Location: Roxly/Ljubljana/Slovenia
Concert date: 08.10.2008
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: 0,0 €
Feedback are a still-relatively-young band of musicians from the Primorska region who, instead of playing classical music like they were supposed to, chose the thorny path of rock instead. But Feedback aren’t your typical rockers. They’ve set out to bring back the good old days of rock music from the sixties and seventies. When you travel with them, you travel into the past, and they’re so convincing that sometimes you really feel like you’ve landed in another era.
In the first part of the show they played the whole new album, titled Od Blizu, which I personally think is a step up from their self-titled debut (review HERE). They showed they’re real masters of their instruments, and with lively melodies they got the crowd on its feet. A short break followed, where concertgoers could chat with the band, buy their CD, go out for a cigarette, a beer, a kebab, whatever.
And it was precisely that kebab that spoiled the second part of the show a bit. Right next to me stood someone who kept belching, with terrifying smells coming out of his mouth that not even the heady scents of the perfumed ladies could fend off. Still, that spoiled kebab didn’t spoil my fun. In the second part we heard some pieces from the first album, a few new songs, and there was also time for some improvisation.
And then it was over. The guitarist and the keyboardist had already gone off for a well-earned rest, but the crowd was in no rush to go home. They held out so long that the bassist and drummer had to give in and go for another encore on their own. For a few minutes the two of them played a funky groove, then the guitarist and keyboardist came back on stage too, and we got to hear one more excellent improvisation. At the end the guys cranked up the sound even more and nearly blew out the audience’s eardrums. Even the guitarist had to step back a bit because he couldn’t take that much volume himself. Maybe that was a little unnecessary, since my head was ringing all night.
With Feedback, everything is about the good old stuff. The older, the better. That goes for their songs as well as the instruments themselves. They all play instruments from Victorian times, and their clothes are just as colorful. Okay, joking aside, these guys play the instruments that dominated the sixties and seventies. The keyboardist even managed to get a real Hammond organ and a real Fender Rhodes electric piano with the lid open, where he could twiddle the knobs and produce those naive but oh-so-right warm seventies tones that fill you with nostalgia. Their playing style is very old-school too. There are none of those insanely fast parts you get in many modern progressive bands; instead there’s a lot of feel and tightness, which is totally my thing. They borrow a lot from jazz-rock bands like Santana and Leb i Sol, from progressive bands like The Nice, and there’s plenty of funk, hard rock, and psychedelic music from the late sixties too.
Feedback have incredible potential. Even though everything they do is rooted in the past, their music has a freshness that I really miss in Slovenia. They’re excellent at mixing different genres: blues, jazz, funk, rock, psychedelia,… All of this is music that our great-great-great-grandfathers listened to way back thirty years ago, but it’s also music that’s missing from today’s scene. The big turnout and the great response also prove that the market for this kind of project is opening up again and interest is growing. Feedback have a bright future ahead of them.
Text: Rok Podgrajšek
Photos: Barbara Milharčič
Setlist
1. Glasbeno kopito
2. Ura pije čas
3. Drobljenec
4. Globina v plitvini
5. Glasba je moj pajdaš
6. Buri katerije
7. Orbita
8. Tordurtormoltor
9. Sevanje
10. Mrzli prsti
11. Faktor, faktor, zmnožek
12. 7/8
13. Laboratorij
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