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

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Ljubljana / CUK Kino Šiška / Slovenia
Concert date: March 1, 2017
Attendance: 350
Ticket price: €15.00 (presale) / €18.00 (day of show)

Crazy how time flies. Barely two and a half years had gone by since American alternative metallers Helmet last rolled into CUK Kino Šiška, playing their album »Betty« front to back on that tour. 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, »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 go way back to the eighties. Today the band is a duo, made up of founding, original member Scott Lucas on vocals and guitar and drummer Ryan Harding. The long-lived outfit has a string of albums in its pocket, though Local H haven’t always been a two-piece, of course. The show from these two seasoned, armed-to-the-teeth-with-energy musicians, who toiled away under the spotlights of Kino Šiška’s small hall while sweating out gallons of the stuff, grabbed you right away with its heart, as they rolled out heavy riffs and Ryan floored everyone with his untamed wildness, bordering on beastly abandon, mercilessly hammering the cymbals and the rest of the kit. Lucas served up an insanely stacked, avalanche-like, reverb-soaked, fat wall of sound that spread out through the wild guitar phrases, while rounding out the show with some seriously crazed vocal work. Alternative rock built on raw garage noise, the kind that anyone caught off guard on the floor that night had no trouble going deaf from.

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 too, especially from the first four albums of their career, all cult classics by now. You can hear plenty of things in Helmet’s music, but the beauty of it is that hardly anyone sounds like them, if anyone at all.

Why are Helmet still so revered in these new times, as the packed floor of Kino Šiška proved, not to mention the Italian fans in the front rows who looked especially fired up throughout the show? Because of Hamilton, obviously. It’s no small thing to be such a special, richly layered guitarist that the one and only David Bowie 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. The band then thundered in together with Give It. The monstrous stomp of steel-hardened riffs and extreme noise, suddenly unleashed across the room, was something you had to catch somewhere in the middle, or the middle toward the front. Hypnosis! Out on the far left or right you could go deaf for a moment, with the monitors cranked up so high they pumped out a multitude of decibels. One moment Hamilton used a lovely, clean, mildly mystical voice, the next he turned into a raging madman who, through the anger of his poetry, bellowed in a nasal, guttural roar about the devaluation of the individual in this long-since collapsed society and, not least, civilization. Layer upon layer, reinforced by the contribution of rhythm guitarist Dan Beeman and an extremely lively, dynamic rhythm section with occasionally thickened groove moments, over which the syncopated riffs kept watch. At times hypnotic, even eerily alienated, then drawn close again with the tenderness of refined subtleties. Post-apocalypse and catharsis finally got going this evening, in the company of Helmet!