Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Kino Šiška / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: November 21, 2009
Attendance: 800
Ticket price: €25.00
Well, the day has finally come. A little Slovenian festival day in the capital, starring the country’s top rock band. I’m probably exaggerating, but I’d say this is a band that pretty much sets the ceiling for Slovenian rock culture and is built for the world stage. Strange that the world hasn’t fully discovered them yet. So, a test day for the Slovenian rock school. Dedicated to “Saga”. And no, not the legendary Canadian art rock band or the genus of bush crickets that share the name, but a brand-new story, one for us longtime admirers of the master wordsmith Hermann Hesse.
New album, new cry, new birth! Action! Kino Šiška is packed. Fans. Anticipation. At 9:30 PM they step onto the stage. The new album “Saga” is right in front of us. Tip-top haircuts where the electric clippers love to graze the skull, off-the-rack black outfits, and? The power of charisma, the power of self-confidence, the power of knowing you’ve already won! The girls scream, and Siddharta step up to Narava. You’d say it’s the ideal track to sit at number one on the tracklist of any Siddharta album, not just the new one. But this isn’t the album review yet. Just an imprint of its first live echo on Slovenian and (utterly unbelievable!) world soil.
The band doesn’t hide their excitement. A combination of a soft violet-orange veil of shifting spotlight colors barely “licks” the band members’ faces. Narava is the kind of track that, in a single moment, fits all the puzzle pieces into the word Siddharta. In the band’s artistry, a strong foundation for building a high, airy atmosphere into which Tomi’s uniquely powerful, sensually passionate vocals are perfectly cast. The band’s lazy “winding” snapped these building blocks into place instantly. Then a switch onto the path of temptation with Angel Diabolo, the fresh fourth single from the new record, on which the band charges noisily into a charged experience of rock n’ roll sharpness that keeps holding the crowd in the hall close, like a magnet.
The energy of “Saga” is a surprise. It’s Siddharta, no worries. But the circle has closed, and “Saga” is the start of an actually new story. The band is known for always having masterfully handled the notion of “atmosphere”. It’s one of the most important building blocks of their music. If they once achieved it with orchestral arrangements, this time they really turned to nature. To an organic sound. It wasn’t only the sound of Jani H., Tomi M. and Primož B. that delighted, with the view of the “vintage” arsenal of their “toys” in their hands, but this time, perhaps more than ever in the band’s artistry, if you like, in its stage vocabulary, in the expression of the band’s essence as a whole, the keyboard work of Tomaž O.R. steps to the front. Siddharta build their new sound on retro impulses that lead them back to nature. Siddharta remain dark, but in that darkness you’ll find plenty of passion, love and a dash of defiance and perseverance in reverse glances!
You feel this band’s real power on stage. As always, what thrills about them is their incredible self-confidence and sense of invincibility. Of course, getting the sound right for the hall at Kino Šiška matters, and it was excellent. I watched part of the show somewhere in the middle of the hall with my buddy Vene, while our photographer Robi was flailing his “photo cannon” wildly around all the “edges” and “centers” of the hall. Later I moved right up under the stage on the left. With a beer, of course. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that the sound was stunning, even in the “corner hole” of the hall from which I later centered my view of the stage. Also stunning is the instrumental Od zore do mraka, which Tomi M. introduced as a moment drawn from the studio looseness of the recording days in Los Angeles, and said he’ll never have its sheet music in his pocket, because it’s a “jam”-type track where the band is given so much freedom that they can play it differently every time. We probably don’t know this Siddharta yet. It was always in the band, and now it’s not just this track that expresses it, but the whole of “Saga”. More than ever. Tomaž O.R. especially showed touches of the eighties sound here, right from the early eighties, when the “primitive” sounds of the first synthesizers were increasingly coming to the fore, and today, when they’re gone, we’re ever more aware of the juice their use can create. The ending was especially intense, with Jani H. (by “twisting” the volume pedal) and Tomaž O.R. turning it into a solemn drifting dialogue between the two of them. The hypnotic atmosphere of the track, with its repeating motifs, also leaves plenty of room for Boštjan M. to let loose more concretely on the drums and, with fast transitions woven into the dreamy rhythm, add a dynamic component to the track.
The hall wakes up again with the excellent Vojna idej, an intensely gloomy vibe where a fiery guitar phrase takes over the room, along with the extraordinary charisma of Tomi M.’s vocal approach, which surfaces in full glory especially in the verse. With the line in an “commanding, fatherly intonation” of the robotized age of our day, “Dovolj je vina!”, which carries a person off into the matrix of a false life, even some “The Drinkers” rogues would identify on some other planet of “hedonism”, in a bid to sober up. This track, along with Baroko and Napalm 3, has already caught on solidly with the fans, who made more racket during these numbers and proved they know the songs by singing the verses too. With the room charged with emotion and a sense of ceremony, the positive-minded Madam leads us into the close of the evening, its energy flirting with the track Stampedo from the middle of the set. We get an unusual ending with the last song, Tom Waits For Me, where only Tomaž O.R. and Tomi M. stay on stage. Interesting that the English verses (in this song only!) at times brought Tomi’s voice ever so slightly close (in a certain shade) to the elusive Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam).
The end. The fascination of the five oiled building blocks of the story is over. The clock ran out before the crowd had really realized the lights in the hall were on, and the people somehow didn’t want to leave. “Saga” has set sail happily. It’ll be interesting to watch where Siddharta land this time on their “Saga” vessel.
One more thing. Maybe some people broke out in a sweat at experiencing an hour of music at a ticket price of €25.00, but it’s worth considering that this was a one-of-a-kind, unrepeatable event that can only happen once. At every new birth. Of every new album. And the band set their price a long time ago. That’s why they’re valued among Slovenes. And the evening at Kino Šiška proved it too, with a full house and big expectations, radiated by the relaxed vibe of the new album’s mission.
photos: Robi Lipej
Setlist
1. Narava 2. Angel Diabolo 3. Alarm 4. Nevarno mesto 5. Napalm 3 6. Baroko 7. Stampedo 8. Od mraka do zore 9. Vojna idej 10. Madam 11. Tom Waits for me
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