Author: Sebastijan Videc
Photos: Jerneja Jerak
Venue: Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Concert date: December 9, 2014
Attendance: 1,000
This one had been in the pipeline for a while. There was even a video trailer that blew straight into the soul of our musical roots. And if we look back through history, reed pipes show up carved on the Vače situla, a pipe made from the lower jaw of a cave bear turned up in Potočka zijalka, and above all there’s the pipe made from the femur of the same animal, found 19 years ago near Cerkno and considered the oldest known musical instrument in the world (50,000-60,000 years old). All of it speaks to a rich musical history on our soil. So it’s no wonder that bands who’ve worked these traditional instruments into metal are so popular back home. On the day when, after about a month, the star closest to us finally showed its face over Slovenia again and pushed aside the gloomy gray, and on the evening when Mother Winter bared her teeth for the first time, the crowd outside Kino Šiška was packed with metalheads, older ones and especially younger ones, and you could hear plenty of our southern neighbors too, since the current tour skips their countries.
The folk night kicked off right on time with the Icelanders. I’ll admit, I didn’t know Skálmöld until now. A buddy texted me before the show that it was supposedly yet another »viking metal« band, a bit less melodic than Amon Amarth. I let myself be surprised, and I have to say I left the hall after their set very pleasantly shocked. And I wasn’t the only one. The proverbially sparse crowd you get for the first, lesser-known openers had been turned by these northerners into a pretty big mob, one that sang along eagerly and left a really good impression, both of them and of the night as a whole. Three guitars on stage might remind you of Iron Maiden at first glance, but the combination worked great. Unlike the other two bands of the night, Skálmöld don’t use traditional instruments – atmosphere comes from keyboardist Gunnar, while the harmonies are handled by the hard-hitting four up front – the bearded Snæbjörn on bass, Björgvin and Baldur on rhythm and Þráinn on lead guitar. While Björgvin takes the lion’s share of the vocals, the other three guitarists constantly back him up on backing vocals, and the clean vocal lines belong to Gunnar. The genre would be very hard to pin down, since you get the feeling that the musical styles shift and blend differently in every single song. While in the older songs you can pick out a stronger influence from their folk idols, the newer material is much harsher, wandering from death to black, thrash and power metal, with the folk element hanging on by just a pinch.
After the Icelandic surprise came the “Slavic brothers” Arkona, who are very well established here. The last time Maša and her crew entertained Slovenian (and international) audiences on our soil was in the peak of the summer heat at last year’s Metaldays festival. This Russian quintet’s club shows have always been rammed too, so naturally the Šiška hall filled up to the last corner. The opening song Yav, from the band’s new album of the same name, honestly came across rather hollow. That was exactly where you could really notice the difference between the three guitars on stage for the Icelanders and the single one for Arkona. Still, Lazar on guitar, Kniaz on bass and Andrej on drums did the job properly. By the very next song the sound had improved a lot, as Volk added a whole new dimension to the music with the whistles (and later the bagpipes) and filled the noticeable gap. And Maša was Maša – wild, unstoppable, convincing in both growls and clean vocals as well as in her visual stage performance. As expected, the setlist weaved between older hits and well-received songs from the current album. The bouncy rhythms naturally got the crowd partying away. The only question was why they didn’t play the song Serbia – politika?
Just like the Russians before them, the Swiss who followed enjoy enormous popularity in Slovenia. On top of that, the day after the show their fans got the news that they’ll be playing Metaldays 2015 too. While the two openers stuck to lyrics in their mother tongues, Eluveitie sing most of their songs in English, though there are of course exceptions, led by the long-extinct language of the ancient Gauls. Bandleader Chrigel Glanzmann is an amateur historian who researches the ancient homeland of the Swiss, so the lyrics mostly deal with this hobby of his. The Ljubljana show promised a live presentation of the band’s excellent new record, Origins, and the set opened with one of its current hits, King. With eight members on stage, your eyes dart all over the place, but they keep coming back to the core trio in the middle – the aforementioned Chrigel, who handles lead vocals and also plays various whistles, acoustic guitar, tamburica and more; Nicole on violin, who was making her first appearance in front of a Slovenian audience and plays a very important role in their music; and Anna, who likewise fills out the music with the hurdy-gurdy and also takes the female vocals. A lineup that big has of course changed over the years, and besides the already mentioned Nicole, this time we also got our first look at Matteo Sisti, who plays assorted whistles and bagpipes. The combination of melodic death metal and folk, male growls and female clean vocals, ancient instruments and modern rock elements obviously works. For every contrast there’s a fusion, and the end result is dynamic music that lets open minds drift off dreamily to another world, another time. Before the current hit Call of the Mountains, Anna said they had recorded the song in the four official Swiss languages besides English, and asked the crowd to vote on whether they should perform it in English or in their native German – the latter won, and the song got the title De Ruef vo de Bärge. Time at the show flew even faster than the moving lights in the lightshow, and the end came way too soon. Although the crowd generally didn’t go as nuts as it did for the Russians (the two bands’ styles are quite different, to be fair), the Swiss did get a small “wall of death”. For the encore, Eluveitie invited Arkona’s Volk onto the stage with his bagpipes, which he played in a duet with Matteo in the song Helvetios.
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