performers: Agan, Lintver, Blackoutt
venue: Cerkno / C.M.A.K. / Slovenia
when: 08.09.2018
A new “Cmakanje” has hit the land, the 20th one already. Where else but among the hills and valleys of the Cerkno highlands, in the long-lived and indestructible C.M.A.K. in Cerkno. It’s one of the few clubs keeping the impoverished Slovenian underground supplied with regular live shows. We can be proud that it keeps defying the odds and hanging in there. Dark forces are always lurking, but they can’t “seize” a heart that hasn’t rotted and cloud its purity.
So 8.9.2018 rolled around, and the first day of this year’s “Cmakanje” had to be pulled off. Metal and alternative rock all the way. The clock hand was already well past nine in the evening, which was when the first band was officially due on stage. As usual, I shuffled into the venue with a serious delay. But just right. They’d barely started thundering, the Slovenian atmospheric metallers Agan, leaning heavily on death metal cues. Agan are apparently hard to catch on stage (this was actually their first-ever gig in Cerkno). The band has been around since 2009 and comes from Baška grapa (you know that stretch from Bača towards Porezen, meaning Kneža, Huda Južna and all the way on towards Podbrdo?). They say they’re drawn to the primeval nature of mother earth, and also to the old faith, say, straight-up “orthodoxy”. The word Agan is a Slovenian archaism and stands for a state of harmony among the sounds coming from nature. They write a hugely catchy and musically appealing metal passion play soaked in symphonic inserts, often in the intro passages too, crossed with the elemental sharpness of the riff. The vocals are gnarled and fit the band’s musical vision nicely, and even though their original material still isn’t officially documented anywhere after all these years, the guys are seasoned old cats, having played Metaldays festival, Orto bar, and abroad too (Laakirchen, Eresia Metalfest festival). This autumn they’re announcing their studio debut, and so in a solid set of just under an hour they presented strictly original material. Domen Duša (vocals, guitar), Robi Lapanja (bass), Sašo Kokošar (drums) and Vasja Božič (guitar) did the job with flying colors. Confident, heartfelt, dedicated. Interestingly, they drew the biggest crowd of all the bands that night. A band worth checking out, a band with potential for the future, and generally a band that deserves your support. Because of that potential, and because of the general fact that metal in Slovenia isn’t exactly doing great these days. You can count the newly released albums by Slovenian metal bands in 2017 or 2018 on the fingers of your left hand. And the two guitarists had fourteen strings on stage between them.
Lintver, the thrash metal revivalists from Goriška brda, are in 2018 one of the few surviving stars of the Slovenian metal scene that still shine with great intensity and keep writing and creating music. They’ve been on the scene since 2004. Those were the golden years of the thrash metal revival in Slovenia, when bands like that were swarming around here, led by the movement’s main protagonists, Negligence. Alongside their contemporaries Eruption and the considerably younger Panikk, Lintver are one of the few “survivors” who never stopped. Two years ago they released their second and still current studio album “Distorted Perception”, which followed the debut “Snakebite” (2013) after three years. The quartet of Erik Kodermac (vocals, guitar), Tilen Grandovec (guitar) and brothers Damjan (bass) and Jan Jakončič (drums) threw themselves into the material with all the zeal they had. The guys delivered an incredibly tight, explosive and unbridled set, full of heartfelt aggression, furious rage, madness and pain. Uncompromising and at the highest possible level. Erik’s excellent, fierce vocals and his raging soloing, the solid riff vise of both guitarists, the band’s superb control even in moments of extreme chaos and in sequences of passages demanding more technical chops all added up to a stellar show, one that every true fan of old-school thrash could drool over, played of course in new times, according to the notes of the new thrash metal legions. From the more brutal urges of the unbridled primitivism of Slayer and the Teutonic school of thrash (Kreator, Destruction, Paradox,…), to the compositional wit inherited from the Bay Area movement (Testament, Exodus,…). Something for everyone. As I said. A real thrash metal shrapnel blast from four potent stallions, straight into the forehead of the foolish. At Cerkno the band played the following repertoire: Punish the Light, K.K.N.D., World Funeral, Trapped Inside, Erroneous Society, Dark Skies, Dune, Old Disputes… New Recruits.
Last up on stage were Blackoutt from Postojna. The quartet, with just as much club mileage as the previous band, presented material from the debut “Behind” (2013) and from the freshly released second full-length of this year, “The Culture Of”. Blackoutt, represented by the quartet of Primož Barut (guitar), Klemen Čepar (guitar), Goran Blaško (bass) and Tomaž Čepar (drums), spared no means to prove why exactly they bear that name. Switch off! The instrumental droning, thundering and oscillating roar, powered by a series of stoned stoner riffs from a rolling psychedelic beast, steaming with alcohol derivatives and other intoxicating substances, with quite a few hints calling out that always debatable prefix “post”, delivered the experience of a state of debauched madness, in which your neck vertebrae have no trouble swaying, especially if you’ve “eaten” something beforehand that pushes “ratio” into the background. It’s incredible, really, how an all-instrumental band, doing everything it does on stage in its total mental disconnect, while also pulling off quite a few bizarre things that court a real drift toward the edge of excess, still manages to hold on to enough presence of mind to run song after song totally confidently, tight and credible. Amid the toppling of Marshalls, same-sex “coitis interruptus-es” (read: “crust” is a “little baby”), and other floor-rolling, it did happen that one of the guitarists got hit by such a blackout that he had to seek help from his comrades to tune his instrument properly, which broke the stoned, absent atmosphere for a few minutes, but on the other hand that very incident put the cherry on top of creating a true underground feel, where rock and roll gets its real primacy of rebellion, in which anything goes. Hanging out with a true-believer underground attitude toward rock and roll, as Blackoutt effectively cultivate it, is more of a rarity than the rule these days. A live show where you couldn’t predict for a second how it would develop. A mix of spontaneity and unexpected moves, of total looseness and being smashed, which the band always skillfully calmed down whenever it had pushed its excesses to the edge. An incredible band. If they always play like they did at C.M.A.K. that night, then they’re definitely something special, a draw of the non-conformist craft and above all a well-guarded secret of the Slovenian music underground.
The first act of this year’s “Cmakanje” successfully got through its ritual of rebellious metal and rock mass. See you at C.M.A.K. again on Saturday, 15.09.2018, when Bad Notion and Le Serpentine play.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
