Performing: Big Bad Wolf, Fuck Logic, Marax, Interceptor
Location: Šešče (Prebold, Žalec) / Kulturni dom Šešče / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, April 28, 2018
It’s been 30 years since the Fuck Off Commercial festival was founded. That makes it the oldest heavy-sound festival in Slovenia, and this year it’s celebrating one hell of a milestone. To mark it, the legendary Styrian metal stormers Interceptor got their slightly rusty joints moving again (well, they’d been dormant for a good number of years). They spat in their hands and contributed a vital ingredient to the anniversary edition of the beloved festival on the Savinja river. The festival is fatefully tied to Interceptor and to all the history stretching even further back, to the days of Epidemic Zone, which Interceptor actually grew out of. So we’re in the Lower Savinja Valley. In lovely Šešče, with Prebold on the other side of the hills and Žalec not far from here either. Ask anyone around here where they belong and they’ll tell you straight up: they’re Savinjčani, Savinja folk.
The organizers thought of everything. Every last little detail. And what mattered most was that noble value we’ve somehow been pretty badly neglecting over the years. Unity. The Savinja folk showed incredible togetherness that night, the kind you can only learn from. From the nice tickets and wristbands to the press passes. Friendly, pleasant staff at the box office, among the security guys, behind the bar and everywhere else. Incredible energy, positive vibes and, of course, a proper party. Tuned to the hellish notes of heavy sounds.
A little before nine in the evening. Ljubljana’s Big Bad Wolf are on stage. The crew who put out their debut “Outrage of Modesty” in February. A quintet that’s razor-sharp and flint-tight. A hugely successful blend of old-school revivalism of speed and thrash metal elements with rock’n’roll. The band played their whole studio debut and tacked on Ugly, an older tune taken from their EP. As expected, guest violinist Andrej Kopač jumped in on Rattlesnake. The band once again won me over with their focus, charisma and songwriting punch. The quintet as a whole. The only discomfort the band had came from the fact that there were, for the moment, fewer people at the venue than you’d expect. The festival had barely opened and most of the crowd was only starting to trickle in. The Mad Wolf howled with power again, maybe with a little less fire than in mid-March at Orto bar in Ljubljana, but I believe that with more substantial support from the crowd, the feeling would’ve been totally different.
After the furiously howling hairball from Ljubljana, Fuck Logic from Braslovče climbed onto the stage. “Fuck logic,” that is. That feeling when you finally, for once, flip off math. A potent mix of old-school thrash metal with elements of death metal thrown in. A quartet with entirely original material. And a quartet that invited a special guest onstage. Čedo from Radio Jam. Since Radio Jam are hard rockers, you could sense that Fuck Logic with Čedo onstage would pull off something outside Fuck Logic’s usual musical world. In memory of Sergej Vučer, a huge AC/DC fan, they played Hell’s Bells together, with Čedo as vocalist delivering an extremely successful vocal take on the original. The band is announcing a studio debut. From what I saw and heard, they’re not short on commitment; what they urgently need now is even more gigs, and with them even more experience and mileage. To give the guys extra wings and punch. They’re on the right track, and I believe the debut will be a temptation worth every sin.
That evening I arrived in Šešče thoroughly out of sorts. Straight from the far west of Slovenia, with a stopover in Kamnik, then a soul-crushing crawl through the endless bends and speed limits of the Tuhinj Valley, I’d been sipping a beer at Florjan for a measly €1.80 at 4 p.m., yet I hadn’t bothered to find out the running order. Expecting the black metallers Marax, I stepped up to the front of the stage, where there was no whiff of black metal intro beats, especially once the second taped intro started spinning, the theme from the legendary Yugoslav comedy “Maratonci tečejo častni krog” (The Marathon Family). Of course. Because the famous interceptor, with the resounding name of Interceptor, had landed on stage. Fronted by the band’s two ultra-marathoners, Gregor Čulk Jr. and Marjan Pader (guitar), along with Dragan Bagarič (bass), returnee Simon Cukjati (guitar) and Davorin Štorglj (drums). This time Čule kicked things off by calming the crowd, telling them to come closer since he wasn’t planning to throw himself off the stage: “Come closer, I’m not gonna throw myself off the stage!” Those who knew a few stories behind that Čule remark burst out laughing.
The band dedicated this show to Sergej and Tomaž Vučer. Two key building blocks of this festival. The men who deserve credit for the festival’s birth; Sergej wrote most of Interceptor’s lyrics, while Tomaž played bass in Epidemic Zone. In the announcement the band had already said they’d work a hefty dose of tracks from the first two records into their set. Mind you, the band has been inactive for quite a while and got together literally just for this show. So given the group’s reputation and status, this event is one of those that will surely go down among the most important events in the Slovenian metal universe in 2018.
The band radiated remarkable tightness, from the Pader–Cukjati guitar duo to the extremely dynamic, active and sharply precise rhythm section of bassist Dragan and drummer Davorin, who ruled the show over time. And then, of course, there was him. The one and only. Master Čulk, “head and beard,” in the flesh. As I’ve always said. When you watch Čulk onstage, you know where he belongs. On stage and nowhere else. This is a man built from head to toe to entertain people. From his very presence, the gesturing, the posture, the grimaces, everything he does onstage. Along with all the comments and other “nonsense” swirling through his mind at any given moment, which he generously shares with the people. Of course, the hall was filled with a crowd who know all the musicians like the back of their hand, and vice versa. So Čule greeted quite a few people in the audience from the stage, thanked those who took care of the logistics and running of the festival several times over, first and foremost Mufi, who thus became Master Mufi, and the band played superbly. Sound-wise too. The sound was fantastic in every respect.
And that’s just how it went. After the expected Homo Stupidus that opened the show, their last single, released in 2008, the band set about revisiting songs from the first two albums, which had some heavyweight veterans in the crowd going properly wild. So the band traveled back in time through its repertoire, and devoted two songs specifically to the memory of Sergej and Tomaž Vučer. A proven first-rate choice, then, for a catapult into godless and blasphemous graveyard metal mass. And Pomarančina Goba zla in there too, naturally! The crushing Paparazzo from the third album “Mora” didn’t get skipped either, with the charismatic Marjan Pader stretching his vocal cords on it, as expected. Misprized Death, with guest Boštjan Bahč on wind instruments, Pader on twelve-string acoustic guitar and of course Čulk with clean vocals. The band wrapped up the regular set with Highway To Hell. That was the second AC/DC cover, dedicated to the group’s fan Sergej Vučer. The band did it “their own way.” So AC/DC got their own version of the song in graveyard metal format.
As an encore came Zadnja žrtev, originally by Epidemic Zone, which the band had already recorded on the album “The Beginning” (1993), and then the show closed with Sepultura’s Inner Self (Sepultura being the band that surely played an important part in defining the sound and style of early Interceptor). In short, all the small and big history of this legendary band in one piece, in one place. Full-blooded and passionate. After this show Interceptor went back into hibernation. Whether they’ll reactivate or not remains a mystery. I won’t hint at anything, but from what they showed, you can feel these guys still have the potency, the charge, the passion. The energy is there, the fire of purification should chase away the demons of the past, and if the constellation of stars is right too, no way the Savinja metal machine won’t roll once again across the Slovenian metal sky and wrap it in its graveyard metal blackness. So let’s give time some time.
As for the thankless role, this time it fell to the newborn black metallers Marax. A quartet featuring the female black metal vocals of singer Anin. Also on board is Cordura’s Tim Draksler, who once helped out Interceptor, just as Bagarič plays in his Cordura, and despite the heavy corpse paint, he wasn’t hard to recognize by his distinctive look, his guitar and his little beard. The band played their EP “The Abyss Of Illusion,” released in mid-April this year, essentially giving it its live premiere. As a non-expert on black metal I can hardly say where to stylistically file the band, but it’s certain they draw inspiration from the rich Scandinavian phalanx and legacy of this kind of music, led by Dimmu Borgir and Old Man’s Child; an association with the project Covenant flashed through my mind too. The band fleshed out the backdrop with taped synth curtains and orchestrations, showed a nice level of compositional complexity and a fair measure of theatricality, which Anin took care of. Dark stuff, then. A shame the waiting phase was so long. Nearly three quarters of an hour, I think. In that time (until the show) the crowd had substantially wilted under the weight of surplus alcohol derivatives, and the number of listeners in the hours leaning heavily toward morning had been thoroughly decimated too. A shame for the band. But every beginning is harder than you’d wish. The band added a few covers of their idols to the set and so managed to scrape together 40 minutes. Definitely a band worth all your attention. Not only because they’re cultivating their own musical identity within black metal, but also because of singer Anin, who is certainly the band’s distinctive feature.
As I enthusiastically hinted at the start. The Fuck Off Commercial festival was a success in every respect. I haven’t enjoyed such unity, such togetherness among people and such organizational muscle in Slovenia in a long time, not like I did in Šešče.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
