Location: Ljubljana / Cvetličarna MediaPark / Slovenia
Date: Wednesday, 1. 10. 2008
Some bands just make a tradition of visiting Slovenia. Believe it or not, Living Colour are one of them. They’ve once again treated music lovers in Slovenia to a visit, their fourth in total now. A quick run through the earlier ones: June 1993 (Hala Tivoli, Ljubljana), July 2001 (Rock Otočec) and July 2007 (Maribor). Adding up all the parts of the gig, the latest show at Cvetličarna Media Park even had a whiff of the glory days, when these guys presented their third album “Staind” in Ljubljana 15 years ago. The crowd did a great deal to make that happen (again), turning out in force to prove that we Slovenes have by no means forgotten Living Colour. Clearly the band’s name and reputation have stuck with us really well over the years, and about 700 people crammed into the hall. Before Living Colour, locals Leaf-Fat raged for 45 minutes.
The Living Colour quartet is built from head to toe out of musicians who, at their core, swear by the traditions of jazz. Since these guys have an innate sense of rhythm in their blood and love to “jam”, funk becomes a clear building block of their musical language. A voluminous groove is a must to pull you into the music, so they add poisonously contagious guitar riffs that even the most orthodox metalheads would envy. But because Living Colour are masters of their craft, musical perfectionists and gourmands of musical experimentation, the whole thing is soaked in trillions of delay effects, sound-sample programming and special kinds of excursions that don’t even skip world music. These guys are monstrously diverse in their musical arsenal, and that’s one of the biggest draws that bring the crowds to their shows. There’s a clear element of spontaneity and unpredictability in what they do, which is quite rare these days and all the more sought after.
After 15 years, Living Colour came back to Ljubljana right at the point where they left us back then (remember? It was a day after the Faith No More show, also in Ljubljana). With the song Auslander! These guys are so damn tight that it’s hard to throw them off track. Corey Glover’s voice is still remarkably well preserved, works more than optimally, and the man still doesn’t skimp on the charisma and power with which he instantly pulls the audience’s attention to his side. Vernon Reid, a totally one-of-a-kind guitarist who is most “listenable” in Living Colour out of all the projects and bands he plays in, kept working chords into the basic motifs throughout the show, chords that smelled strongly of jazz tricks, and he bent even the lines in the transitions that way as much as he could. Uncompromisingly blissed-out, completely “Reid-style” the whole way through. The Calhoun/Wimbish rhythm duo is a chapter of its own on the music scene, and when you put them together, the final musical expression reaches a quality that comes very close to the musical ideal. The sensing between them works like a trance, with unpredictable breaking of rhythms at the transition points, and not just there. Within the basic rhythms too. In short, these guys fired away with no brakes from all the arsenals of rich musical knowledge and priceless experience at their disposal. And that’s exactly why we love them most!
Living Colour built the repertoire to suit the audience’s taste, which means the bulk of the tracks came from the first record, “Vivid”, with mostly songs from the albums “Time’s Up” and “Staind” added on top. The setlist also included Bless Those, a brand-new song we’d already heard last year at the show in Villach, Carinthia, and the whole thing felt even more nostalgic to everyone who saw the band in 1993 at Hala Tivoli, when the guys tackled the Clash cover Should I Stay Or Should I Go in the encore.
Of course, amid all this there was no shortage of the playful fun the band is known for. This time it was mostly Doug Wimbish who entertained the crowd, firing off barking-dog effects between pauses through his computer gadgets on stage, cracking up most of all himself as he watched the other three band members react.
During the longer jams that decorated the basic song frameworks, Corey made quite a few laps around the stage to pass the time during these moments of his bandmates’ wild experimental flailing. Living Colour are poison, you see, especially for metalheads who want to spit out an identical copy on stage of what their studio work sounds like, frozen on tape. It’s exactly this disregard for following set templates that sets the band apart from everything else on the planet and makes them wildly unique and one of a kind. Even though they’re 15 years older, they get the crowd on its feet with no trouble, because the vibe they create is downright hypnotic, mostly thanks to that invasive rhythmic power.
The guys tore it up for a good two hours. In the front rows, where I (once again, irresistibly) mingled in myself, the sound was very distorted. Reid was too loud, so Glover often couldn’t be heard properly. In the back (closer to the bar) and in the VIP box, the sound was apparently okay, from what I heard. Calhoun didn’t forget to add a fantastic drum solo that took your breath away. Usually these kinds of numbers just steal the audience’s time because they’re so unoriginal, but in William Calhoun’s case, that spot in the Living Colour repertoire is an absolute must that lifts the band’s show to a higher level of quality.
People definitely hadn’t forgotten the band’s classics like Desperate People, Middle Man and, of course, Cult Of Personality in the closing stretch, which came across most intensely with the whole hall joining in. Interestingly (against expectations), the evergreen hit Love Rears Its Ugly Head got the fewest modifications of any song in the repertoire. The band, for instance, didn’t play it at all in Madrid a few days ago when they kicked off the tour.
Given the excellent turnout, the decent participation of the crowd during the show, which in itself livened up the band’s response (they were far from holding back in their playing and delivery on stage), this gig was a win across the board and an absolute upgrade over the much blander experience of the band’s visit last year at the casino of a hotel in Villach, Carinthia, Austria. What fascinated me most about it all, though, was the ability to walk onto a stage in such a ridiculously simple way and come across as spontaneous, genuine and unpredictable in every single moment. Living Colour are a band that never plays one song the same way twice (on a given tour, for example). Different jams often slide into a completely different song, and one night’s jam can be plugged into one song and the next night’s into another entirely. The same goes for the choice of rhythm, sound effects, programmed samples, Vernon’s way of “picking” chords. It keeps flowing and shifting, with no set form, yet at every moment in perfect harmony, dictated by musical perfection combined with an extraordinary dose of wit and breadth of musical horizon that these guys possess. True to the band’s name. A harmonious blending and stringing together of full, vivid color palettes in games without borders, dictated by the freedom of drifting through musical experimentation.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Mya Milharičič
Setlist (written from the author’s memory):
1. Auslander
2. Desperate People
3. Middle Man
4. Pride
5. Funny Vibe
6. Type
7. Which Way To America
8. Operation Mind Control
9. This Little Pig
10. Bless Those
11. Glamour Boys
12. Solo Drums
13. Ignorance Is Bliss
14. Time’s Up
15. Cult Of Personality
—encore—
16. Love Rears Its Ugly Head
17. Should I Stay Or Should I Go
18. Memories Can’t Wait
