Venue: Faraon club / Bled / Slovenia
Concert date: 10/30/2007
Attendance: 60
Ticket price: €5.00
When Lady’s First are on the bill, you know you’re in for a great show, one worth showing up for and tailor-made for the soul of any hard-sound fan. Lady’s First do everything themselves. They’re warriors who believe in their thing and know exactly what they want and what it takes to keep their wagon rolling. They’re their own managers, sound techs, lighting techs, and merch sellers. All in one. And that deserves admiration and respect. You’re your own boss, you make the calls, and you answer for what you do. So hello, freedom, earned with bloody blisters, but worth every last drop of blood.
Halloween night. Once again it’s going off everywhere human imagination reaches. Ever since the late Yugo is gone and the powers that be took over the American holiday for strictly commercial purposes, weird stuff happens around here on this day. A horrific crash at Podvin, a traffic collapse: from the junction with the Podvin turnoff all the way to the start of the highway before Žirovnica, coming from the Gorenjska side, everything is standing dead still. Outside a cold wind is blowing, scattering autumn leaves across the deserted Bled roads while I rattle my way up to Faraon club. I pull up in front of the venue and run into two very familiar faces. Miha Oman – Buco, Lady’s First guitarist, who was just lighting a cigarette with his better half, outside the club of course, no mistake. Soon the whole Lady’s First lineup gathers around for a smoke in front of Faraon’s doors,… The clock creeps toward 11 p.m. Suddenly there’s a racket inside the club, so I wander in….
On stage, in near-total darkness, a girl surrounded by three young guys. The band Spleen. Not a soul in the club, just a few heads parked at tables with drinks, keeping warm in the corners. Spleen are an interesting bunch for the youth. A modern product of crossing metal moves, softened right down with alternative sonic impulses of smeared, rasping guitars, with a dominant female vocal front and center. Nice stuff. Mostly thanks to the singer; the other guys are more or less stage extras, though they show bold command of the technical side of playing their instruments (bass, drums, guitar). The Spleen quartet has some downright enviable preconditions for a breakthrough. But they’ll have to roll up their sleeves. The band made it clear they can convincingly play their own original material live. Of course there were a few mishaps during the set, little slip-ups that had the members glancing at each other briefly before carrying on as if nothing happened. The vocal is strong and charismatic, and that’s the band’s first ace. Of course, when you’ve got a charismatic girl fronting the band, things can get complicated in the extreme (totally positive from a market standpoint) to the point where the singer overshadows the rest of the band. The examples in rock music are well known (The Cardigans, Nightwish, Sade, The Pretenders, Blondie,…) . But that’s the price, and it’s worth the risk. I’d recommend the guys bring more stage movement in the future, and it wouldn’t hurt to work on their looks either, so they don’t end up as a mere pale shadow of the girl (well, being pale in Bled – “bled” is Slovenian for pale – kind of works). So the original material is there, and the band will clear the first hurdle if they put out an album. Right now Spleen need as many gigs as possible to get their name out, build up their confidence, and grow further and tighten the bonds as a unit.
This time Faraon was very, very empty. I counted a good 60 people in total, including the bar staff and the hostesses. Lady’s First, just like Spleen before them, were forced to squeeze onto the very same stage, which had exactly one tiny spotlight and three flickering bulbs. Small stage, few people. Still, the guys stepped up the way they know how to. Below the stage they were greeted by a group of their loyal supporters, who’ve been rooting for the band ever since it started. Plenty of people turned around at the club’s entrance door when they heard the admission was €5.00 and that you get two free drinks with it (consumption credit). “What kind of racket is this, huh?” Bled’s youth, just hooked on the drug of globalization. I wonder where all the “way too loud” rockers and metalheads, always so brave and clever with their words, were that night, when they could have come to cheer on Lady’s First?
Lady’s First shone in their true glory a few times this summer, by far the brightest at Metal Mania Open Air in Komen! Of course the magic is different when a bigger crowd is waiting below the stage, a crowd firmly united in its love of red-hot metal clang, when you’ve got a bigger stage and a proper “light show” to go with it. This time that wasn’t the case. The only company Lady’s First had on stage was a stripper pole, which does fit the band’s name and its upright, white-topped mascot, even if the guys didn’t catch any scandalous bunnies in their trap during the set. But there’s something. Youda and company are known sound masters, and they once again made sure the stage performance had a quality sound the whole way through.
The guys split the show into two parts. The first was dominated by their original material, with the intense wrecking balls High Machine, Criminal, and The Game at the center of attention. In between they slipped in The Trooper (Iron Maiden), a staple of their shows. The two-part format serves to keep the club in the nightlife longer, lure in more people, and sell more drinks. In cases like this the first part is always shorter and less packed with energy. It’s almost become the rule. It turned out that way this time too, and it fits the principle of building up atmosphere, which has to hit its climax of intense energy at the end.
With the second part, which they opened with the epic, bombastic 911, they effectively warmed up the small crowd (about 60 heads). The first alarm for an adrenaline spike in the bloodstream was an interesting take on the song Prazna cesta, which caught the attention especially of the female part of the audience, who also warmly welcomed the song Nisi ti later in the show. Then come the classics, Hallowed Be Thy Name (Iron Maiden), and the show really caught fire with the Rage Against The Machine cover Killing In The Name Of, which the guys pulled off extremely effectively, Domen’s vocals included. They built on that explosion of energy with the evergreen Motori (Divlje Jagode), during which the crowd went especially wild, and closed the regular part of the show with their standard cover of Fear Of The Dark (Iron Maiden).
In this closing trio of covers, people got so fired up they wouldn’t let the band leave the stage. Hallelujah. So the Lady’s First show was a success. People were hot! Domen says: “Okay, let’s do one more!” and they launch wittily into a rock n’ roll version of Ko boš prišla na Bled. Next comes something for the stirred-up female hearts (Sweet Child O’ Mine, by the forgotten Guns N’ Roses), and to finish, the guys call Nejc from Bless The Deaf up on stage, who sang Pankrti’s anthem Bandiera Rossa with Lady’s First. The band even coaxed out a “mosh pit” below the stage, and some of the wildest flailers had to come to terms with hard landings on the floor.
Because of the conditions described above (small stage, poor stage lighting, and above all too few people), you could tell Lady’s First didn’t quite floor the gas all the way. It was most noticeable in the vocals, which in general is nothing special in cases like this. It’s simply the most exposed element of any band and the only natural “instrument” (the body itself makes the sound), the most vulnerable one, which can’t hide behind distortion and wah-wah when it’s not its day. In “translation,” that doesn’t mean Domen didn’t sing at a perfectly good level throughout the show, just without any extra drops of sweat this time. Buco and Čare were banging their heads around as usual, Youda carefully “squealed out” his famous solos, the two guitarists tore through riffs and triple harmonies in sync, and the guys played their set optimally. Seamless, compact. That proves they’ve reached a level of tightness and coordination that lets them control for themselves how much energy to spend, where, and when. In that respect Lady’s First have matured thanks to constant tempering on stage. It’s been a year since I first saw the guys live at KUD in Ljubljana. The progress in how they deliver their show is more than noticeable. And I guarantee you: wherever they show up, things really smolder. So the guys have a confirmed gig on 11/24/2007 in Besnica, where things will once again properly smolder under the stomping baton of Lady’s First.
Setlist
1. Intro
2. High Machine
3. Criminal
4. The Trooper
5. The Game
6. LF
7. Creeping Death
8. 911
9. Lady
10. Prazna cesta
11. Hallowed Be Thy Name
12. Nisi ti
13. Killing In The Name Of
14. Motori
15. Fear Of The Dark
—encore—
16. Ko boš prišla na Bled
17. Sweet Child O’Mine
18. Bandierra Rossa
Photo gallery
