. So the newly reformed band has reinvented itself in its musical expression too. Grrizli Madams are looking for a singer, male or female. Let’s be honest, they badly need one. After 10 minutes, their (for now, sadly, only) instrumental approach becomes soul-crushing, since the vibe stays unchanged throughout the playing and turns repetitive. The band did string together a few interesting motifs and twists, ones where it was hard to imagine what melody a singer could carve out over the verses, but that doesn’t mean the songs won’t go through some serious transformations once the lineup is filled out with a vocalist.
Vatrene ulice were given 50 minutes for their set. They started wreaking havoc a good 15 minutes before midnight. Right from the start the quartet made it clear they were trying to get the attention of the aloof ones who stubbornly kept leaning on the bar. The band finally released its first real studio album “9 po Richteru” (2009) this past August – RockLine review HERE, and although their beginnings go back to 1990, with it they delivered a compact history, a cross-section of the last twenty years. The engine that generates the ideas and writes the lyrics is singer Goran Filipančić – Fila. Together with guitarist Marin Jovanovac, bassist Daniel Vukoja and drummer Mario Barić, he took the stage in a spirit of joy at finally being able to present the new album with his bandmates in Ljubljana too. The guy even surprised us by speaking partly in Slovenian, which definitely earns plus points for the band’s whole approach to the audience.
Vatrene ulice are a band born for the stage. They’re a lot grittier and sharper than the studio recordings of “9 po Richteru” make them out to be, and what’s especially fascinating is how tight and relaxed they are during the show. Most of the attention goes to Fila, with his charismatic performance, polished stage moves and extremely passionate, soulful approach, which especially fires up the anger in songs like Idi sad, Ne okreći mi leđa, Samo bog zna, Visoko, as well as Sve u meni nestaje.
The band played the entire album live on stage. The sound is actually hard to pin down. In the case of Vatrene ulice, we’re talking about a band that grew up in the eighties. So it brought a whiff of the former Yugoslavia, a whiff of punk, a whiff of post-punk, and you can’t miss, especially in the guitar phrasing and in the crunchy effect on Marin’s guitar, that “grunge” has touched the band’s development to some extent too. And it all works so well that the best way to characterize Vatrene ulice is to tag them as “a concretely defined, tightly arranged, yet bluntly direct rock principle”. So the traces of musical influences only surface in certain parts of the songs. Particularly interesting is the song Usnuli grad se budi iz sna, with a motif in the verse that draws very tastefully on elements of the blues, and into which Fila’s vocal color and approach settle perfectly.
The likeable quartet delivered an excellent stage performance, and neither Diskurz nor Grrizli Madams before them held back either. Sadly, in the closing stretch of the concert, with the songs Samo bog zna, Dok padaju glave and Moja generacija, in just under an hour together, they drove their set home in front of a dozen lonely souls at Orto bar, which is surely a big shame. We were robbed of the kind of character that a bigger, more responsive crowd brings out. Apparently we’ll have to catch Vatrene ulice in Croatia, where the shows are supposedly a lot more intense, since a better turnout is said to get them there. I’m talking especially about that touch of spontaneity and an even bigger loosening of the brakes once the real energy flux starts flowing between crowd and band. This is a band that’s different, one that cultivates a compact, cutting, yet melodically shaped rock, and could win a solid core of fans down the line. They sound convincing and stand firmly on their own two feet, also in terms of the excellent lyrics, marked by the singer Fila’s personal, confessional verses. Vatrene ulice are something different, something fresh. They draw on the experience and wisdom of the past and pour it into the energy of the present, with their eyes fixed on the future. If they blossom, expect the follow-up to “9 po Richteru” to arrive in a relatively short time.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
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