Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: April 6, 2017
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: €16.00 (advance) / €20.00 (day of the show)
Nocturnal Depression, the French crew from Grenoble, are old friends of ours. At the start of this April they paid Ljubljana another visit. Years ago they played Metelkova with the Danes Make A Change… Kill Yourself, but this time, with a new album in their pocket and as the headliners of the tour, they brought Georgian metal »carolers« Psychonaut 4 along with them to Orto bar.
This visit from Nocturnal Depression and Psychonaut 4 was »doubled up« as far as gigs go. Meaning we got two concerts on the same day, and of course in the same place. Nocturnal Depression and Psychonaut 4 played the standard club stage at Orto bar, the one you reach by climbing the stairs, while downstairs, on the newer and bigger stage, the alternative rock gurus Demolition Group from Brežice were playing.
Let’s go there, into the company of everyone who had an early-spring suicide planned. Into the bosom of depression, despair and all the other lovely vistas of »wrist-slitting«. A combo of two special bands, each with »depression« and »black metal« in their genre tags, and, just to make this blend of the latest developments in extreme metal even bigger, a “post” on top, turned out to be remarkably interesting and, to a large degree, pretty unusual in more ways than one.
Psychonaut 4 were first up, hitting the stage at half past nine in the evening. These Georgian oddballs, whom people squeeze into the depressive black metal mold, with a firm »post« flavor of generally repetitive phrasing, where at times it wasn’t hard to pick out even a revivalist post-punk tinge, or even some psychedelia, surprised us right from the start. Not so much with the performance itself, but with how they got onto the stage, with most of the band staggering and swaying. First prize in that department went to guitarist and vocalist Drifter, with vocalist Graf not far behind. But once they were up there, everything changed. They presented their third studio album »Neurasthenia«, released this year, and that’s also how the show opened, with a longer pre-recorded intro taken from the new album. The sextet fit the small Orto bar stage incredibly well, and there was still enough room for vocalist Graf to spend many minutes of his theatrics growling in all sorts of poses. Sitting, lying down, “springing up”,… But he never lost the thread. Neither did the other members. The band delivered excellent tightness, despite the hollow stares of total “wastedness”, or the sense of mental absence. A really exemplary tightness, compactness, and sound too. Melancholy, a heavy metal sound that settles deep in your gut. Dark metallurgy offset by longer passages where the bass lines reigned, while the repetition of individual phrases swept up the sixty or so heads present and carried them off into a world and mood states all their own. The band is also pretty special in that they write and sing in several languages, including Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian. It later turned out that Psychonaut 4 were an excellent live pairing with Nocturnal Depression.
Around eleven in the evening Nocturnal Depression had barely started getting their sound sorted, going through a short concert warm-up, or frankly, a sound check. Then they vanished backstage for ten minutes and came back to pre-recorded sounds, decked out in black metal “corpse paint”. The quartet radiates a ton of experience. With their eighth studio album, released this year and titled »Deathcade«, in their pocket, Nocturnal Depression came across as an incredibly tight crew who only truly ignite when heard »live«. That is, face to face with the band. At a concert. Even the slower parts and phrases, which earned the band the “depressive” label, felt ambient-heavy and gripping in mood. A compact blend. Superb tightness and sound. The band managed to build an atmosphere wrapped in a leaden haze, from which the only way leads into the abyss of eternally gloomy expanses of doom. Lord Lokhraed, the only original member left in today’s Nocturnal Depression, once again ruled over the venomous vocabulary driven by his “cyanide-spiced” gnarled vocals, while with the “split wrist” of his left hand he superbly chased down the riffs and guitar passages of the transitions. Charisma and then some. The heavy rhythmic rolling was built up by smashing riffs, crossed with quickly twitching passages, with which Nocturnal Depression also kept up a tangible trace of the great musicality that can be sensed in their music.
The godless and sweet intoxication of raging, unstoppable gloom, before which the little devil himself bows in the halls of the underground expanses, turned into a veritable ritual of black metal mass-making that night at Orto bar, courtesy of ragged, special, heavily distorted carolers of extreme vistas, and with it this year’s early spring, in all its despair, bloomed murderously.
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