Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: 03.11.2011
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: €8.00
A small club, two outstanding bands that don’t do half-measures, a handful of the chosen few down by the stage, and music with soul. That combination thawed Ljubljana’s proverbial chill and lit a huge bonfire of hope in my heart.
Time is an executioner that shoves us along the lines of our lives without mercy, so fast that a few years flip over just like that. In what feels like a blink, five years have gone by since I first met the Rijeka hopefuls of a new generation, the band Father, who poured pure extract into my soul and ears, the soulful nectar of the album Inspirita, and stole the lion’s share of space in my otherwise very picky heart, the space reserved for those bands I’d be ready to fight a bloody battle for. So I’m not promising some deep, essential truth. The lines below are closer to spiritual impressions, or entries from the diary of a teenage lover of heavy sounds, except that this teenager, on this side of the screen, has already crossed the threshold into a third decade of existence. The soul is no less youthful for it, so no worries!
Friday nights in Ljubljana are reserved for impersonal wandering through light mists, sampling hop extracts, deep debates about saving the world, or a little breather from everyday worries, and if there’s good music along for the ride, all the better. And that last part could be handled by the announcement of a return visit to Slovenia (the last one was quite a few years back, more than expected) from the lads from Kvarner’s outpost of good music and urban architecture, the city of Rijeka: Father. The lads, or by now slightly older lads, could be described in plenty of ways with all sorts of adjectives, but words like half-measures, superficiality, boredom or stereotypes, and similar words that suit the generic emptiness of modern music, would never sneak into that string. They’re vital, surprising, shattering, juicy and professional standard-bearers of true-believer alternative, and as an outstanding band they also have a tasteful dose of approachability and modesty. It’s exactly because of that that years ago I caught the rhythm, the melodies and the deep messages that the five-piece, with a precise soul compass, drives into their musical vignettes.
Back then, the excuse for storming stages was the debut Inspirita. This time, besides the album One Eon, there was also the call of nostalgia for the old days and the urge to reach the high peaks of spiritual ecstasy where I once stood, and from which the view of the world is so beautiful that even bitter everyday life is sweeter than divine manna.
With that in mind I headed toward the temple of musical happenings. Not a church, but at most the alternative chapel of rock worship: Ljubljana’s Orto Bar. Way too early, yet just in time to learn at the last moment the surprising and more than promising news that the Styrian metal/metalcore hopefuls Inmate would be serving up their music on stage as an appetizer. The heart starts beating faster and a slightly parched throat needs its first dose of beer, then up the steep stairs and through the swinging doors I claim my corner of sparingly measured space …
Instead of a crowd, what’s surprising is that only a handful of around 50 people sought out their moment of delight in a similar way. That might be down to the fact that I didn’t spot a single poster announcing the event anywhere in Ljubljana, and there was no sign of Friday’s musical dessert even in front of Orto Bar itself. Sure, we live in the age of digital media, websites, hubs and chat rooms, and sure, this binary-code-based way of spreading the word is more eco-friendly, but if nobody pins up the news that something is going down somewhere sometime, the crowd can end up even more decimated than it (maybe) would’ve been otherwise. Never mind, at least there’s a bit more room for under-the-stage meditation, the optimists would add!
Inmate took the stage first. Six years after their creation, and since the moment when a union of heavy-music lovers from the bands Rotting Cemetery, Astris and Frozen Hell gave them a new lease on life, the young enthusiasts got new lungs and a throat with a pair of steel vocal cords in the form of singer Mike. The band breathes, screams and wrecks everything in front of it with a thoroughly distinctive body of heavy-sound aesthetics. What you notice first is what most Slovenian bands actually lack, but Inmate have it: a sense of stage setup, of looking professional and of aesthetically polished design. That would satisfy only superficial types obsessed with visuals, though, since music isn’t listened to (only) with the eyes. What matters is what trickles through the auditory channels to the brain’s cortex.
And after an admittedly predictable intro, a confident salvo of tastefully seasoned guitars hits the listening center for total disconnect, sounding, in the palette of technically flawless metalcore, tasty and not at all flashy or kitschy. The first to pierce the veil of expectations is the song Without Warning. The first track from the debut Free At Last, announced for next year, sounds crushing and fit to rub shoulders with more established top-flight acts like Unearth or As I Lay Dying. The guitar duo of Aleš Kroflič on the left and long-haired Andrej Bezjak on the right side of the stage is complemented by the not-at-all-excessive but hellishly fat bass of Saša Bandal. In the background drummer Jure Grudnik fights his battle with technique, cymbals and drum skins, while the effective magnet of total attention at the front of the stage is singer Mike, who has a brutally grooved throat, a tasteful dose of stage humor and charisma. The power doesn’t drop afterwards, since Inexorable Path had already thoroughly honed the earwax back when I listened to the demo version on the band’s Myspace page. Because Ljubljana’s crowd doesn’t let itself be lured down to the front that easily, the aforementioned lover of martial arts and bestial vocals, singer Mike, provocatively left the safe shelter of the stage and confidently moved into a face-to-face confrontation with the club congregation. Lost In Words and Angels rushed past like a ten-ton armored vehicle, and among those egging on ever louder applause, right in the front row, were members of Father, who came not just to check out Inmate but to offer them honest support. The song Inner Fear, now renamed Victorious, opens with a Teutonic start that sounds like prep for a landing on an unsuspecting German crowd (they got a taste of the Styrian echelon just a day after Ljubljana). It fills the vaults of Ljubljana’s temple of alternative with the precise meter of perhaps slightly dry metalcore. But despite the generic quality one could blame on the genre and a string of cloned bands, Inmate are something fresher and better already because they’re from this side of the Alps, and they’re going about the job at the highest level.
You can call them craftsmen, but the products that come out from under their fingers are actually masterpieces fit for export, which can easily penetrate much further than just the neighboring hamlet! Even after the last ride down the roller coaster of intense emotions and hard sounds with the song Out Of The Darkness, my opinion doesn’t change for a moment. So March, when we’ll supposedly get the sharpest shrapnel of homegrown creativity, which Inmate will deliver in the form of their debut, will be one damn wonderful month. We’ll get a local vision of metalcore that’s not tied only to the local backwaters, and in the mix of reactive elementals there’s enough noise, melody and edge to make the cataclysmic year 2012, if nothing else, at least a bit spicier!
When the Slovenian bearers of blackness left the stage, a swift, flying changeover unfolded before our eyes. In a battle against time and the approaching midnight, the Croatian geniuses, the reason many had come to Orto in the first place, were getting ready for their stage performance. And after a quick setup the dance of the shamans of Father can begin. The lights get slightly smoky and a trip into the familiar spheres of the unknown begins on stage with the song Cynosure. One of the juiciest fruits from the album Inspirita. One piece that sets off an avalanche of emotions is also this shattering song, which kicks off a journey around the edges of the universe. The pain and bitterness of farewell come together into a mosaic of melody, rhythm and directness. The quintet, visibly a little tired since the show at Zagreb’s Bogaloo, has it in such measure that the spell cast through the speakers hits hard and lands, despite the initially slightly worse sound. The ice is broken and the heart breathes easy at the fact that, despite so many years of hiatus, Father are only slightly dusty, and otherwise the soulful machine runs flawlessly. Proof of that is the follow-up in the destructive groove of Chigla Pegla, one of the last singles from the first album to get a video. Proven melody-playing with pauses in between, switching from an enraged bull to a herd of invisible buffalo wrecking everything in front of them, helped along both by an outstanding compendium of music and by that which can’t be learned: charisma.
On the small, cramped stage the musical duties are divided evenly between the long-haired samurai with the painted guitar, Davor Tomić Pinky, his taciturn, thick-haired yet equally guitar-skilled counterpart Dario Pazanin, and the likable short-haired rhythm duo made up of bassist Franjo Jardas and the band’s new acquisition, a member of Belfast Food and The Beatles Revival Band and a truly outstanding rhythm man, Marko Jurić. Soul and body need a voice too, and that’s taken care of by the gifted shaman, central stage figure and soulful elemental of the band, singer Mihael Prosen. He doesn’t squander words on needless chatter from the stage, but with his words he forges such an authentic bond of erotic lovemaking with the crowd through his throat and microphone. Half-closed eyes and wide-open registers weave a link with the sublime, and the body bends to the rhythm and gravity of emotions in the primal dance of a medium through which the muses of music speak. Father are undoubtedly a channel of communication between higher spheres of consciousness and the world around.
Time to present the current stuff, and the first in the string of musical novelties from the new eon off the album One Eon is the playful eruption of emotions in the song Mangiafuoco Il Magnifico. The guys aren’t lying when in the opening verse they announce a reckoning with the rot of the age and the world we live in. Father filter the signals of a world pulsing ever faster toward its inevitable end and convert them into music with a logical equation. Right after that comes time for one of the sweetest dishes on the menu of Tool-ish aesthetics. The song The Downloader got me, at least with its intro rhythm and its link to the astral tips of the rebel universe. Compromises are unacceptable, and reshaping and decanting into multicolored consumer bottles of a mentally emptied world is out of the question. Father raise their middle fingers and stand up against all norms without needless obscenity, but with the magnitude of at least a hundred atomic bombs, the kind that leveled the Hiroshima of our worldly nothingness. The reckoning is complete, even though in this world of illusory freedom and democracy we can seemingly leave the trenches of enslavement at any moment. As they put it, the only revolution that could air this world out is a total mental airing-out. If the world is business, the totalitarianism of music is the only thing that can purify us and fill our lungs with fresh air.
Venus & Mars offers a slight return to the balance of hard emotions and the pure heart impulses of perfect love. Like passionate flames of the duality of male and female energy, Father build a bridge between the two hemispheres and cosmic poles, in a style and with shades that one gladly pays for in solid gold. Father sail between Venus and Mars and, in a state of total levitation, have a navel where both energies mix and drive the rotors of living hearts. Tenderness and punch are in balance, and the perfect meditation continues with the sentimental ballad interlude of Part Of Me. One Eon, in its apparent incompatibility, is so damn effective that the new songs feel like a polished refill for a world already heated up by the primal explosion of Inspirite. And that’s where the passion comes from, the one that infected the soul so sweetly it can’t survive without new doses of energy. As if standing on the join between tectonic fault lines, I switch quite naturally to the older call of Never Come Back, which is followed by a birthday present, though I doubt there was anyone in the congregation who had actually blown out one more candle on their cake on that gray yet so bloody beautiful Friday evening. We got a wreath of the influences and songs that brought Father to where they are. Pantera’s I’m Broken sends blood from toes to crown, and resisting the motor function of movement is utterly pointless. Into the battle of passion sneaks the good old, back-then-still-unspoiled Metallica, and it doesn’t go without the good old R.A.T.M. and, back in the days of sincerity, still irresistibly attractive Korn. Blind bends backs and we gladly slide down the slopes of the canyons of our own personal development to the depths of hell, where Father remind us of Slayer’s domination. Father are all that and more than just a combination of these few elements, since they have their own backbone, besides their own pair of ears and a gigantic soul, and also one big heart that drives the five homogeneous links of the perfect machine, the venerable Machine. After that the lights can only go out, since midnight marks the hour of this time’s final farewell.
Hopefully the break will be shorter this time, since the heart is filled with such warm blood that the mind and soul need their next delight soon. Before the end of the year they’re off to Dubai, an unconventional destination for serving up rock pleasures, and just a bit too far for the average person’s pocket to survive. We’re not all tycoons and we don’t all have rich daddies and mommies, right? Despite everything, I hope the fairy of financial success finally smiles on them, as long as the sheikh and his hopefully lovely daughters don’t lure them into seeking shelter on the sandy side of paradise, since we need them here, now, and again soon. The heart got its dose of tenderness and impulsive passion in the best possible way, and in the egoism of total conviction one could have wished for a slightly longer show, one where we’d get the grand finale of the evening with a full dose of both albums, topped off with Eleanor Rigby slapped on after Katana. The evening would’ve been baroque-full then, but as it was I could head home happy and satisfied, my mind already counting down the seconds to the next meeting. Father are very addictive, since their music is manna without which the heart tears and starves, and this concert, also in terms of the tandem link with the outstanding forces of Inmate, was one of those I’ll gladly remember for a long time, gulping down thick saliva of cravings that, this time, were satisfied.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
INMATE: 1. Intro 2. Without Warning 3. Inexorable Path 4. Lost In Words 5. Angels (ITHOT) 6. Victorious (Inner Fear) 7. Written In Blood 8. … Overcome (S&H) 9. Out Of Darkness FATHER: 1. Cynosure 2. Chigla Pegla 3. Mangiafuoco Il Magnifico 4. The Downloader 5. Venus & Mars 6. Part Of Me 7. Never Come Back 8. Madley 9. Machina
Photo gallery
