location: Cerkno / C.M.A.K. / Slovenia
date: 09/15/2018
This year’s »Cmakanje« (already the twentieth edition) was once again a colorful affair. The middle weekend of September brought a gig by two seriously intriguing acts to the C.M.A.K. club in Cerkno, especially because there are clear genre dividing lines between them. This time around, not 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 belt (»Ujemi val«, 2015), while Bad Notion are promising theirs for this fall.
Le Serpentine were first on stage. They’re an alternative rock band at heart, with a real feel for musicality, where the riffs are properly greasy and rumble with muscle, thick, sharply pointed and voluminous. The band builds on sturdy, charming rhythmic kinetics with a fat, clearly pushed-up »groove« bass foot, and the whole thing is commanded by a charismatic female vocal that can get downright angry at times, but also gentle, tender and soft. Three lovers of American baseball caps plus one woman have made a serious leap in their artistic and performance growth since we ran into them at Pržan four years ago. Besides playing through the current album, they also served up some new stuff (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, but what’s striking is that a few times it also smelled of new wave, the kind born on the British Isles in the eighties on the wings of artistically more »advanced« punk bands. An extremely tight, compact performance that wowed in every respect and proved that Le Serpentine have successfully gotten past their birth pangs of gathering experience and mileage, and have grown into a quartet with polished musical focus and their own recognizable musical charisma, one that also has just the right measure of musical accessibility that, in a healthy mainstream environment, could easily make its way onto the radio waves.
Bad Notion are a band that, in terms of what Slovenian rock can reach today, count as a kind of sensation. Far from saying blues was never played here before, but this trio is the herald of a new generation, meaning a generation that, when composing, reaches for anything but the doctrine of blues as a genre, the real opposite. Actually, it’s got the fire and passion of blues purism, but one that can also be generously soaked in longer instrumental jams, where spontaneity and the act of »the unexpected« stare you right in the face. Blues rock that can also be seriously schooled in funk kinetics. After Prismojeni profesorji bluesa, who somehow freshened up the doctrine of blues for new times and with their work put it back in the focus of the masses, Bad Notion feel especially appealing. This is likewise a band girded with sturdy blues rhetoric, only they approach the blues considerably differently than the Prismojenci. Bad Notion are led by guitarist Grega Smola Crnkovič, who, in his dewy mid-twenties, is a man of astonishing technical skill. If Julijan studied Jimi down to the dot, Grega is wired differently. He soon worked through Clapton »and left him behind«, and reaches for an incredibly confident command of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s work, which makes him especially jaw-dropping with his technical dexterity, his extreme control over the instrument and a colorful landscape of sensually measured tones, which take a lot of manual fine-tuning to get your emotions through your fingers and into the body of the blues the right way. Authenticity, organic feel and sensuality. Emotions. On a set list of mostly original material, there were quite a few fun (extra) surprises. From Stevie Ray Vaughan, through B.B. King, to Michael Landau. The blues this punchy blues rock trio cultivates carries the seeds and potential for a more serious flirtation 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 eagerness to prove themselves. They could have played all night at C.M.A.K., if it had been allowed. Incredible power, and spontaneity too. Excellent tightness, real working chemistry between Rok, Žiga and Grega, which has reached its live performance peak. A show that fills you with (awed) 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 you really shouldn’t go overboard with the praise. So Bad Notion are a band with incredible potential, and with their sincerity, big heart and unfakedness, they are hugely important to the Slovenian mini-wave of blues revival, which Prismojeni profesorji bluesa so openheartedly and authentically sparked a while back.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
