Author: Urban Bolta
Venue: Orto bar / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 08.12.2012
Attendance: 20
Ticket price: 8€
On the second Saturday of December, with the cold biting in its most stubborn form and snow burying a good chunk of Slovenia, Kraljevski Apartman played Ljubljana’s Orto bar, their very first show on the Sunny Side of the Alps. They’re a long-running heavy metal outfit from Serbia who, despite building a name and earning cult status on their home scene, just can’t seem to reach listeners outside their native Serbia.
Kraljevski Apartman started writing their story in the mid-nineties. Riding a wave of consistently good albums of old-school heavy metal laced with a pinch of recognizable Balkan melody, they became one of the leading names on the home scene. With the release of their sixth studio album »Igre bez pravila«, the Serbs set up their promo push wider than usual: with a gig in Zagreb and another in Ljubljana the next day, they started promoting their name across the whole territory of the former common country. After a reportedly great response at Zagreb’s Klaonica club on Friday, the Serbs faced a new test: Ljubljana’s Orto bar. First, though, they had to actually make it to Ljubljana: according to oral tradition, their van got stuck a few times in a ferocious snowstorm in Lower Carniola, but thanks to the short distance between the Croatian and Slovenian capitals they still managed to arrive at the “scene of the crime” in time for the evening.
But damn, Orto bar was empty even at ten in the evening! A bit over a dozen souls, surely no more than twenty, was fewer than the five Serbian musicians had expected, so the start of the show was laid-back, almost sleepy, despite the punchy opening tracks Gradski ratnici, Mračan grad and Dao sam sve od sebe. Zoran Lalović – Lotke, the gray-haired frontman who returned to the band after a short split following the album »Čuvar tajni« (2008), only addressed the crowd for the first time after the opening songs, and with the help of typical Serbian self-pitying humor and satire he began to break down the wall between the band and the half-empty club space of Orto bar.
There was one change in the lineup! For a decade and a half Kraljevski Apartman had two guitarists, but now the second guitar has been replaced by keyboardist Nebojša Maksimović, a university-trained musician and a real pro at his craft. With this instrumental reshuffle the Serbs moved even closer to the retro heavy rock sound of bands like Dio, Rainbow or Uriah Heep, since a new ambient layer, the keyboards so indispensable in classic rock outfits, now hovers over those razor-sharp riffs the whole time.
The quintet on stage walked through all the older hits and also slotted three novelties from the current record »Igre bez pravila« into the regular set, and they blended in with the older tunes perfectly credibly. How could they not, when the dozen or so people in the crowd knew exactly what they were getting into! In one of his between-song remarks, Lotke said he realized that only the band’s biggest fans had turned up, us included. From that moment on it was all uphill! The band, resigned to the modest turnout, oiled up the machinery and squeezed the most out of a seemingly unpromising evening – in proportion to their current form, of course. Years spare no one, and Lotke will have to come to terms with that too, since his voice doesn’t serve him as well as it did a decade ago, so he swapped the high notes for a throaty vocal even more often than on the studio recordings, one so recognizable in our part of the Balkan cauldron. If many people can’t stomach bands like Bijelo Dugme or Divlje Jagode precisely because of their intense Balkan melody, the same might happen to them with Kraljevski Apartman.
After the »Maiden-style« galloping of Posle oluje (javi se), the quintet marched off stage and came back just for the evergreen Rainbow classic Long Live Rock n’ Roll, with only Lotke on vocals and Nesa on keyboards left on stage, and for a final farewell they played the ballad Sve u svoje vreme. Despite the miserable turnout, the first meeting with Kraljevski Apartman on Slovenian soil was a bullseye, since bands of their kind visiting the land beneath Triglav are more the exception than the rule. So I’m urging all fans of that heavy rock ex-Yugo sound: do yourselves a favor, mark their next visit here in your calendar, and forget about the (overchewed) Jagode for at least one day… you won’t regret it!
Setlist
1. Gradski ratnici
2. Mračan grad
3. Dao sam sve od sebe
4. Slomljeno srce
5. Ne verujem u lažne andjele
7. U lavirintu sedam greha
8. Misterija
9. Dodaj gas
10. Jesen
11. Dama iz kraljevskog apartmana
12. Pandora
13. Magija
14. Ruka pravde / Rocker
15. Nikad se ne predajem
16. Ranjena zver
17. Izaberi jedan put
18. Ona vedri i oblači
19. Posle oluje (javi se)
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20. Long Live Rock N’ Roll
21. Zgubljen u vremenu
22. Sve u svoje vreme
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