Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Gradišče ob Soči (Gradisca d'Isonzo) / Parco del Castello / Italy
Concert date: August 10, 2013
Attendance: 400
Ticket price: 0.00€ (free entry)
The Ciao Luca festival, sitting a stone’s throw from the Slovenian border near Gorizia, and where American old school speed/thrash metallers Viciuos Rumors played last year, is clearly a festival in full bloom, picking up a more and more distinct character with every year of holding its ground. But hey, who can keep track of the whole heap of gigs happening right next door? This year, though, the festival didn’t slip past RockLine. Day two of the festival boiled over when Sweden’s naughty all-girl rock ‘n’ roll crew Crucified Barbara and the superb progressive metallers Threshold from Great Britain hit the stage, with Threshold getting the honor of closing out the night and the whole festival with it.
Entry was free. What could be better? A killer line-up and free entry on top. As is only proper, the organizer kicked off day two with no fewer than four Italian bands warming up the crowd in front of the castle walls – a neatly kept grassy park area where the stage was set up just like the one we remember from the Metal Mania Open Air festival at Komen na Krasu in Slovenia. Let’s hope that one makes it back among the living festivals someday!
The RockLine crew arrived at the scene just as Italian power metallers The Overtures were wrapping up their set. They’re the band that opened day two of the Slovenian Metal Mania Open Air festival at Komen na Krasu on July 21, 2012 – RockLine report HERE. Before them came sets from the local heroes Sacro Ordine (del Cavalieri di Parsifal) and then The Names.
And Kingcrow were already on stage. Italian progressive metallers, a sextet. Complex figures, all kept in service of the lead melodies. A model blend of elements, and at moments very easy on the ears. Keyboards in the role of an orchestra, borrowing motifs from neo-prog acts like Arena as well as progressive metallers like Symphony X. Just a slightly clumsy vocal approach. If the band took their live show up a notch by using the vocalist differently, adding an element of theatricality, polishing the English in the verses, and putting more emphasis on the lead vocal lines – even though prog doesn’t strictly demand that – Kingcrow could leave a bigger mark on the international scene down the road. A quality band that was anything but boring on stage.
Then came a totally different energy, carried onto the stage by the attractive Swedish rock ‘n’ roll fillies Crucified Barbara. We first saw the band right at the start of their rise, on June 3, 2006, when they opened the famous Gods Of Metal festival in Milan (Idroscalo) – RockLine report HERE. And seven years later? This band is seriously great. Four wild girls playing with incredible commitment, hiding neither their passion nor their relentless rocker grit. They can be as beastly as it gets. Naughty, hooligan-ish, call it what you like. No “excessive” flaunting of curves here, no buying off the crowd by posing around in off-the-rack outfits. Give them Spandex and/or skin-tight leather and full-on sleaze instead. Stage poses, moves and steps exactly what we’re used to seeing when a male band is up there. Only Mia wore shorts, which definitely suited her as lead singer. That girl is unbelievable. Her vocals can embody the devil, and in the next moment she turns into a gentle angel. Outstanding voice, outstanding flexibility and authority, and with all that it didn’t take long before the crowd freely surrendered to the dirty rock ‘n’ roll energy hitting from the stage with huge authenticity! The male half of the audience drooled generously in response, as you’d expect. The girls pushed their new studio album “The Midnight Chase” hard, which came out at the end of last July! They opened the show with the album’s opening track, The Crucifier, poured oil on the fire with the especially naughty Shut Your Mouth, and then spiced up the set with more new songs like Everything We Need, Rock Me Like The Devil, Count Me In and, right at the end, Into the Fire. The older stuff wasn’t left out either, with Sex Action played in the finale, plus Play Me Hard, then In Distortion We Trust, and Motorfucker and Jennyfer. On top of her vocal gifts, Mia also nailed the guitar solos. No messing around with this girl. She even uses her pinky. She’s precise in her work! The band is extremely tight, compact and fully locked in. Rehearsed poses, rehearsed movement. Everything runs like clockwork. You can’t ask for more, and you wouldn’t settle for less. This is a band that obviously enjoys big popularity with our western neighbors in Italy. That was confirmed by their show four years ago in nearby Ronchi dei Legionari (Rocnhi dei Legionari), near Monfalcone – RockLine report HERE, where they once again gave the devil’s hide a good tanning with their biting stage work! The girls always use the same instruments. They swear by the good old Gibson (Explorer and Flying V) and Fender sound, the wood of instruments that keep “shedding” paint and lacquer over years of use, ripening and taking the sound with it! The only right way. An excellent one-hour display of rock ‘n’ roll potency and full-blooded proof that four girls can move mountains if they want to. It’s simply an expression of authenticity, fed on one side by flawless playing and on the other by the chemistry between the members of Crucified Barbara. If you don’t believe it, you simply have to check it out.
A different musical story kicked off in the final stretch of this year’s Ciao Luca festival! The British veterans of the progressive metal craft took the stage. Superb and unique masters of the trade. Threshold! A band that’s obviously going through a real rebirth and a new spring, and has been on the road all year, touring non-stop. The new album “March Of Progress” and a deal with the German label Nuclear Blast Records brought the band back to the scene after a long stretch when nobody knew what was cooking in their camp. “Dead Reckoning”, the predecessor of the new album, came out in 2007. Then came the sad, career-defining news. Two years ago, the great vocalist Andrew McDermott tragically passed away. Damian Wilson returned to the lineup for the third time in his career, and Threshold are once again firing on all cylinders. Creatively and live. In one way, visiting Ciao Luca was a real must for Threshold fans from Slovenia. If you were at the Threshold gig at Orto bar in March this year – RockLine report HERE, you got a taste of the real intimacy of a club atmosphere, where you could actually down a round of beers with the band members and take a photo with the then-bearded Wilson. Still, we know the miniature stage at Orto bar is a serious limiting factor, one that forces adjustments, for a band with such megalomaniac gear, especially with six members. This time Threshold stood on a “proper stage”. And they stretched out the way they should. What’s interesting about Threshold is that they’re one of the rare progressive metal bands who, for veterans like them, stand out by offering incredible stage kinetics and so a constantly dynamic show. Not only is the charismatic Wilson an outstanding frontman who stuns not just with his crushing vocal performance, which nails everything, even the most demanding sky-high registers, but the other members too – Karl Groom, Steve Anderson and Pete Morten – are constantly squaring up in shoulder-to-shoulder duels, goofing on each other during their passages, and don’t hide the enormous enjoyment and relaxed fun they’re having. In the background the timekeeper keeps constant watch. Johanne James, who once again amazed with the incredible precision of his rhythm. What’s fascinating about this drummer is that he gets an outstanding effect from very few elements in his stage fortress. In the transitional parts, where other drummers usually do wide rolls around a whole array of toms (Johanne uses just a single tom), he leans heavily on weaving in the double bass drum pedal to fill the available space (in the spirit of the good old school of pioneering sacred excellence of Cozy Powell). A fantastic drummer in every respect. Unfussy, yet with proven rationality, extremely productive.
Despite the spacious stage and a considerably bigger crowd than we saw in March in the middle of Ljubljana’s Orto bar, Threshold delivered a shorter show, barely over an hour. They trimmed the March set list from the Ljubljana show down even further. The repertoire was thus maximally devoted to material from the new album “March Of Progress”, even though the opening with the “Subsurface” (2004) track Mission Profile didn’t hint at that yet. Let me just mention that “Subsurface” came out on August 3, 2004, and exactly seven years later, on August 3, 2011, the previous Threshold singer Andrew “Mac” McDermott passed away. You could definitely feel that Wilson doesn’t generate the same energy in the “Mac-era” Threshold songs. “Mac” was so unique in his vocal expression that all the Threshold music recorded with him gained a unique energy that only Mac himself can fully re-create on stage (sadly, no more). Still, Wilson fits the band like a glove. In every respect. The likeable Englishman won everyone over again with his approachability and warmth, constantly shaking hands with fans in the front rows, and he broke down the barrier between crowd and band right from the start by stepping vehemently to the front of the stage and announcing: “I would like to introduce to you… Threshold!!!”
The massive showcasing of the otherwise excellent “March Of Progress” was put on hold for a while when the set ran through the great Angels, taken from the album “Clone” (1998) and featuring one of the most beautifully crafted chorus melodies of Threshold’s career, followed by Pilot in the Sky of Dreams, which counted as one of the highlights of the show with one of the best moments from the album “Dead Reckoning” (2007)! Fans of the album “Hypothetical” (2001) got their fix with yet another hugely melodic classic, Long Way Home, and then the “March of Progress” songs took center stage again, with the band closing the regular part of the show with the excellent mini epic suite The Rubicon. Here they unfolded once again that element that’s especially cherished among their fans. A unique energy and a unique mood came alive on stage! Threshold generate just the right feel for a mix of drama and atmosphere steeped in solemnity and bombast! It’s that priceless feeling when you come to a gig and experience the unique re-creation of the studio recordings you listen to and spin daily. A priceless feeling that, in this case, you can only share on stage with Threshold.
The band wrapped up the show before midnight. A few minutes before. Even though the set list had three songs added for the encore, they played only one. Slipstream from the album “Dead Reckoning”. Fans of the band will lynch me when I reveal the other two, which stayed on paper only. The first was the one-of-a-kind Sanity’s End from the debut “Wounded Land” (1993) and the second was yet another “Hypothetical” classic, Light And Space. It’s a real shame we missed out on both, because otherwise this show would have been nearly perfect.
Besides the set list being noticeably overloaded with “March Ovf Progress” material, another thing that bugged me in the first part of the show was that the sound wasn’t at its best. Wilson got “lifted” in the mix fairly early, toward the end of the opening Mission Profile, but the techs needed considerably longer to sort out the somewhat muddy riff sound of both guitars. The best sound was up front. Right at the front, in the first rows. Why? Because you could hear the work of keyboard master Richard West well enough too.
Anyway. A great festival experience. We can say that the Ciao Luca festival delivered a genre-wise wonderfully colorful palette of bands. At the start it gave the very promising local bands a chance to shine on stage, bands we know are swarming all over northern Italy, and then it spiced up the bill with two bands that are, genre-wise, basically completely incompatible, Threshold and Crucified Barbara. Two bands that each, independently and in their own direction, have polished their musical character and work into unique and one-of-a-kind jewels of musical craftsmanship. If Ciao Luca offers such a lovely line-up next year too, we’ll gladly keep attending this festival. It was nice to see that the second day also drew a whole bunch of true fans of heavy and progressive sounds from Slovenia.
Setlist
THRESHOLD:
1, Mission Profile
2. Don’t Look Down
3. Coda
4. Colophon
5. Angels
6. Pilot in the Sky of Dreams
7. Long Way Home
8. Ashes
9. The Rubicon
—encore—
10. Slipstream
Photo gallery
