Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden am Woerthersee / Austria
Concert date: 27.04.2012
Attendance: 40
Ticket price: €30.00 (advance) / €34.00 (day of the show)
What do you get when you put together a dark-skinned fireball of a vocalist, Dacia Bridges (WMD- feat. Lemmy Kilmister, Tape, I Begin To Wonder, Shakedown, Mousse T.), Doug Wimbish on bass (Living Colour, Tackhead, Sugar Hill Gang, Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, Depeche Mode), Flo Dauner on drums (Die Fantastischen Vier, Paul van Dyk, Sarah Brightman, Dee Phazz) and Alex Scholpp on guitar (Farmer Boys, Tarja, Tieflader, WMD, Sinner)? A well-honed variation of wired groove metal rock, laid on top of a bold funk mattress!
The Help is a fresh formation. A week ago they put out their debut album » The Help…Is On The Way« and picked the Bluesiana club in Velden as one of the few stops on a short European tour that was staked out with just five shows. Four musicians who never take a creative break have known each other for a while. Scholpp, who’s also a darling of plenty of European power metal fans, got in touch with Doug Wimbish when they both played for Tarja Turunen (ex-Nightwish). Scholpp and Dauner had previously played with Dacia in her band Dacia Bridges & Band,…
The musicians’ reputations alone made it clear that this Bluesiana date was not to be missed. With Bluesiana almost completely empty, the crew waited until 21:50 before finally stepping on stage. At first it was only Dauner, Scholpp and Wimbish up there, opening the show with the instrumental Make Way. With some lazy rhythmic jamming, they slowly and gradually coaxed out of it a massively noisy, detonation-packed, solid driving rhythm that was meant to rally the ranks in front of the stage. But this time, there were no ranks. With the song Whatever, Dacia joined them on stage. A singer with a hugely energetic character and polished vocal charisma, explosive to the core, with an innate feel for dosing out soul improvisation flourishes with finesse, and a performer who completely throws herself into her vivid, well-crafted stage persona. It was her presence on stage that instantly dispelled the alienating feeling that we were, in fact, in an empty Bluesiana.
Scholpp provided a low-tuned, modernly smeared groove-metal wall of sound of extraordinary mass, with Wimbish’s famous funk touch and Dauner’s incredible agility and nimbleness setting up an effective framework for it. The drummer pounded so violently that actual wood shavings flew off his sticks into the room during the show.
The Help played pretty much their entire studio debut at the show, and Doug Wimbish got the obligatory exposure, delivering an excellent ballad-style solo in the middle of the set, using his tried and tested method. This time Wimbish left his laptop at home, but that of course didn’t mean there was no pile of effect pedals laid out at his feet, which he used to memorize the lead motifs, lock them into a delay effect, and layer tone after tone of ridiculously beautiful soloing over the form he’d built. He strolled through it like a ballet dancer, in his proven, theatrical way, across the empty space in front of the stage. A Doug Wimbish solo spot? Need you ask. Definitely one of the highlights of this show. Dacia Bridges shone especially in the acoustic Let Me, where only Alex Scholpp accompanied her on acoustic guitar. He then, in a similar experimental spirit to Doug Wimbish before him (who coaxed the sound of an electric guitar out of his bass), coaxed an electric guitar sound out of the acoustic through effects and soloed as if he had his ESP guitar in his hands rather than an acoustic. A spontaneous slalom into instrumental sonic experimentalism went by the name of Resistance Of The Cell, in which Wimbish and Scholpp also thoroughly egged on Dauner until he “drove himself” into a short drum solo.
In the finale, Dacia Bridges, the main energy generator of The Help and its driving engine, called on all the girls and ladies in the room to join her in singing the song Call Me (the original of which belongs to Blondie). For that purpose she came down off the stage, and it was downright funny to watch her literally beg the members of the fairer sex to finally get out from behind their tables and keep her company in front of the stage for the number. Mission accomplished! And so the band wrapped up the regular part of their set after an hour and twenty minutes.
For the encore the band returned only as an instrumental trio and played one more song, Echoes. A pure instrumental from The Help’s debut, which once again underlined how beautifully the jazz-funk groove, as created by the devilish bass genius Doug Wimbish, ties together with the infectious, classically conceived melodic norm of European origin, whose main creator is Scholpp. It was surprising and honestly unusual to see Wimbish with a pick. That’s a great rarity, but the hardness of The Help’s sound simply demands it.
The visit to this intimate hang with a loud band, an hour and a half long, was fully rewarded! A week ago this quartet released a debut that promises a lot. The combination is a happy one, with creative distinctiveness and a challenging “groove” whose chemistry is highly contagious. Let’s hope that, given how packed all four members’ schedules are, they find enough time for The Help to stick together for years, put out another studio album or two and come back for another tour. As for you, until then it’s up to you to get properly acquainted with who The Help are, and to support the band the next time they visit the Bluesiana club. By showing up!
Setlist
1. Make Way
2. Whatever
3. Heard It All Before
4. Late Late Show
5. After Dark
6. Farcaster
7. Swiri
8. Let Me
9. Resistance of the Cell
10. Hal
11. American Dream
12. Bump The Grind
13. Call Me
—encore—
14. Echoes
Photo Gallery
