Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Jerneja Jerak
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: February 12, 2013
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: €0.00 (free admission)
»Kadilnica of Death« came back to life this time in a special edition! It was Carnival Tuesday, and the event took on the fitting name »Carnival Glam Night«. It was a warm-up gig, the opening act for the fourth Lipstikk N’ Leathür festival, set for February 16, 2013 in Medvode (MC Jedro).
For the first time in the history of Orto Bar, and of the »Kadilnica of Death« too, a gig went down in a new space! On the ground floor of Orto Bar. You walk past the bar toward the smoking room, hang a left and keep going straight past the »grill« (read: foosball table), then through the open door into the new concert space. For now the logistics don’t allow hooking up to the power grid, so the organizers came up with a Solomonic solution: all the performances were acoustic. To pull that off as a performer you need guts, because you get shoved out there and served up to the audience’s ears in a literally »naked« way. Every single one of your “flubs” gets heard.
The announced Broken Arrrow from Brežice have been on the scene since around 2005 and get better at their live shows year after year. I’d caught them live four times up to that day, and gig after gig they blew me away more and more. All the more so because with their melodic rock/AOR »vein« they’re surely a rarity in Slovenia in this genre, if not the only ones.
So it was Carnival Tuesday, and since lovers of »glam« are usually lovers of »sleaze«, dressing up comes naturally to them. Like breathing air. Even if it hadn’t been Carnival, nothing would have been different. They’d have been decked out one way or another. That’s just part of the culture. Or rather, an integral part of it. So this Carnival Tuesday too we got plenty of serious contenders among the costumes, and after a retroactive draw by the “jury of the RockLine editorial team” in the category for most inventive carnival costume, they ranked in the following order: third place went to a bleeding Christ weighed down by a giant wooden cross on his back, second place went to Paul Stanley of Kiss, and first place this time went by a mile to a relic of a bug that Kafka’s Gregor Samsa couldn’t hold a candle to – a mustachioed ladybug.
Before Broken Arrow, the unleashed costumes in the room were entertained by Slovenian Glam Superstars United, who with their lineup on stage confirmed that a great alliance reigns among the new-generation bands in the wave of rock musicians in Slovenia.
Broken Arrow will release their studio debut this year, which as these sentences are being written is at the demo-recording stage. I hope the album comes out in the first half of the year. The band learned the material in acoustic form just for this gig. The quintet also »pulled« a female duo onto the stage and stunned with the excellence of the acoustic delivery, and especially with a brilliant command of multi-part vocal harmonies, which I doubt anyone else in Slovenia is pulling off so well on the live circuit right now. That very realization makes us all the more impatient for the debut album. When the band launches into the original »Have A Little Love« with a truly infectious chorus that catches fire on the first listen, and you realize the band is superbly stage-»calibrated«, that there are extremely few flubs (in acoustic you can’t hide anything), and that they know what a hooky chorus melody is, with the vocal harmonies creating most of the atmosphere, then it’s clear you’ve found yourself in the right place at the right time.
There’s always a positive vibe at events like this! And this time was no different. Broken Arrow are simply one of those bands that generate energy, and the carnival revelers kept passing that vibe around in full dose long, long after the unstoppable professor of »glam« and »sleaze«, DJ Shuyo, took over the post-gig party with his ironclad repertoire!
The evening whetted our appetite! So, drooling and bright-eyed, we’re impatiently eyeing the events calendar, where it says: Saturday, February 16, 2013, Lipstikk N’ Leathür festival, Medvode (MC Jedro)!
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