Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Kamnik / MC Kotlovnica / Slovenia
Concert date: 05.10.2013
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: €0.00 (free entry)
Like it or not, summer’s been over for a while now. Autumn has been showing its teeth for some time with its foggy weather, dropping temperatures and the occasional downpour, and with October the college crowd has followed the high schoolers back into the lecture halls. But you’ve got to look for the bright side in everything, otherwise all we’d have left is thoughts of doom. With autumn’s arrival, the clubs have started opening their doors again after lying dormant through the warmest part of the year, when festivals and holiday activities take over. So on the first Saturday of October, Kamnik’s Kotlovnica was back in business with its Wednesday-style night out – free entry, fun drinking games, and a lineup of Hellcats and Space Unicorn On Fire on top of that. The perfect reason for Rockline to head to the foot of the Kamnik Alps too!
A few minutes past ten in the evening, Space Unicorn On Fire were already on stage, a fresh band on the Slovenian metal scene that nevertheless already has a Metaldays gig in Tolmin under its belt. The »Space Unicorns« work in an interesting corner of power metal, with occasional jumps into hard rock and even prog when it comes to the interplay between Matej’s guitar and Matjaž’s keyboards. Kotlovnica’s quirky interior, with its pillars in the middle of the room and a sunken area in front of the stage, doesn’t offer the best acoustics, and this time it played tricks on the Unicorns too. Up front, we listeners suffered through the Tavt / Egzi vocal harmonies, since Egzi seriously drowned out his colleague in the middle of the stage, who at times was barely audible. From what I heard, Space Unicorn On Fire have shed the parody vibe that followed their debut in front of the metal public earlier this year. The band’s stage approach was dead serious and focused – so much so that frontman Tavt, in the middle of some dynamic stomping around, lost his footing toward the end of the set and landed in the crowd for a moment. Despite a professional performance and plenty of experience, though, they couldn’t hide a lack of tightness, which was most noticeable whenever the keyboards came in on the songs. The band’s stage look is amusing too, since each of the Unicorns cultivates their own distinct image (Egzi in a Yankee outfit and keyboardist Matjaž in doctor’s gear stand out), which makes them come across less as a solid unit and more as a conglomerate of five individual musicians. With their epic Stratovarius / Edguy formula, Space Unicorn On Fire are a welcome addition to our scene, but for anything more they’ll have to roll up their sleeves even harder and iron out some beginner’s mistakes. This was my first time seeing them live, and I hope it’s not the last, because they shyly hide even more potential, and only the future will show whether they actually want to cash in on it.
The headliners of the night were Hellcats, who, thanks to the interesting formula of four women, get more media attention than most of their male peers, and with their steady gigging they’ve slowly reached the point where they can headline a show. Especially now, with a big milestone behind them! A few days before the Kamnik show, Hellcats put their debut album »Divja pot« on the market (Rockline review here), so expect to see them on concert stages a lot more in the coming period. These girls are the real deal! While sisters Saša and Sanja Zagorc steered the ship on stage with a measured, cool-headed approach, though still with a mischievous smile across their faces, it was the new but by now established frontwoman Ajda Kovačič who spread the much-needed energy with her youthful dancing among the crowd. Their simple, one-dimensional style, which with a single guitar leaves little room to maneuver, is tailor-made for fans of old-school bands like AC/DC, Judas Priest or Accept! Guitarist Katja, the band’s central instrumental figure, laid down riffs deftly and stuck to the »less is more« rule in her solos too – Hellcats bet on directness, both in the structure of the songs and in the melodic multi-part choruses that typically mark the peak of a track. The only real minus for these devilish cats is the somewhat naive lyrics, but that’s exactly what wins listeners over right away, so even on a first listen to a song, by the second or third time around the chorus you can already join the girls in the dance steps. The timeline of mostly original material was filled out with a few covers (Warlock, AC/DC, Judas Priest), and the girls wrapped up their all-too-short get-together, as expected, with their best-known song, Divja pot. That’s just what the stature and the voice were like, and the heart is in the right place. The debut is out, so for Hellcats there’s only one direction left: up!
Setlist
1. Mačke pekla
2. Vladar noči
3. I Rule The Ruins
4. Prerojena
5. Ustaviva čas
6. Highway to hell
7. Viking
8. Čas je da greš
9. Sanjam demone
10. Breaking The Law
11. Bojevnica
12. Heavy metal
13. Divja pot
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