Author: Rok Klemše
Venue: Rock Cafe / Postojna
Concert date: March 31, 2010
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: free admission
For the ninth time running, the Epic RockLine Contest lured us into the warm embrace of Postojna’s Rock Cafe last Thursday, this time with three excellent acts. The closing night of the regular round flew by way too fast in the company of Noom8, Almost Rage and Divine Illusion, whose inventive, unyielding stage presence and enviably high level of playing once again proved the point of backing unestablished scenes that are hungry to prove their own musical vision.
NOOM8
The biggest unknown of the night was Noom8’s set. In great spirits, the band stunned the crowd with a Spartan-style rotation through a colorful palette of genre influences, putting together one of the most enjoyable experiences of the contest’s first part. Pinning down where they belong is tough. At heart they seem to be built mostly on grunge, which, luckily, mutated long ago into a refined, tightly served musical cocktail that keeps a nourishing brew of rock & roll derivatives in circulation with fresh, innovative touches. The band happily washes it all down with a heaping helping of expertly placed backing vocals and unpredictable rhythmic turns, dictated by the finely polished “language” of drummer Dejan Stopar and bassist Teo Korenika. And to top it off, Noom8 have a female guitarist in the ranks! The words of a frustrated mildew-dweller sitting on a record stockpile of testosterone, you’ll say. Relax, she (the girl, that is) is miles away from some fabricated Barbie torso who squeezes out a barely audible chord once in a blue moon. She carries a serious share of building the sound on stage, vocals included, and her fingers love to twist out a particularly spicy solo or two, well-seasoned enough for most of her fellow six-string guys, packing their full sacks. It seems Noom8 have pretty much everything, well, almost. They’d undoubtedly be far better off without the pop-ditty-style vocals, which hug the genre-twisting nicely enough, but are honestly too sugary and predictable for such a biting musical brew.
ALMOST RAGE
Almost Rage are coastal lads raised in true thrash spirit, who started out as a trio, and in Postojna the guys gave their newest addition, guitarist Bojan Sinkovič, his premiere test run. After the name change, the single-guitar band has, as if by some logical evolutionary process, grown into a twelve-string guitar playground for testing finger-speed stamina, which is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. Befitting the reinforcements, the quartet quickly drew some seriously thickened parallels with Metallica, let’s say the one from its so-called “healthiest period”. These pulsed shamelessly like overbearing hemorrhoids, especially through the vocal delivery of Edi Udovič, an obvious debtor to James Hetfield’s legacy. Whatever, Almost Rage came across as a well-oiled, high-octane thrash metal machine with heaps of simmering character, forging its weapons from simple, hard-hitting songs with not a shred of reserve or regret. The miles logged wandering from stage to stage show, understandably, in the toughness and confidence of the band’s core, namely the trio section mentioned at the start, which knew how to tailor the arrangements to the “delicate” needs of the freshly paired-up guitar rattling. The whole package kills on stage, constantly widening the dimensions of the sound. Worth adding: despite all the cliché of wrapping themselves in “bay area thrash metal” colors, Almost Rage still sound fresh, even spontaneous in their own way of developing the expected thrash routine.
DIVINE ILLUSION
Divine Illusion had already started confidently smoothing out the surface of the Rock Cafe stage while the hordes of their supporters finally got their courage up and crawled out together from behind the monsoon-like backdrop of Thursday’s Postojna night. Taking over the front lines was next in the script of these moral patrons of local heroes, who built their reputation on worshipping power metal iconography. Just like their metal colleagues Almost Rage, Divine Illusion left no room for doubt. The brisk power metal onslaught, riding on melodic catchiness, loads of guitar riffs and the synthetically coated sound of keyboards, drew quite a few outbursts of enthusiasm, though (for those with their feet firmly on the ground) it understandably came across as too predictable to be seen as anything out of the ordinary. Still, the guys know how to serve it up, at least judging by the tasting of organically structured original material, which demands a high level of technical know-how and, ultimately, of course, tight playing from the whole Divine Illusion orchestra. Its baton was waved in perfect tune by the band’s lead throat Simon Simšič, who put his famed vocal flexibility to a fairly successful test on the Helloween classic “Eagle Fly Free” too, escorted, in strict power metal tradition, by lightning-fast guitar and keyboard solos soaring above thick layers of rotating thunder from the double bass pedal. More than impressive enough a performance to confirm their reputation as Slovenia’s leading power metal outfit.
Photos: Mojca Perdih
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