Juvenile Revolt Against the World (2013)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Venue: Orto Bar, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Concert date: November 2, 2013
Attendance: 30 – 40
Ticket price: 12 € (reserved) / 15 € (not reserved)

Unexpected things sometimes lodge in your memory for a long time, but after Saturday’s outpouring of tuneful melodics, with ear-wormy HC punk, skate punk, post-HC and above all a display of routine from an Anglo-American cavalry of middle-of-the-road, not-too-critical punk, one of two things holds true: either nothing special happened, or I’ve changed personally and simply don’t dig certain things as much as I used to. Years ago in Ljubljana I had a total blast with the American jokers Lagwagon, who, true to their name, hitched themselves neatly onto the wagon of pleasure right when we were all swearing by NOFX and Bad Religion after Offspring and Green day, and the more »enlightened« and well-read among us soon started widening our cali-punk spectrum with the other, now-classic names of the Californian punkoid explosion of sound and carefree songs about the fun side of existence. After repeated visits by individual members of the Lagwagon crew as well as the whole collective (by the way, two years ago even teamed up with No Use For A Name, if my senile memory serves), a gig was on the horizon at Ljubljana’s Orto that even the doubting Thomases couldn’t have believed – during a seventeen-day European tour, they decided to drop into the Ljubljana club of rocker pleasures and serve Slovenian youth a bowl or two of splendid nuggets of genius: Versus The World, a band made up, among others, of members of Lagwagon and Ataris. The veterans entrusted the scouting mission of feeling out Slovenia’s pulse to a young band of British imitators of Funeral For A Friend, Rise Against and similar melodic types, not yet seen (or heard) here, who under the name Templeton Pek promise something quite different and by no means stale. Despite the different intentions, Saturday’s trek to Orto was well justified, and my expectations matched the fact that in these few years since my teens I’ve gotten older and can’t stomach naive music in one gulp as well as I used to, though any excuse for a little fun and good times is, these days, more welcome than not.

The first shock of the night, even before the young, fired-up Brits took the stage, was that there’d be no real crush of a crowd in front of the stage. Maybe twenty bewildered curious souls scattered ourselves in front of Orto’s small stage, greeting the arrival of the young Birmingham hopefuls Templeton Pek without any particular applause or enthusiasm. The trio, made up of vocalist and bassist Neal Mitchell, hyperenergetic and lanky guitarist Kev Green and slim, hard-hitting drummer Jon Keen, took up strategic positions on stage and, after some early trouble with the intro sample, started defending the colors of their third album Signs, fresh out on Century Media Records, with the song Trial And Error. The tuneful punch of the guitar riffs, which could use a bit more thickness and weight, after salvos of razor-sharp sounds, a considerably more potent bass and Neal’s decent vocals, with their rhythm changes and some serious flirting with the American FFAF and Rise Against (I even hear a bit of Britain’s Bullet For My Valentine, and even a hint of Lemmy’s Ace Of Spades seeds toward the end of the track …), didn’t produce anything all that shattering in the audience. A mild round of applause, and the guys, despite being »lucky to finally be on this side of the Alps after years of effort«, had to push on without real euphoria from the crowd below the stage. Barriers was the right call for the follow-up, if the obstacles are physically in front of the brave trio. Punchy HC with a melodic solvent properly shook Orto, but the trio’s tightness, despite the effort that has Kev practically melting in buckets of sweat the whole time and burning out to the point of self-combustion, was spoiled by a slightly unbalanced sound that didn’t improve as the set went on. »Time waits no man …« Neil sings out tunefully, and the show rolls on. The extremely punchy Dark Matter shows a few aces from the past, while Low and the tuneful cry for an awakening in Wake Me Up prove the adaptability of the Birmingham hopefuls, who are on the road to breaking through among the punk elite of today. It’s true, though, that Templeton Pek are tailored to the general taste of American youth rather than to the somewhat different, rawer European palate. The nineties have faded a bit, and apart from the more explosive moments of nostalgia, few people are cranking So-Cal ditties on their iPods anymore. Still, in Templeton Pek I see a case of good songwriters and good sonic chameleons who know how to spin their music onward, whether it’s short bursts of energy like 30 Seconds To Far, the more tuneful and effectively softened balladic HC gems of What Are You Waiting For?, the rawer Slow Burn, or the promise of safety in Alive (Promise Is Safety), during which Neil takes a rock-star stroll from the stage through the bewildered, rooted-to-the-spot Ljubljana monoliths up to the bar, deftly climbs onto it and, during the guitar solo, poses a bit for a crowd thirsty for fun and surprises. Showbiz demands such sacrifices, and the young Brits earn my sincere respect and a heartfelt pat on the back. I could easily, and gladly, see these kids on the Punk Rock Holiday stage next summer, but there was no sign of any backstage dealings with the Slovenian organizers, since the main players weren’t at Orto this time. Let’s leave the side remarks aside and get back to the gig. There was no half-assing at the opening, and when I add that Chris ‘Big Bitch’ Flippin was standing right next to me by the stage, my initially somewhat hardened heart softened a little on this punkoid night.

The rest unfolded with routine energy and tempo, and more than the music, what drove the many attendees into Orto (by now their number had reached the level of a well-attended class at some high school) was thirst for beer and curiosity about how the hell a combination of parts and members of Lagwagon, The Ataris and Crooks And Liars would sound. The Santa Barbara foursome has, meanwhile, become a five-piece with the arrival of guitarist Tony Caraffa, and the recipe is as expected – punk tunefulness right off the bat and a performance where chromed, amped-up balls absolutely must not be missing. A short, pot-bellied provocateur with a good voice, the melodic Donald Spence, stands confidently next to the literal punk giant Chris Flippin, while on the right side of the stage, long-haired (and thin-haired, aging) bassist Mike Davenport and the band’s young blood, guitarist Tony, squeeze in confidently under the speakers, with Bryan Charlson dominating the drums in the back. The opening decibel shock of Is There No End? proves that Versus The World are a compact phalanx of musicians from the real school, since there’s nothing to fault in the sound or the stage show. Still, the energy among the crowd, thoroughly worn out by the holiday and the deadness of the Day of the Dead, rose only with louder applause and a salute to the stars of the night. After the primal question from the debut, the band turns to promoting last year’s record Drink.Sing.Live.Love. with She Sang The Blues, on which the sharp-tongued Don settles scores with his mom and a jerk of an older brother, and the band serves up a well-polished, tuneful melodic ballad running on octane that’s anything but sleepy and weighed down like the blues. Blatantly timed hooks and music rub toward a sort of fun that quickly slides right out of your head. The expected A Love Song For Amsterdam confesses the slightly pathetic party side of aging uncles from America, who despite being close to fifty bet on the same aces as they did at a dewy twenty, while Donald urges people to buy shirts, CDs and other »junk« purely so the band can stock up on a fresh supply of greens. Marketing trick or a genuine need for a little more switching off? Either way, Versus The World keep rubbing it in, sweetly and melodiously, with the goofy song dedicated to the idiot brother, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, and with Kids Are Fucked, they let us kids, boys and girls, know we’re screwed. If the world is full of people of dubious moral caliber (Crooks And Liars), and an evil spirit out of the bottle has been raging through it for a long time (the song Ghost In The Bottle is about exactly that …), you have to wonder where, under a ton of carefree tunes and cynical outpourings of happiness and lightness, the punk revolt and defiance of the world is actually hiding. Maybe the punk revolution has gone a bit Gandhian and consoles itself with the idea that puberty should be extended, because then there will be fewer troubles and burdens on your shoulders in your shorter middle age. After the rather benign salvos of These Bones, or Seconds To Shine, by then already a bit tipsy from the sheer quantity of beer, the fun concept starts to sound irritatingly samey. The weepy Medellin and Lullabye thunder past without much payoff, and during the tuneful foo fighters salvos of Fond Farewell I wonder where all the punk explosiveness went, which should be firing off the stage like a machine gun instead of us getting stroked with the fuzzy hand of obviously less pissed-off representatives of the whole of American suburbia. And it even goofs around at the expense of food (Donner Pass). After a rather watered-down and drawn-out show (don’t get me wrong, there was no shortage of comic interludes and sweat on the stage boards), they say »we used to know how to party, burn and live« (what a fitting end to the night the closing song We Were Alive was …) and switch off, partying with the same routine as they routinely tiptoed onto the stage in the first place.

A night without any real peaks served up a few really well-delivered tuneful band-aids that could keep the youngsters’ appetites sated for a week or two, but a truly shattering, unsurpassable element of shock and revelation, honestly, we didn’t get that night. I’d mostly praise the young Brits, who proved themselves in every aspect of the game and, as befits their age, were in harmony with the world and the times, both in look and in musical offering. And Versus The World are … Rebels without a cause, aging veterans of once-relevant but now slightly watered-down times, fortunate comic figures that some evil tongue might call a »parade of oddballs« or a »freak show«. They’re special and they’ve got character, but in a parodic way, maybe clearer and closer to Americans. This time the quintet didn’t heat me up to the point of spontaneous overheating, and no, I can’t claim I haven’t heard better and more convincing stuff before, but we did, honestly, get at least a solid holiday-Saturday chill-out in good company, with a beer in hand, brains on off and ears marinating in music that, I promise, won’t give you a hard time to digest, and that won’t make you strain your intellect to grasp that sometimes a happy existence just takes following the four principles of a slightly juvenile gospel: drink, sing, live and love! Doing anything else you can’t influence is pointless and futile anyway. Or is it? Personally, I obviously need a little more for perfect enjoyment …