Venue: Rock Cafe / Postojna
Concert date: 16.12.2009
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: Free entry
Last Thursday, Postojna’s Rock Cafe hosted the second act of the Epic RockLine Contest. This time we sailed the waters of punk rock. After the grand (non-)arrival of Zagreb punk legends Eksodus (!), two local bands, Cosa Nostra and Taking Over Mars, battled it out for a spot in the next round. The youngsters’ sets more or less confirmed a well-known fact: even here at home, the young punk rock forces have a hard time offering anything all that new these days.
COSA NOSTRA
Cosa Nostra are a trio whose racket you could most easily define, genre-wise, as a passionately spiced musical wrap of garage rock & roll, with recognizable punk elements sprinkled between the layers. As you might guess from the above, precision isn’t exactly a virtue of our barbecue buddies. And that’s also where most of Cosa Nostra’s arsenal hides. The music the trio serves up so roughly feels like pure chaos in some undecorated, hard-to-pin-down context! At heart, Cosa Nostra do play punk rock, and they play it full throttle. But it veers off the basic recipe with plenty of rhythmic switcheroos that hit out of nowhere and at rarely announced intervals. Barring just a few details. The tireless little foot on Matjaž Obran’s bass pedal kept adding unexpected spice to the expected pogo party, and he clearly cultivates his very own way of understanding tight rhythmic pounding. The tight stuff was of course only a sample, and the excursions were accordingly uncontrolled, but all the more fun for it.
Cosa Nostra surprised with their genre variety, the result of a clever rotation of stage roles. Most of the vocal duties were decently delivered by guitarist Tadej Pomperger, while here and there bassist Marko Čuturilo took over the vocals completely. The pair’s vocal wobbling managed to adopt a unique sound that could be a problem for ears used to more concrete melodic harmony. Which is, of course, one of Cosa Nostra’s trump cards. The trio’s real potential lies in exactly this inconsistency, or you could say unconventionality, especially when viewed through the lens of the narrow confines of modern punk rock culture. To simply please the crowd, there’s just too much genre color here, and a good helping of individuality also shows in the simple but far from spoiled, teenage-annoying lyrics, or in the clever rhythmic departures from established, or rather expected, musical structures. Simply put, Cosa Nostra have balls, character and swagger that take them beyond trendy, pre-menstrual punk rock hysteria.
TAKING OVER MARS
The story with Taking Over Mars is a little different. The guys from Kranj have thoroughly adapted their own definition of punk to a modern interpretation of the genre, whose many familiar incarnations today are generally as alike as two peas in a pod. Their stage show, unlike their predecessors’, was more polished, meaning the performance itself ranked a level or two higher. The guys didn’t push the swapping of musical roles seen earlier, and in fact those stayed carefully assigned throughout the set, and the choreographed bits they showed were dreamed up along similar lines. That’s probably also why Taking Over Mars would hardly be filed under any truly shaking genre challenges. Everything they do strongly recalls the tried-and-tested formula of musical rampaging, which in its most harmless, i.e. accessible, version of punk rock or maybe even punk pop, politely bows to the trends of today, and in doing so of course wipes away any trace of authentic taste and credible rebellion. In other words, Taking Over Mars sound like Zablujenci before the vasectomy that befell the poor guys in their last years of commercial augmentation. Well, let’s not just grumble. The dudes may not have made a name for themselves with some wildly innovative stage approach, but they pulled it off with confidence, no slip-ups and a high level of energy, which contributed a lot to the intensity of what went down on stage.
You could say Thursday night passed without any major shocks. Both Cosa Nostra and Taking Over Mars put two punk derivatives to the test for us, two that have grown over the years into completely different branches of punk rock evolution. There was something to hear for everyone. While the former are no strangers to exploring the reach of their own musical expression, the latter mostly stick carefully to a proven formula that deliberately sacrifices breadth of expression for compactness and stylistic accessibility to a wider audience. The latter option turned out to be the winning one in the end (RockLine’s winner announcement here). The only minus of the evening was the poor turnout, that chronic lack of interest in supporting up-and-coming bands that remains the Achilles’ heel of the Slovenian club scene. You could say that, in this respect, yet another chance to break the monotony of everyday musical life with a bigger bang was surely missed.
Photos: Mojca Perdih
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