Author: Aleš Podbrežnik, Sandi Sadar Šoba
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Concert date: 22.08.2007
Attendance: 1508
Ticket price: 150.000
This year proved once again that the little pitcher can keep going to the well for a heaping cup of water until something snags and the pitcher shatters. The Austrian festival pitcher, apart from a few less successful ones we’ve already reported on, is for now being filled from geysers of proven Germanic precision and guaranteed success, and the latest peak was supposed to come from the recently wrapped-up FreQuency festival. The announced lineup promised, besides lesser-known indie pop names, acts with real repute who wouldn’t get drenched in pop sauce even in their wildest dreams. TOOL, for instance, and NIN, and we could go on … Curiosity simply demanded that we be there too, at the site of the new concert Mecca, Medina or Jerusalem.
On the grounds where race cars, Formula cars and similar beasts once roared and growled, the organizers, for the seventh time now, set up two big stages and a small one (Open Minded or Talent) and offered a plethora of more than fifty bands from every corner, plus a bungee cord for the adrenaline junkies and plenty of places to thoroughly empty your wallet, but more on that later … A caravan of thirty-two Slovenes also set off for the place near Salzburg, entrusting our lives to the skilled hands of the driver of a rented minibus from the biggest and most capable provider of concert pleasures abroad – the company Koncerti.net. After a little over six hours of relatively comfortable driving, the bus wheels rattled off the last few kilometers of the four-hundred-kilometer trip, and soon we got acquainted with an interesting phenomenon of Oberkrainer culture – without too much complaining, they’re able to stand in long lines, relatively disciplined, for hours and hours. When we finally got our wristbands, which defined how much freedom of movement we had in front of and behind the stages, and above all with which we could, slightly tired, go and pitch our tents in one of the two designated tent areas, we finally walked through the gate of our campsite, which was supposed to offer us all warmth and hospitality for the next four days of our festival stay.
Evening came, then night, in which some chronically lacked alcohol and adrenaline, and others, somewhat calmer, lacked sleep because of the first lot. For some, the morning wake-up call started as early as three a.m., and the rage at the herd of juvenile alcoholics and the tribe of their sympathizers could only be cooled with the warm thought of the festival curtains rising the next day and the start of the musical occupation of the senses. So the night could somehow be gotten through, just about.
DAY 1: DISAPPOINTMENT FOR A GOOD MORNING, OR “TOOL SIND ABGESAGT!”
The morning dawn settled over the tent city of Salzburg’s Babylon, and after a morning shower not worth wasting words on, we once again stood in disciplined lines as long as the ones outside bakeries in the worst famine. A fortifying breakfast hit the spot, and after a morning powwow about which of the most interesting acts would happen on which stage, it was time to swap our regular T-shirts for concert ones. After that, a German course. Topic: the meaning of the word abgesagt. Hushed whispering and discussions could be heard even earlier, but the first passer-by, emboldened by the sight of a T-shirt reading TOOL, confirmed the blackest and most pessimistic suspicions – TOOL had cancelled their appearance at this year’s Frequency. Reason: Maynard supposedly got sick and lost his voice … After the cancelled visit by the former frontman of Soundgarden and Audioslave, Chris Cornell, this band, the reason most of us had set out to bivouac in Salzburg, added its share of disappointment to the first day! The organizers proved they’re people of boundless understanding and an ear for the youth masses with a gesture of refunding the ticket price to anyone who went to demand it at the entrance by ten p.m. Tempting, but our ride had gone who knows where and our return was only guaranteed for Saturday, three days later …So we headed for the venue entrances, where security gave us a thorough search at one o’clock and graciously let us down the hillside toward the complex of the once-mighty racetrack, riddled with patches of asphalt track and garages.
The organizers split the concert action across two main stages. The Race Stage, the main central space, and the somewhat smaller Green Stage, which was far from negligible in size. A third spot, where fans of electronica and exotic acts sought their peace of mind (by the way: Croatia’s Overflow and naturalized Slovenes of Bosnian origin, Emir&The Frozen Camels, also played there) – the Open (Minded) Stage. Since it’s almost impossible to believe in the principle that you can see everything and actually enjoy it, I picked the Race Stage for my festival “enjoyment” in pleasant company, while the other half of the team went off to besiege the Green Stage.
RACE STAGE:
THE FILMS: 15.15 – 15.55
The Films are a band of four young guys, Michael Trent, Kenneth Harris, Jake Sinclair and Adam C. Blake, who describe their musical genius as a combination of indie/rock/pop, but a few bars tell you that this American foursome from Charleston sounds closer to bored Britpop, a bouncy soda-pop derivative of forced-playful melodies that add a pinch of the sixties to a conglomerate of mostly stolen crap, and you get a combination that grabs the German audience. In fact they’re quite often at home on the waves of our northern neighbors, since The Films are currently on an all-German tour with Kooks, while here they’re still very unknown. They can be recommended to anyone chronically short on Oasis-style harmonies- on a folk rock beat … You can also buy The Films’ debut CD, Don’t Dance Rattlesnake, where they try to charm you with supposed hits with titles like ‘Black Shoes’ and ‘Belt Loops’, and the main trump card is the song ‘Strange Hands’. The overall impression they left in my mouth was the bitter aftertaste of disappointment, since with a clichéd and washed-out performance they were anything but the first choice of bands that could have made the first day at least a little bit sweeter.
BRAND NEW: 16.10 – 16.50
The first dose of somewhat tighter and far more intelligent musical performance comes from a quartet of young New Yorkers, Brand New, an alternative rock outfit formed at the turn of the millennium from the ashes of the post-hardcore band The Rookie Lot. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Jesse Lacey, pianist and guitarist Vincent Accardi, the somewhat less noticeable bassist Garrett Tierney and solid drummer Brian Lane serve up something quite different from what we’d already heard. You could actually describe them as dark, embittered and rather hard to digest, with the beauty rounded out by a constant sense of the implosion of greyness, forever interwoven with an almost Blur-like rainbow-colored musical imaginary. Brand New are alternative in the sense of replacing feelings of depression and melancholy with a multitude of shades of musical additions you wouldn’t expect there even in your wildest dreams. From the primal seed of pop-punk they started with, the band morphed into a more complex, more mature form of indie-emo bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate and Straylight Run, and they keep building their opus from album to album. They already have three albums under their belt. After Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Enendu, last November they released a third album, The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me, where from a fairly mature treatment of themes like illness in the family, fear of losing loved ones and self-ironic mockery of themselves, they take a step forward that occasionally recalls Radiohead-style themes of a collapsed system of family values, lack of worldview, father figure and love. The more notable songs of a rather intimate, slightly restrained but anything but uninteresting set were songs like ‘The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows’ and ‘Sic Transit Gloria… Gloria Fades’, and among the newer ones ‘Jesus’, ‘Welcome To Bangkok’ and ‘Sowing Season’. After a good 45-minute journey through Brand New’s not entirely pessimistic but not playfully optimistic world of realism, the guys left the stage and, at least in my eyes, reaped the first truly positive sympathies amid the festival’s mid-point agony.
THE VIEW: 17.10 – 18.00
Soon after, following a quite drawn-out break, badly needed for swapping gear and banners, which some used to buy the traditionally expensive festival beer (the price was “only” 5 € for half a liter of Otakringer …), the music from the monitors slowly faded and four clones of an already-seen stage image marched on, going by the name The View. The View are an indie rock quartet from Scotland who reap quite a lot of praise and rave reviews on the other side of the English Channel, but the songs from their debut album Hatts Off To the Buskers sounded rather unconvincing, hollow and unimaginative on the stage of the Salzburg festival. Kyle Falconer, the lead throat, guitarist and occasional bassist of the band, tries to rouse the melancholic crowd and makes every effort to impress the mass of listeners, wrapped in despondency, with his broken German. Partly it’s down to clichéd logic, and partly to the fact that the other members also do their bit for the band’s broken sound, like bassist Kierin Webster, who tries to fill the ears with harmony using thirds, while you hear plenty of clams that not even lead guitarist Pete Reilly’s guitar wanking and drummer Steven Morrison’s ska noodling can drown out. The View sound desperate and, thanks also to the rather dry PA sound, they come across as if they were holding a public rehearsal rather than giving a serious performance at one of the bigger festivals in this part of Europe (by the way: already on the first day the sold-out FreQuency logged around 40,000 tickets sold, while the crowd in front of the Race Stage was only beginning to gather …). Not everything the media offers us can be taken as pure fact. If the media promised overflowing imagination, talent and musical sex appeal this time, then even the deaf and blind could confirm that The View missed the target and came across as a washed-out mixture of pop, Clash, Verve and Oasis, degenerate ska, and reached a level of mass outpouring of misery and pathos. They get a bit more of a response during ‘Wasted Little DJ-s’, but songs like ‘Superstar Tradesman’, ‘Face For The Radio’ and the rest don’t fall on fertile ground at all. The yawning is stopped by a bow, a thank-you and their rather flat exit from the stage.
…AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD: 18.30 – 19.20
We placed a lot of hope in the show of the band with the pretty long name that could also adorn some metalcore band. Trail Of Dead are anything but. They’re indie rockers who are often compared to heavyweights like The Who or Sonic Youth, and the very rumor of their on-stage equipment destruction stirred the sentiments of all those who in the golden days witnessed wild outbursts of destructiveness at concerts by The Who or Nirvana. A fairly massive and melodic body of music already adorns four albums, the latest in a line of epic attempts being last year’s So Divided. Singer and dedicated multi-instrumentalist Conrad Keely, drummers Jason Reece and Doni Shroeder, guitarist Kevin Allen and bassist Danny Wood serve up multi-part vocals and a vision of music that intelligently opposes any meddling. The energy grows from the very first song, and the undoubted peaks were the main singles from the records. ‘Mistakes & Regrets’, ‘Another Morning Stoner’, ‘The Rest Will Follow’ and the others are a prelude that forces you to keep dissecting what you’ve heard. The line between the intimate and the generally, publicly vulgar is crumbling. Music is provocation. Lyrics are a philosophical mantra. There’s no more surprise that we’ve built a society where technology develops faster than the principles with which to properly and fully control it. Excesses have outstripped consumers’ ability to properly judge and rule on taste. There’s too much of everything musically, and what’s missing is the enlightenment of sturdy amateurism. Trail Of Dead are an appeal, not shallow pop icons. They’re intellectuals and musicians, not pop entertainers. Because of that, applause is superfluous. Because of that, the festival appearance and placement on the bill, going by the key of what looks prettiest and where something truly bizarre can be heard, and because of that the end of the concert is apocalyptic in the sense that everything seems untouched and unaffected, while the message, if you’re capable of listening deeply, eats into the center of your cerebellum and burns a path to deeper pleasures the next time you listen. Judgments of quality are totally superfluous after that, aren’t they. The indie rock R.E.M. cataclysts leave and, at least in my mind, leave behind a huge crater of mental overload.
EAGLES OF DEATH METAL: 19.50 – 20.50
The decisive moment was the show by the new-age rock’n’rollers and unabashed entertainers – California good-timers Eagles Of Death Metal, who, true to expectations, “knocked the socks off” even the biggest skeptics and their former opponents. A heartwarming mix of blues, guitar minimalism, simple riffs, rhythm, garage do-it-yourself logic and a sense of humor puts something that sounds rather stale but is utterly fresh and digestible on the face of the usually dull music scene. Jesse “The Devil/Boots Electric” Hughes, charismatic singer and guitarist, the chubby, post-punk-haircut dad Dave Catching, bassist Brian O’Conor and the muscleman behind the drums, Mr. Gene Trautmann, came to the stage to free you from dark thoughts and serve up full-blooded fun. “We’re not here to talk about the wars and shit. We’re here to make you dance, move and make love to …”. Eagles of Death Metal plow in simply – with the song they opened the show with in Ljubljana too: ‘I Came To Bang’. Simple and efficient. Jesse dances and works the “Oberkrainer rabble” quite richly, showering them with compliments and winks as if he were ready for insatiable mating 24 hours a day. The rest of the EODM collective doesn’t skimp on energy either, but Jesse is champion among champions. The crowd is eating out of their hand from the very first note and finally we get a sense of mass hysteria. This time the multi-thousand-headed crowd dances just as Mr. Hughes commands. EODM are stage gods and dictators of consistent pleasure, and the Gospels are the songs from the albums Peace, Love, Death Metal (2004) and Death by Sexy (2006). ‘Kiss The Devil’ and hits like ‘Whore Hoppin”, during which they serve up an extended solo and play with the crowd, and ‘Cherry Cola’ set the course for total success. EODM aren’t virtuosos on their instruments, what matters more is the vitality, which the California “darlings” of Axl Rose don’t lack. Jesse promises this is undoubtedly the best audience under the vault of heaven, but we’ve heard similar triumphant outpourings of stage verbal eroticism on our stages too, haven’t we? No hard feelings. What matters is the euphoria and satisfaction on both sides of the barrier. And the air steamed with the smell of sweat, testosterone and pheromones, the smell of beery breath and genuine rock’n’roll.
SILVERCHAIR: 21.20 – 22.50
The heated atmosphere of rocker debauchery had started to cool off a bit, and many of us wanted a closer look at the show by the once most resonant Australian music export after AC/DC, Midnight Oil and INXS, who back in 1992 promised a worthy reinforcement of the grunge ranks (even though they were only 14 years old then) – Silverchair. They were supposed to be hard rockers, post-grungers, alternative types and artists, but the first glance at the stage shows they’ve fallen into a phase of identity loss and post-adolescent crisis. Frontman Daniel Johns occupied the stage, after the arrival of drummer Ben Gillies, whose beard has grown in by now, and the slightly bloated bassist Chris Joannou, in the manner of a character from Pirates of the Caribbean. A long white scarf wrapped around his head, a posey goatee and a painted face let you know that Silverchair let the fame and success go way too far to their heads – first after the debut Frogstomp, then after the somewhat less resonant albums Freak Show, Neon Ballroom and Diorama, followed by a long break. In the meantime Johns strayed into totally un-rock waters, pooling his creative forces with Australian electro wizard Paul Mac, who became an indispensable member of the band after the fifth album Young Modern. Artistic cramp and the transcending of former boundaries made them poppy beyond the bounds of good taste. They sound stale and wretched. The closest comparison would be a guitar version of Take That, where all the spotlights have to hang on one figure, the otherwise very insecure and unconfident superstar above all superstars – the person of young Mr. Daniel Johns. No, they didn’t convince with their renditions of hits like ‘Without You’ and ‘Luv Your Life’. ‘Ana’s Song (Open Fire)’ also sounds just as hollow and empty. Soulless. Without the bare minimum of kerosene that could make the show acceptable and good. ‘Miss You Love’ and ‘Abuse Me’ sound like a string of stereotypes, which during the show summon a song by the Slovenian sarcasts and musical humorists Slon in Sadež: “We’re the fantastic five / a boy-band quintet / we make music for girls under twelve …”. Silverchair have become a caricature of success and a symbol of musical emptiness. The musical (r)evolution has devoured yet another of its most promising and most talented children, hasn’t it? The overly long set of sadness and misery dragged on like all unpleasant things – too long…
GROOVE ARMADA: 23.20 – 01.00
The hour had come when the ones who made the first day worthwhile should have stepped onto the stage, but they cancelled their appearance at this year’s FreQuency. In place of Tool, the organizers moved an English, more precisely London duo of Yorkshire native Andy Cato and Cambridge boy Tom Findley – Groove Armada – onto the main stage. I’m no expert on electronic music, but this trip-hoppy house downtempo derivative of a stoned mood is far from adequate compensation for all those who wanted to hear the harmonies of the post-apocalyptic ironists and intellectuals TOOL … After seven albums, last year they served up an orgiastic state of sonic debauchery in the form of the album Soundboy Rock.
Since the stimuli and the state of latent aggression boiling out of my every pore after a whole day of roasting in the moderately hot sun, and the swap on the main stage struck me as slapdash, idealess and, truly, the last straw, my better half and I chose to leave the venue and went to recharge our batteries for the mass of music that might finally wash the bitterness out of the thoroughly soured taste that had been rolling around in my mouth since morning. Pluses and minuses: the otherwise very cleverly laid-out festival grounds serve up plenty, but for the first day there were too many disappointments and extremely too little good music. Maybe the mood would have been fixed by hectoliters of cheaper beer and some antidepressants, but those are pictures from a totally different fairy tale … The positive thing is at least that after the all-day music marathon, the too-loud neighbors finally gave us some peace, and the second night under the open sky of Salzburgring was on the edge of acceptable.
Regardless of the fact that half the essence of the first day was, as always, poured out grandly from the core of his faithful soul onto a piece of paper by my colleague Sandi, who devoted himself entirely to the Race Stage, Frequency festival 2007 actually started on the Green Stage. For three days it was reserved for a touch more alternative than the Race Stage, though even on this stage a few far too exotic blooms turned up among the performers that simply don’t belong in a healthy alternative rock family, but more on that below…
JERX: 14.25 – 15.10
The great honor of opening the festival went this year to the locals – Graz emo-core band Jerx. Sweet youngsters, for the mass of little girls down front true princes on white horses, they served up a three-quarter-hour repertoire that left a rather washed-out overall impression. They remedied their minuses in tightness and stage execution of the material very successfully with a whiff of glam image, on which the girlish eyes of the female part of the population, who had forgotten about using their mechanoreceptors, were fixed. The rhythm riffing and drumming slipped out of sync into serious trouble at a few moments, which proved the lads still lack quite a bit of live mileage. No need to explain: black makeup around the eyes, sad looks, at moments deliberately sobbing, whiny vocals, well, sweethearts, this is real sappy emo core. The guitarist showed up in special clothes, like a cheered-up astronaut who had just stepped out of the wreckage of a crashed spacecraft, far from the charm of the one and only brave little mouse. But don’t get me wrong. The outfit served its purpose, he drew huge attention. To everyone’s great surprise, that same guy pulled off a suicidal stunt during the last song, taking a run-up from the front of the stage and flinging himself into the crowd. Madonna! If he’d smashed his hard skull on the asphalt, brrr, or if his knees had cracked at the joints, brr (and once more brr, brr)…. Anyway, astronaut! Jerx of course “sawed off” the single Pleased To Meet You (mamma mia – why are the Rolling Stones jumping around in my head now?), and there were also Entertain, Better Stop This and Money. And the crowd, spoiled rotten, liked it….
VANILLA SKY: 15.30 – 16.15
Here’s how we’ll put it! Four lads from Rome (Italy) followed and upgraded the milk-toothed Jerx, though with no less milky teeth, you just felt they have a layer of enamel that’s a bit more hardened in its confident structuring. By the time of their Frequency show they had released their third studio album, titled “Change” (2007). The Romans drew a serious mass of people to the front, so a solid 10,000 heads were jammed onto the asphalt slab between the mixing desk, about 50 m from the stage, and the stage. The craftiest ones, though, bolted for the green slope and, “sweating and panting,” instantly claimed the shady abundance. Gorgeous ambience, gorgeous view. And a gorgeous crowd. The guys on stage were really enjoying it. Compared to Jerx, they offered a more compact performing version of a very similar genre orientation. More confidence and less eccentric behavior and stage acting, emo-core fringes, Morrissey-style acid skinny sad looks, and here we are… Confident playing and feeling the energy the crowd was sending up to the stage visibly fired the guys up! They played their material excellently, without a single slip, and the crowd eagerly carried them on its waves, especially by nailing the verses. A thoroughly successful show by the youngsters! And yet interesting, because the stylistic musical similarity to Jerx somewhat spoiled the taste, as you involuntarily got the feeling you’d watched the same movie twice, once in a karaoke version and once with real actors… If you’ve pricked up your sensors, let me whisper in your ear that the guys play Graz on 15.09.2007, and a month later Treviso (more precisely Roncade, near Treviso), which means a good two hours’ drive from Ljubljana one way.
THE TWANG: 16.35 – 17.25
Actually the first real indie rockers – baggy rockers, that is, working under the strong influence of Madchester – the music scene, or movement, that appeared at the end of the eighties in Manchester and combined elements of indie rock with dance-oriented approaches. A pinch – incredibly – even hints of New Order psychedelia, acid dance, even rap, Britpop, and Hartland and Etheridge certainly didn’t skimp on dance steps. An incredible musical mix from the Birmingham five-piece, which nonetheless didn’t hold people at the stage, even though the quintet came on at a high level. A new energy aimed at another segment of listeners, who occupied the space in front of the stage between Jerx and Vanilla Sky. The band included the definitely standout Wide Awake, their first single, in the set, and we were honored to hear also Shoot To Kill, the reggae-tinged Fake ID, then Time Waits, Either Way, Push The Ghost and Aimless With An Aim. A very interesting combination of different ingredients, the most colorful of which is truly tailor-made for the most spoiled indie gourmets, who look in music for the weirdest moves of musical motif combinatorics. So nobody went stiff from accidental overbearing excitement at what they heard during The Twang’s show.
THE ARK: 17.45 – 18.45
An early peak on the Green Stage! If this year at Nova Rock they scared people with Eurovision familiars Lordi, their replacement in milder form at FreQuency was The Ark! Both in performance and in the energy whipping off the stage, The Ark – seasoned glam rockers from Sweden who have been roaming stages since 1991 – finally brought to the Green Stage what I had badly missed. Fire! Debauchery, a full bag of silliness and foolery, spontaneity sparkling in powerful stage play that easily glued the listener to the voluptuous sipping of the nectar of this finally real rock odyssey. The boss and singer, ever-provocative Ola Salo, with an impressive hairdo and venomously made-up eyes, came across as completely androgynous, at moments, when he twisted around, quite girlish, the next moment childishly, naively boyish. Extraordinary confidence, extraordinary tightness and “Prayer for the Weekend,” the band’s fresh album released this April, was definitely represented with the Eurovision flower that stood for Sweden at this year’s song contest, so we’re talking about the song titled The Worrying Kid. A comparison with the Swedish The Darkness might not even be out of place for the band, given the injection of a pinch of glam craziness. The band also played One of Us Is Gonna Die Young, the fresh this-year Give Me Love To Give, the stumbling boogie rocker Death To Martyrs, a disco-seventies-oriented ABBA attack with Prayer For The Weekend, and the solemnly shod rock’n’roller Absolutely No Decorum. In short! No time for boredom, a wonderful space for a total switch-off and revelry with the band. People went mad at the exhibitionism of Ola Salo’s excellent dictating. So The Ark, excellent modern hard rock jesters, represented over the three days of FreQuency festival on the Green Stage the strongest link to the genuine, original eruption of the rock n’ roll legacy – the magnificent Swedish legacy of immaculate rock’n’roll pussies – bravo!
THE DANDY WARHOLS: 19.05 – 19.55
What The Ark managed to create was kept going and topped up by at least a good floor by The Dandy Warhols, who, by landing on the stage, once again spun the atmosphere around by a contrasting 180°, especially because of the wholly different genre vision driving the band’s gears. The Ark brought the audience back to the front of the stage, and at The Dandy Warhols that same space in front of the stage suddenly became impassable, so many heads were crammed against one another… The band, in the lineup of Courtney Taylor-Taylor (bass guitar, vocals), Peter Holmstrom (guitar), the ever-mockingly squirming female beastie and cheeky flirt Zia McCabe (keyboards, backing vocals) and Brent DeBoer (drums) – in stage position fully in the front line together with the other three, from Portland (Oregon, USA), with an incredible European alternative groove, a soft rock effect, almost poppy, with a touch of sixties psychedelia, with jabs raining down alongside Procol Harum, The Shadows, of course the superior creators of “all things lovely” The Beatles, and the depression of The Velvet Underground, the latter especially because of Taylor’s vocals. The band knows how to refine and enrich the sound by adding dissonance tricks, which got the strongest response e.g. in the performance of the song Shakin’. The band knows how to create that psychedelic and massive curtain of sound, built on an interesting combination of keyboards and guitar, that at moments literally seems transcendentally undulating. Under this curtain they can lay a totally typical rock n’ roll beat, as happened in Everyday Should Be… Whoever hasn’t managed yet to step on a banana peel could experience it with the wrenched-out We Used To Be Friends. The band is positively, artistically out there – rock today needs bands like this, and in this quirkiness it practically seemed invincible on stage. Without a single slip, with constant high-level communication within the quartet on stage. Of course the notorious, controversial Bohemian Like You, no way they forgot that one! The Dandy Warhols are oddballs in indie rock and in rock in general. People received them extremely intensely and loudly, with incredible mastery of the verses. The band-to-crowd interaction was incredible. Hands fluttered in the air and their uniform waving, as far as the eye could see, created a magical moment at some point. I wished for more bands like this at FreQuency festival, because this time the word “alternative” on the Green Stage truly shone in all its meaning and light, most intensely on the festival’s first day. A band that knows how to strike very subtly, with a sophistication that gravitates toward the notion of transcendence and hypnosis, soft in its approach, but given the overall sum of the contribution of the extraordinary chemistry they created, the constant calibrated balance and communication among the members, all the more real. An objective assessment, comparing all the first-day performers on the Green Stage, delivers the undeniable fact that The Dandy Warhols took first place by far. Simply because of the authenticity of delivering artistic musical intellect, the genuineness and the described stage magic of a perfectly crafted show. The peak of the Green Stage on day one!
SHOUT OUT LOUDS: 20.25 – 21.25
The Swedish alternative band, with their brand-new release “Our Ill Wills,” gave the crowd in front of the stage no rest. With their musical mix of The Cure, U2 and trendy post-Britpop moves they created an atmospheric air most reminiscent of an innocent, not to say unjustified, cry for help coming from a child’s room after the kid stared up at an ugly little hairy spider lowering itself from the ceiling on a silk thread over the child’s nose. Or in other words. A very soft version of self-pity, with some kind of positively oriented shared mood. Vocals somewhat Cure-like and whimpering, rhythm lines strongly inspired by the baton of classic U2, riff moves from the post-Britpop wave. Harmless but pathetic. The kids partied intensely in front of the stage, especially the female part of the crowd, some went off on conga trains,…. An expression that’s spineless, highly predictable and unremarkable. Of course the band played its material on stage without a slip and of course the atmosphere in front of the stage was great, but the reliance on single-string plucking and driving a unison backed by keyboard sound eventually came across by ear as monotonous and repetitive, with a hypnotically lulling effect. In short, the band’s musical expression, without any particular guiding line or clearly recognizable vision of development. Just pleasant to the ear. You down three beers and it’s enough for a switch-off with Shout Out Louds. God forbid you analyze them rationally, because even my grandma can grab three chords on a guitar and sing: “There’s gotta be a bouquet…” Welcome in the sounds of: Tonight I Have To Leave It, Impossible (with Cure-like Boys Don’t Cray jingling…), Very Loud with vocals aimed straight at Bono Vox and The Edge-like single-string guitar whistling… The monotonous swaying in the lazily stuffy atmosphere spared me at least in that I didn’t catch seasickness.
TOCOTRONIC: 21.55-23.10
The German soft pop punk rockers, in the lineup of Jan Müller (bass guitar), Arne Zank (drums), Dirk von Lowtzow (guitar, vocals) and Rick McPhail (guitar, keyboards), meant the doors to delirium for the FreQuency festival crowd were wide open. German lyrics! And that’s what brings the quartet extraordinary popularity both in their native Germany and in Austria. Darkness had long since settled over the festival, and so the band, wrapped in plenty of fog and the shifting beams of stage lighting that barely pierced the saturated foggy air, managed with its energy to bring this obscure, mystic, sly, distant image of the stage together with an understanding of the alternative. Interesting that this wasn’t very far from the energy of the predecessors Shout Out Louds. Just this German…. Apparently in German-speaking countries you can achieve absolutely anything with this language. Security had their hands full the whole time rescuing girls and boys from the front rows who were left breathless in extreme concert euphoria at the stage, though most of those whom security pulled out of the raging sea of delirious revelers simply wanted to show themselves to the band, since they wouldn’t leave the space between the barrier and the stage by any means, so security had to act more sharply several times to remove them. In short, there was the new single Kapitulation, then Imitationen, then Sag alles ab… well, I couldn’t shake the feeling of cloning the dark movement from the late eighties. Comparisons rain down, but if you write verses in German, that’s a tool enough for a refined, free borrowing of what’s been invented, which thus becomes original or “one’s own”. General impression? Musically an ideal moment for a big yawn, the kind not even a lethal dose of sedatives would bring on. Atmosphere? As already said. Tocotronic are a band adopted as folk heroes, and that is best understood only by Austrians and Germans, who dictated a hellish atmosphere during the show, which in fact constantly gave the band extraordinary energy and drive.
2RAUMWOHNUNG: 23.40 – 01.10
In the pursuit of 100% profit, it pays to invite yet another German as headliner. Do you still remember the Bežigrad euphoria at Siddharta’s show a few years ago? Well, Austrians aren’t Germans, but they didn’t fall far from the same tree. An hour and a half of delight was delivered by the duo of Inge Humpe and Tommi Eckhart. Inga is of course the perfect personification of a German diva, replacing what Madonna would give the Germans if she sang in German. And what’s more, Inga wears that cold gaze through crystal heavenly-blue eyes that pierce you with a glassy effect, a cold look akin to her Germanic colleague Marlene Dietrich. The band presented a vision of an interesting combinatorics of rock alternative merged with a full bag of electronic samples. Inga’s feminine vocal woven into it and her untouchable diva image worked mightily thrillingly under the skin. 2raumwohnung have also become folk heroes, does it even make sense to point that out? Inga is an exceptional actress; she subjugated the people with her act, as if wiggling the pinky of her left hand. Her energy was incredible over the hour and a half we saw. She actually did everything on stage entirely by herself. The musicians accompanying her played the roles of perfect extras, or meek mice who strictly follow orders. Fortunately, the occasional monotony of the stage act was broken by films playing on screens set up on the stage in four little towers, among which Madame Inga strolled. Confidently and authoritatively. No slips. One stage, one person and one crowd. Extraordinary cohesion in this triangle; perhaps a bit more intensity and kinetics wouldn’t have hurt the musicians, but as said, Inga ate them all up as soon as she first opened her mouth and drew breath on stage.
What’s strangest to a foreign visitor coming from non-German-speaking countries is the fact that German and Austrian bands are so hugely popular. After what I experienced I stayed totally cold and empty. The Ark and The Dandy Warhols created what I’d come to the Green Stage for on the first day. That is, a triumphant delivery of their own musical tricks and visions. And yet both played the role of 50-minute passing visitors to the stage. Incredible. If only Tool hadn’t cancelled, or at least Chris Cornell had shown up and thrown an Audioslave and Soundgarden party. As it was, the first day passed in a real shortage of a healthy dose of rock energy. FreQuency apparently clings too strongly to the adjective national, since the festival’s financial success and survival are still based on attendance by locals and Germans, which, ranked against the musical achievements of Canada, Australia, the USA and of course Great Britain, means a spit in the sea of the alternative/indie rock that FreQuency festival, as one of the world’s leading festivals, was supposed to bring closer to us in a healthy, tasteful and most objective way. In short, on the first day the organizers deftly pulled a gas mask over my face and forced me to sniff violets in full bloom and honeyed sweetness. Without an orgasm, of course. So let’s hope for a better tomorrow, 16.08.2007.
Setlist
RACE STAGE: 15.15 – 15.55: The Films 16.10 – 16.50: Brand New 17.10 – 18.00: The View 18.30 – 19.20: …Trail of Dead 19.50 – 20.50: Eagles of Death Metal 21.20 – 22.50: Silverchair 23.20 – 01.00: Groove Armada GREEN STAGE: 14.25 – 15.10: Jerx 15.30 – 16.15: Vanilla Sky 16.35 – 17.25: The Twang 17.45 – 18.35: The Ark 19.05 – 19.55: The Dandy Warhols 20.25 – 21.25: Shout out Louds 21.55 – 23.10: Tocotronic 23.40 – 01.10: 2raumwohnung
Photo gallery
