Location: Drašiči / Turistična kmetija Simonič / Slovenia
Date: Friday, 10/26/2012
Sometimes you show up at a gig without knowing it’s a gig! And without knowing a report will come out of it. Whatever kind of report it ends up being… The Concertica agency is full of surprises. Not least, this September we got to enjoy a show in Ljubljana, where two classic rock acts took the stage, produced by the Concertica agency, bands you’d never in your wildest dreams have imagined would visit Slovenia again after the distant eighties – Wishbone Ash and Nazareth. The point of the get-together at the Turistična kmetija Simonič was to celebrate the successful staging of that concert in Ljubljana a month earlier. Nobody knew about the surprise, though, because the merry revelry in the inn was colorfully spiced up by a performance from the seven-piece El Kachon.
The septet, made up of Tina Gerbec Radaković (vocals), Andrej Krt Barbič (guitar, harmonica, backing vocals), Tomi Perinčič (vocals, slide guitar, guitar), Dejan Sondža Gerbec Radaković (bass guitar, backing vocals), Žiga Dobravc (drums), Ptrimož »PimpS« Malenšek (percussion) and Mladen Cetina (keyboards), took the whole thing deadly seriously, even in a setting where the crowd was happily sliding around the bends of drunkenness, and spent a good chunk of time getting everything ready for an optimal live performance.
Going into the details paid off. It’s obvious that El Kachon are the kind of musicians cut from the right cloth, who approach everything with a huge amount of love and respect for the art of music. In their far-from-modest show, split into two parts, they gave us a repertoire made up almost entirely of their own original material.
El Kachon are definitely oddballs of the Slovenian music scene. Their style is hard to pin down. The easiest way to label it would be progressive blues rock. Their compositions combine an exceptional tangle of classic blues rhetoric with detours into psychedelic rock, as well as a blend of jazz elements. Tomi’s slide keeps reminding you that a given part of a song can very quickly tip into something that might smell of bands like the Allman Brothers Blues Band, or on the other side also the “southern” Govt ‘n’ Mule, even Lynyrd Skynyrd. The sound was excellent during the show, and the building blocks in the landscape of the sonic picture were evenly spread out. The lead vocals of Tomi or Tina, often paired up in duets, were wonderfully harmonized with the backing vocals of the other members too. It’s precisely the vocal delivery, along with the excellent interpretation backed by the rich experience of the band’s members, that’s the tip of the scales and fully convinces you of El Kachon’s outstanding quality.
There’s no room for a slip-up here. In such organic melodiousness, every single mistake, however tiny, can be heard. And this time there were precious few, if any. El Kachon, who felt right at home in this setting – probably not much different from the rehearsal space where they normally practice – are a phenomenon of exceptional listenability, yet with a varied, even complex story of songwriting. With the exception of Neal Young’s Cinnamon Girl and Albert King’s The Hunter, which blues heavyweights from Canned Heat and Blue Cheer to Free have covered in their own versions, the set featured the originals Home, What If, Snake Bite, Solo Moon, Little By Little, One Fine Day, Mustang Sally and Still.
El Kachon blew us away with their perfection and precise tuning, which reaches the level of a flawlessly running Swiss watch. This is a band that Slovenia is short on, so let’s hope it gets the spotlight it deserves on the scene going forward, and, most importantly, that it puts out a studio debut as soon as possible and brings as many of its gigs as it can to the masses. In Ljubljana you’ll have a chance to catch them on 11/29/2012 at the club Channel Zero, in Metelkova.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Helena Vertačnik
