Location: Ljubljana / Kino Šiška / Slovenia
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2019
Summer is over, and so are the festivals. Time to head back to the clubs. September is packed with shows, and Kino Šiška especially so — the venue is hitting its 10-year anniversary, and the lineup through the whole month is absolutely stacked. September 17th was one for fans of raw sound and heavy rhythms, as Deafheaven came back to Slovenia, joined by Touché Amoré and Portrayal of Guilt.
Portrayal of Guilt opened things up. The young band delivered a pretty raw mix of genres, running through material from their debut Let Pain Be Your Guide. The music leaned firmly into more extreme sub-genres — plenty of hardcore punk in there, but the sheer rawness of their sound also pushed into grindcore and blackened sludge metal territory. The vocals matched the vibe, really putting the throat through its paces. Portrayal of Guilt made for solid warm-up. You can tell the band is still finding its identity — it’ll take another album or two to fully get there.
After more than two years away, Touché Amoré were back, drawing noticeably more support than the first opener. The band have firmly established themselves as one of the standard-bearers of post-hardcore, so fans of Defeater, La Dispute, and Pianos Become Teeth were well catered for. Their stage experience shows — the performance was tight and polished, with a heavy emphasis on emotional weight. Musically, nobody’s reinventing the wheel here. The strength is in the simplicity, no unnecessary frills, which is why so many of the songs leaned on those signature power-chord riffs. Touché Amoré more than lived up to their reputation with an energetic set drawing from across their whole discography. Maybe a favourite or two went missing, but judging by the crowd’s reaction, people went home happy.
Deafheaven closed things out — the band that exploded in 2013 with Sunbather and became the flagship act of so-called post-black metal. Before that record they were total unknowns, which showed at their first Ljubljana gig when barely a handful of people turned up. Kino Šiška told a different story. The room wasn’t sold out, but the support for Deafheaven has clearly grown — we’re well past the handful-of-people era. The band was in good shape, the members tight, and the drummer especially intense, holding down those blast beats for an impressively long stretch. The vocalist came across as a bit lost at times, but inexperience isn’t the issue here.
The Deafheaven set pulled from their last three albums, though the whole thing ran fairly short. The songs are long, but everything together came to around an hour. Honeycomb and Canary Yellow showcased their current direction: that black metal rawness is still there, but the quieter atmospheric passages really come into their own, their dreaminess calling to mind plenty of post-rock bands. Much the same could be said of Brought to the Water from New Bermuda — no real stylistic departure there. They showed more of that raw edge with Black Brick, their new single, which ditches the dreamy quality entirely. Dream House from Sunbather closed the night. There was definitely room for another song or two, and somehow the whole set had a slightly going-through-the-motions feel to it.
All in all, a pleasant evening that covered a solid spread of metal and hardcore sub-genres. Another lively night in the books as Kino Šiška marks a decade of shows.
