Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / C.M.A.K. / Slovenia
Concert date: 15.09.2018
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: €0.00 (free entry)
This year’s »Cmakanje« (the twentieth edition in a row) is colorful once again. The middle weekend of this September delivered a gig at the C.M.A.K. club in Cerkno featuring two seriously interesting bands, especially since clear genre dividing lines run between them. This time around, there wasn’t a whiff of metal. Just Le Serpentine from Kranj and Ljubljana’s Bad Notion. Both bands hit the five-year mark this year. Le Serpentine already have a studio debut under their belts (»Ujemi val«, 2015), while Bad Notion are promising theirs for this fall.
Le Serpentine hit the stage first. They count as an alternative rock band at heart, but with a strong sense of musicality, and the riffs are properly beefy and rumble with a sturdy build, thick-edged and voluminous. The band builds on a solid, charming rhythmic kinetic with a fat, clearly pronounced »groove« bass foot, while the group is commanded by a charismatic female vocalist who can get downright angry at times, but also soft, tender and gentle. Three fans of American baseball caps plus a girl have made a marked leap in their artistic and performing maturity since we last ran into them at Pržan four years ago. Besides playing through the current album, they also served up a few novelties (Skalca, Jrm, Veselja krik, Le naprej, Friends, Črnobel), which hints that a new studio album is right around the corner. You can feel the influence of bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden,… in the music, while it’s also striking that they breathed a few times of the new wave that was born in the British Isles in the eighties on the wings of artistically more “advanced” punk bands. An extremely tight and compact performance that impressed in every respect and proved that Le Serpentine have successfully weathered their birth pangs of gathering experience and mileage, and have grown into a quartet with a polished musical focus and a recognizable musical charisma, which also carries just the right dose of musical accessibility that, in a healthy mainstream environment, radio waves could easily embrace.
Bad Notion is a band that, in terms of what Slovenian rock can reach today, counts as something of a sensation. Far from saying that blues was never played here before, but this trio is the herald of a new generation, meaning a generation that, when composing, reaches for just about anything other than the doctrine of the blues genre, the real opposite. Actually with the fire and passion of blues purism, which can still be sturdily laced with longer instrumental jams, where spontaneity and the act of the “unexpected” burst out. Blues rock that can also be seriously schooled in funk kinetics. After Prismojeni profesorji bluesa, who somehow refreshed the doctrine of blues for new times and put it back in the spotlight for the masses with their activity, Bad Notion come across as especially appealing. It’s likewise a band girded with sturdy blues rhetoric, only they approach the blues quite differently from the Prismojenci. Bad Notion are led by guitarist Grega Smola Crnkovič, who, at his tender mid-twenties, is a man of astonishing technical skills. If Julijan studied Jimi to a T, Grega is wired differently. He soon worked through Clapton and “left him behind,” reaching instead for an incredibly confident command of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s work, and so he especially astonishes with technical skill, extreme control over the instrument and a colorful landscape of sensually measured tones that demand a lot of manual finesse to get your emotions through your fingers and into the body of the blues. Authenticity, organic feel and sensuality. Emotions. On a setlist of mostly original material, quite a few fun (extra) surprises happened. From Stevie Ray Vaughan, through B.B. King, to Michael Landau. The blues cultivated by this punchy blues rock trio carries the seeds and potential for more extensive flirting between their blues rock and jazz, but let’s leave that for the future. Bad Notion also have no trouble crossing Latin rhythms (a fun bossa nova groove in the track »Bossa Noga«) with the blues. The trio is full of fire and dynamite in their drive to prove themselves. They could play all night at C.M.A.K. if they were allowed. Incredible potency, and spontaneity too. Excellent tightness, real working chemistry between Rok, Žiga and Grega, which has reached its live performance optimum. A show that fills you with (awe-struck) respect, even though after the gig the band will modestly tell you there were a bunch of mistakes and who knows what else, and that the praise shouldn’t be overdone at all. So Bad Notion is a band carrying incredible potential, and with its sincerity, heartfelt spirit and unpretentiousness, it is hugely important in the Slovenian mini-wave of blues revival that Prismojeni profesorji bluesa so sincerely and authentically sparked some time ago.
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