Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: 27.12.2013
Attendance: 70 – 80
Ticket price: €3.00
A few months ago I gushed that I love dandelions, and that hasn’t changed one bit on these cold December days. On top of a heavily vitamin-enriched love of salad products, that love got a serious boost lately from Ljubljana’s Dandelion Children, a trio of two dudes with guitar firepower and one rock-solid fine lady behind the drums who knows how to serve up a rhythm. Since it’s rare for the festive season to be crowned with fairly intense live appearances by young avant-garde bearers of garage untamedness and Alan Ford-style humor, it was only a matter of time before we’d land on the same coordinates of space and time again after Trnfest. This Friday the promise was all the bigger because, besides Dandelion Children, indie rockers from Upper Carniola, the five-year-old John Doe (or Janez Dovč to his friends), also announced their arrival on the Orto stage, so the decision to head to the Ljubljana club of exceptional name wasn’t in question for a second.
That quite a few people were thinking along the same lines, despite the gloomy, foggy holiday days, was proven by a cluster of a good thirty people outside Orto well before nine o’clock. A recession-friendly three euros for entry was a great send-off for plenty of music-loving enthusiasts, and a bit before ten p.m. things started shifting into a higher gear. »What do you think? Shall we start?« Jure and Anže ask the crowd, and above all the sound guy, amid the echoes of a nicely effected mic. After a well-seasoned intro of fat, beefed-up bass, which Jure tames with confidence, plus drums that groan solidly and give resonantly under the blows of Katja’s sticks, Jure joins the dance and the session with an effectively balanced, souped-up Stratocaster. The rhythmic trio hums at full blast with a punchy version of slightly cleaned-up garage noisiness from the first bar of the splendid F1ee4 (which, I hope, will see the light of day on the band’s seventh record in the near future), and Anže’s confident (almost Cobain-like) raspy vocal immediately makes up for the slightly mumbly, at-first-glance slightly absent communication between the lead vocalist, in the field of three dandelion lights, and the audience, which, I don’t know why, keeps its distance from the stage boards. A high-octane serving of a good grunge-enriched cocktail of White Stripes metrics and the gloomy cynicism of Jack Black is this time rounded out with something funkoid and airy. I’m Going Extinct, a song off the album Perhaps Maybe, sounds more lucid, less screechy and squealing, and from the right side a hefty dose of lows from a well-calibrated five-string bass blows directly and perfectly in, with a good guitar riff and a just-raw-enough drum. It’s as if a sliver of Peter Dekleva’s magic had sneaked into the whole thing and the young trio had evolutionarily taken a few elements of early R.H.C.P. into their core. The mixed style of these time-aired songs continues with the newer song Warpaint, in which the stage performance of the young but well-tempered trio that goes by the name Dandelion Children had no shortage of confidence. Sips of beer from the bottle help too, as does the fact that the band’s sound is flawlessly solid and almost indestructible, and the young lad and lass are well prepared for stage challenges and outpourings of Monty Python-esque humor. Sonically too, when Mr. Evaluator sails off again from stoner-grungy solidity into the world of funkadelia, disco and spaghetti westerns (I knew we lean toward country in Slovenia, because farmers, John Lacklands, aren’t in short supply even in the Slovenian capital, so I can only chime in on the meaningful provocation from the Dandelions’ lead throat, who after the song Never Fine announces something more farmer-juicy – the song Never Handled). Dandelion Children are a well-oiled machine that holds nothing sacred – not the audience’s expectations, not the untouchability of memories of the past, unless it serves their own liberation, release, discharge of tension and above all a better-quality event. Again I stress: Dandelion Children are anything but a conventional band that fits into the frames of normal. The novelty Indistinct Frames again serves up a show of the trio’s punching power, and after the perfect fusion of the eclectically brutal charge of guitar and bass the whole thing locks into a newly postulated frame of sonic perfection with a bit more funk and more articulate garage distortion. The continuation had been seen before and was expected, but after a flying swap of guitar and bass on stage the gig gets that cherry on top that fans expect from Dandelion Children. Goalless Confessions begins, as usual, with the hangout of an imaginary Jack Black and a garage psychotic who, after settling into the bouncy ska metric of Don’t Bother The Goat, proves yet again that the trio never intends to burden itself with genre purism. Also because clichés are totally pointless, and free style is so gladdeningly colorful and calorie-packed. After the expected single Smitten (you know, the song where Dandelion allow themselves to invite zombies to the prom …), the Dandeloid Ah Ja sails into the set rather unexpectedly, a well-seasoned surfer detour into the spheres of rustic rock, which the incorrigible dandelions allow themselves to speed up a bit and amplify with distortion, and underneath the whole thing you can hear, besides the influences of the great Frusciante, something dirty-beautiful. By the way: did I mention that this time Anže handles the soloing and serves up the guitar sensuality, while Jure lets loose on the five strings of the bass? Don’t you dunk it! Yes, I swear! And as the evening’s ending nears, Jure sums it up with a screaming, punchy version of the folk-ified hit Ne Maki ga, without which I can’t and mustn’t imagine a Dandelion gig. An energetic trip up the guitar neck, to which Dandelion Children add a bit more smoky reggae potency of musical psychedelia, plus a bit of disco, funk, groove and a full load of the egg essence of rock-solid dangly oil! The whole thing plays out extended-sexy, ecstatic, inflammable. It can only be closed by something additionally splendid and previously tested on unsuspecting test subjects. History Of Fail, with its dirty groovin’, is meant for sobering up, and after the fade-out of a perfect alternative to the alternative we can only admit, delighted, that in their game of elements of perfect music and hilarious humor Dandelion Children are way ahead of all the competition. The »Mindfu(n)k« of dandelion potency was sweatily sweet and tasty, and the lad and lass deserve sincere praise and a roaring round of applause in written form too!
What came next was a total unknown, as befits Janez Dovč, a Slovenianized loser who goes by the name JohnDoe. After the first flying swaps and a scan of the uniformed hipster soldiery below the stage, I wasn’t expecting anything good, or just an approximation of what Kings Of Leon, Keiser Chiefs or Franz Ferdinand usually serve up (well, in Slovenia the ones in charge of that are the »Canadians from Slovenia« Toronto Drug Bust). This time something altogether different was in the cards, since the preview already said that JohnDoe are gig-hardened bearers from Upper Carniola of supposedly unique quality music, which on top of everything would be completely original. Aleš Svetina picks up the guitar, Bojan Marinko sits behind the drums, Tilen Knaflič takes up position to the side, and after the first presses of the organ keys by Luka Zemljič, evidently breathed through by John Lord, the show begins. In a slightly clumsy but endearingly confused style, the band’s lead throat Marko Zemljič also steps onto the stage to applause, and the show is on. With an association to the emperor’s new clothes and to the bands that left their mark on the turn of the millennium, the action shifts from the garage into the more mainstream fashion current of sweeter-spiced sounds of simplistic guitars, keyboards and emphasized accents on drums and keyboards, promising a bit of British invasiveness of slightly faded sounds. The holiday-appropriate opener December Lights is an indie-rock number that, with a strong keyboard sound, serves up well-greased rhythm guitars, sweet singable choruses and a rather pompous association with the aforementioned unmissable influences of the new generation of fashionable rockers; still, this time the Upper Carniolans present themselves with their melodic, atmospheric hangout of positivity, musical spirit and love of organic music. Franz Ferdinand was no illusion or hallucination, since JohnDoe, by jumping to the well-known singalong hit Take Me Out, bravely tease the ever copyright-burdened Sazas. Despite adorning themselves with borrowed feathers, I can admit the Bled – Radovljica quintet finds its way well in this game of fashion and more fashionably shaped haircuts. Worth praising above all is the good diction of Marko Zemljič, whose ringing voice, gifted with just the right amount of vibrato, complements well the quality series of tones his co-conspirators coax out of guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. The genie’s out of the bottle, but this time a bit of mimicry and blending with the past doesn’t prove disturbing (by the way: what can you hear these days that you haven’t heard somewhere else?). Below the stage the rows thicken nicely, and besides enthusiastic hipster devotees, a good dose of the prettier part of the Upper Carniolan population mixes into the crowd. For the latter, the quintet serves up a slightly cosmetically embellished original creativity with the song Black Glitter, which neither spoils nor diminishes the solid series of well-calibrated sounds and the slightly nervous, stage-fright-ridden contact with their own, well-disposed audience. The christening performance at Ljubljana’s Orto goes in the direction of an otherwise good unfolding of energies, but perhaps lacks a bit of the stage chemistry and sparkle that the start of the gig offered in abundance. Of course this is a difference in mileage and familiarity with the stage boards, and the young indie newcomers can’t be reproached for lack of desire to prove themselves, for a bad attitude or for half-heartedness when it comes to perfectly played music. In time, I bet, they’ll also get the polishing, tempering and better-lubricated stage dynamics that can’t fully unfold on Orto’s cramped stage anyway. It may also happen that the band’s frontman finds a bit of teasing coquettishness for his stage act, as despite an excellent vocal range he has to work a bit more on the softness of his stage movement, which this time was rather static and more like plowing with a ten-ton harrow than caressing with refined, soft moves. A matter of taste, but unlike the older of the Zemljič brothers, the textbook example of gallant stage ease is the somewhat cocky exhibitionism of Izak Košir, a direction in which John Doe’s stage act could develop in the future and reap even better reviews. There was no earth-shattering quality in this rather two-dimensional but consistently correct and genre-appropriate stage show this time. Since another gig obligation forced us to leave early, we hereby solemnly swear we’ll check the lads out again soon and next time deliver an even more in-depth analysis of the music John Doe are preparing, in the form of a debut, for an audience hungry for indie-rock extravagance. To the sounds of High Hopes we thus made our way out of the steamy Orto and headed to the complete opposite end of Ljubljana, where a fusion of a musical collage by the band Trio z dioptrijo was going down on stage (RockLine report HERE).
I couldn’t cite any bad impressions after the gig at Orto, since the tandem twin bill, despite the obvious stylistic differences, was quite juicy and interesting to consume. Dandelion Children are definitely a band with stage chemistry down to the last fiber of its being, and beneath the surface of the confident trio you can also detect a huge amount of well-refined influences, nicely adapted to Ljubljana’s musical fabric, which have started functioning with an energy all their own. The Upper Carniolan indie nightingales John Doe haven’t managed to incorporate refinement into their young, five-year-old musical organism, and for my taste they lack the much-needed daring, danger and stage audacity that is somehow essential to solid rock musical eroticism. The latter can’t be learned. It’s precisely stepping over the line of permitted and pretty behavior, but not toward complete tastelessness, that separates the decadence of true rock’n’roll from the fashion-tailored tidiness of cautious but consistently correct indie rock, which never contained a note of subversiveness, revolutionary danger or punk revolt in the first place. So it’s a matter of taste and personal preference, and I still bet on skin-and-sweat grit in leather, denim and provocative, loud slogans of disguised garage rock that pays no heed to makeup, fashion trends or the aesthetics of the pretty, even at the cost of rarer appearances on the front pages of trend-minded papers. Soul matters more than looks, but that’s a topic for another debate at a completely different gig in a completely different quadrant of the mental universe …
Setlist
DANDELION CHILDREN:
1. F1ee4
2. Extinct
3. Warpaint
4. Mr Evaluator
5. Never Fine
6. Never Handled
7. Indistinct Frames
8. Goalles / Goat
9. Smitten
10. Ah ja
11. Maki
12. History
JOHN DOE:
1. December Lights
2. Take Me Out
3. Black Glitter
4. Change Of Heart
5. High Hopes
6. Criminal Mind
7. Ritm
8. Rider
9. Gold On The Celling (plus Santana)
10. From Russia To China
11. Lonely Boy
Photo Gallery
