Author: Urban Bolta
Venue: Kino Šiška / Ljubljana
Concert date: 15.02.2010
Attendance: 600
Ticket price: €10 / €12 (day of show)
Every year there comes a day when doughnuts are waiting for us around every corner, stomachs are stuffed, and there’s a positive energy in the air. In short, a great day to hit a gig, costume or no costume. This year’s Shrove Tuesday saw the third Yu go! night go down at the Center for Urban Culture in Šiška, serving up a three-band package: our own Carnaval, plus two Croatian acts, the all-female trio Larve and the Rijeka provocateurs Let 3.
CARNAVAL
The night was opened by local boys Carnaval, a band who put out their debut “2” last year and, according to Radio Študent, earned a spot on the podium in the best Slovenian albums of the past year category.
An ice-cold, doomy riff kicked off the set. Carnaval started telling their story to a lonely room, but luckily the noise drew a decent number of music-hungry folks from the foyer into the thick of it, which in turn motivated the band to squeeze out the best they’ve got. Carnaval ran through their debut and in about forty minutes laid out their vision, which is most easily pinned down as stoner rock. Their carefree playing revolves around heavy, distorted guitars that set a pretty dark mood and, without meaning to, recall the late eighties, when grunge was being born. Add a dreamy vocal in the style of Layne Staley and comparing them to Alice in Chains wouldn’t be so far off at all. But the guys build their songs on progressive foundations, work power blues patterns into the grunge morbidity and even a drawn-out doomy riff here and there, and the cherry on top of this interesting music is an oddly tuned rhythm section that can surprise you and, with an out-of-the-box solution, steer a song in a completely new direction. The Ljubljana crew suffer from a lack of stage charisma, but I’m convinced that road mileage will fix that flaw too, and then the satisfaction after a Carnaval show will no doubt be even greater than it was this time.
LARVE
Second up was the spiky all-female trio from Rijeka, Larve. The fact that the band has only three members can be very confusing live, since a synth program plays the role of the drummer, so the listener keeps unconsciously glancing at the empty drum stool at the back of the stage. Once you get used to the unusual setup, watching Larve, if you’re a fan of new wave, is a real treat! Larve were born three decades too late, hooked as they are on the new wave legacy. The Rijeka kind, not the Zagreb kind. If the Zagreb scene of the time bet on guitar phrases, the Rijeka scene saw the synthesizer as a hugely important musical element. For Larve it’s the foundation every song is built on, and sometimes the guitar seems almost secondary. If you let yourself go, the dark, psychedelic music of these three punk girls carries you off to a whole other dimension beyond this world, helped along by the constant two-part vocals from guitarist Dunja and bassist Petra. No need to guess twice that Larve come from Rijeka, because you can feel the strong influence of the local new wave heroes, Termiti, Ogledala or Mrtvi Kanal. The psychedelic side of Larve outweighs the punk, so the girls never really dive into full-on thrashing waters; the guiding principle of their songs is building drama and giving you goosebumps. A great show, which sadly lasted barely half an hour.
LET 3
Despite the excellent warm-up from two support bands coming from totally different takes on rock’n’roll, it was only the Rijeka weirdos Let 3 who managed to properly fill the main hall. Well, could you even find a better band for Shrove Tuesday than this already circus-like outfit from Croatia, known even more for their on- and off-stage provocations and their freaky style, which turns many a stomach, than for the music itself? Probably not.
At the end of last year Let 3 reissued two cult albums from the start of their career, Two Dogs Fuckin’ and El Desperado, via Dallas, and before that came the live DVD Živa Pička. In short, Let 3 made sure that even during an apparent studio drought (it’s been almost five years since their last release, Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačka) there’s plenty of talk about them in the media. So a visit to the Slovenian capital, a stronghold of their fan base, was a logical move. After a good two years since their visit to Cvetličarna, we were once again treated to madness that goes beyond the limits of a normally functioning human being.
It all started out in pure hard rock fashion. “U Rupi od smole”, “Niotkuda” and “Ne trebam te” took care of those few souls who look for actual music in the Let 3 phenomenon and are usually disappointed. After such a great opening, where the Croats proved they can still play punchy art punk tracks and even enjoy themselves doing it, the question arises on its own: how far could Let 3 have gone (strictly musically speaking) if they’d stuck to the artistic inspiration of their early career and resisted the temptation of needless circus antics? “El Desperado”, “Fuck Famiglia” and a cover of the cult “Vjeran pas” kept the good early form going, right up until Prljo flung a decent polyvinyl costume into the corner, which meant it was time for that other side of the Let 3 reality. Temperamental Balkan folk patterns and electronic beats packed into the songs that followed turned the rock party into a carnival debauchery miles away from the guidelines of traditional rock values. Tracks like “Zurle Trešat” or “Sokol” flipped the initial positive impression of the average music connoisseur on its head, while the hall, after seeming dead for a moment, broke into a party-hungry rave-up. The hits “Profesor Jakov” and a cover of Bele Vrane’s “Tazi tazi”, partly sung in the original Slovenian lyrics, just poured more oil on the fire. The mustachioed men on stage are clearly having a blast; Mrle, Prlja and co. play like it’s their last show ever. The energy flows both ways, from the stage to the floor and back. Even a skeptical visitor feels at least a two-way party, stronger than the fact that this is all just a well-rehearsed act by Croatian “musicians”.
No doubt about it, Let 3 are only alternative at the roots, but their tentacles reach so far that they mix up the crowd, and in cross-section there are more people who just want a party, even a cheap one, than followers of the rock’n’roll tradition. The main goal of the night was achieved, the people had a blast, even though Let 3 didn’t show all of their manly attributes and this time actually stuck to the basic rules of decency. The support bands did a great job too, though it was once again proven that unestablished bands fit better in an intimate club setting than on the stage of a room as big as Kino Šiška.
Photos: Mojca Perdih
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