Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Venue: Menza pri koritu, Ljubljana
Gig date: 22.09.2011
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: 7€/10€
For the first autumn Friday night of the year, the BangYourBrain crew brought the Singaporean-American Wormrot/Maruta grind package to Ljubljana and backed it up big time with Brežice’s own Dickless Tracy.
On a warm evening, the expected crowd (about 50) of grinders gathered in front of the Menza doors in Metelkova, killing time with a little ale, hop tea and green cigars while waiting for a brutal assault on their eardrums (no lube, of course…). The gig kicked off an hour later than planned, but that didn’t spoil the pleasant boozing, uhhh… socializing (quite the opposite), and given how little material most of the bands have put out, the delay wasn’t exactly a shock.
At ten o’clock sharp, Dickless Tracy attacked us from the stage, and this time there were four of them up there! The sound was decent, the crowd (as it turned out, the biggest of the night) was happy, the band too, and songs we’ve heard a million times rang through our ears, heads and guts once again. As already mentioned in some earlier reports, the dickless grind is very cheerful and easy on the ear, you can’t accuse them of not knowing their instruments either, though it’s true they treat every gig like a public rehearsal. Then again, considering they personally know 90% of the audience, you really can’t hold it against them. The set flew by as usual (it goes without saying that people knew their songs inside out and the party was to match), and soon the crowd was back to enjoying the smells of the Metelkova night, adding their own share to them (the smells, that is)…
Right on the heels of the local heroes, Florida’s Maruta took the stage. They’ve officially been around since 2005, when a bunch of youngsters who had previously cut their teeth in local death/grind bands, mostly short-lived ones, pooled their (lack of) instrumental skills. In their years together they’ve put out two albums and racked up countless gigs, and on Friday they hit the crowd with beastly grind, but they have a pretty serious problem for the band’s long-term survival: they’re monotonous on stage… The grind that sounds youthfully upbeat on record and shows two raised fingers (not thumbs) to societal norms sounded tired, short on ideas and short on energy tonight. Maybe that’s partly down to the small crowd (but hey, damn it, grinders don’t exactly play to sold-out stadiums), but the band seemed bored and clueless about how to get the energy of their music across to the audience. They fired through their set competently, thanked the crowd and left the stage. Anyone who came for “the racket” had no trouble being satisfied with the show, but those of us who were still (relatively) sober headed out for a smoke break with a slightly bitter taste in our mouths (and not from beer)…
Since the breaks between bands were almost too short tonight (or the debates in front of Menza too long, who knows…), we were soon back in the “concert hall” to check out the three-headed Singaporean attraction Wormrot. Just like Maruta before them, Wormrot have two albums out, plus a few splits. But they were way more cheerful than the American lads before them, and they delivered their take on the music, definitely shaped by the vibe of the country they come from, with enthusiasm, as if they’d just been inducted into the Young Pioneers. They shook up the crowd of maybe 30 right down to the bone, delivering a proper grind kick in the guts and a great introduction to the autumn that’s trying to sneak into our little country, even though the sun is still shining on us… The whole thing was over way too fast, but then you can’t really expect a 90-minute set from a band with two records.
Maybe this report talks a bit less about the music of the bands, but real grind is simply a state of mind, the kind that tears you apart down to your prime factors every time and at the same time fills you with the energy we need to proudly show the world our outstretched index fingers… that’s grind for you. If you get it, you get it, and the rest don’t care anyway. Those who got it could spend a great evening hanging out with the right people and enjoying good music, and the others weren’t there anyway…
Photos: Nina Grad
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