Helmet Ride the Wings of the Apocalypse and Thunder Through CUK Kino Šiška Once Again (2017)

Poba Last updated 18 April 2020

Location: Ljubljana / CUK Kino Šiška / Slovenia
Date: 01.03.2017

It’s unreal how time flies. Barely two and a half years have gone by since American alternative metallers Helmet dropped by CUK Kino Šiška on the tour where they played their album “Betty” in full. Front to back. This time they’re back in Europe and back in the Slovenian capital, bringing fresh original material with them. Last October saw the release of the band’s eighth studio album overall, titled “Dead to the World”.

A little over two years ago, Page Hamilton and his crew played without a support act. This time they brought one along. Local H’s roots, just like Helmet’s, actually reach way back into the eighties. Today the band is a duo, represented by founding and original member Scott Lucas on vocals and guitar, and drummer Ryan Harding. This long-running outfit has a string of albums under its belt, though Local H haven’t always performed as a twosome. Under the lights of the small hall at Kino Šiška, the two seasoned, energy-loaded-to-the-teeth musicians sweated buckets, and they won the crowd over in no time with sheer heart as they rolled out heavy riffs. Ryan stunned with his untamed wildness, bordering on beastly abandon, as he mercilessly pounded the cymbals and the rest of the drum kit. Lucas delivered a razor-sharp, avalanche-like, reverb-soaked and fat wall of sound that swaggered through the unruly guitar phrases, while rounding out the show with some seriously wild vocals. Alternative rock built on raw garage grit, the kind of thing that made it easy for the unwary at the venue that night to go deaf.

Helmet showed up with the same lineup as on their October 2014 visit to Kino Šiška. Even though the set list leaned on the new songs from “Dead to the World”, the quartet didn’t need to be asked twice to spice up the repertoire with older cuts, especially from the first four albums of their career, now cult classics. You can hear plenty of things in Helmet’s music, and the joy of it is that hardly anyone sounds like them, if anyone at all.

Why are Helmet so revered even in these new times, as the packed house at Kino Šiška confirmed, with a noticeably fired-up group of Italian fans down in the front rows during the show? Because of Hamilton, of course. It’s no small thing to be such a distinctive, multilayered guitarist that the great David Bowie himself picks you for his backing band.

Page announced what a superb guitarist he can be the moment he stepped on stage, warming up his fingers with jazz-tinged soloing variations. Then the band thundered into Give It together. The monstrous stomp of steel-hardened riffs and extreme grit, which suddenly flooded the room, was best taken in somewhere in the middle, or middle-front. Hypnosis! Over on the far left or far right you could go deaf for a moment, the monitors were cranked up so high they pumped out a ton of decibels. One moment Hamilton used a lovely, clean, mildly mystical voice, the next he turned into a raging madman, snarling nasally and gutturally through his anger-fueled poetry about the devaluation of the individual in this long-collapsed society and, ultimately, civilization. Layer upon layer, reinforced by the contributions of rhythm guitarist Dan Beeman and an extremely lively, dynamic rhythm section with the occasional thickened groove moment, watched over by syncopated riffs. At times hypnotic, even eerily alienated, then drawn close again with the gentleness of delicate finesse. Post-apocalypse and catharsis finally kicked off this evening, in the company of Helmet!

author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

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