Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Logatec / Grajski park / Slovenia
Concert date: 05/26/2012
Attendance: 300
Ticket price: €3.00 (presale) / €5.00 (day of show)
The May concert and the freshers’ party in one package! For the 12th year running, the grounds of the Grajski park in Gorenji Logatec host a rock event that gives lesser-known local bands a chance to make a name for themselves, bands that badly need exposure at exactly the kind of events that should, at least in theory, be well attended. The decision to drop by this little festival came in the afternoon, on the very day of the show. The main reason was the headline slot of the evening, the popular Slovenian art rockers from Novo Mesto, Dan D.
The stage is set up against the southwest wall of the castle, looking out over the greenery of the park, a landscaped bit of nature that’s protected as a cultural monument. Magical! Special, at the very least. What drew the youngsters in first and foremost was the cheap drinks, especially the ones that top the charts in alcoholic content. Young people have to practice the culture of pouring booze into themselves. No nagging parents anywhere in sight, so it was the perfect moment. Cheap alcoholic derivatives. Doesn’t get better than that.
The RockLine crew got to the venue relatively late. We missed the sets by Big Band Wonderbrass and, after them, BHC from Novo Mesto. The Dreams, known early in their career as a The Allman Brothers Band tribute act, had just plugged in loudly and were cutting into the first song of their set. The area in front of the stage radiated emptiness. People, of course, had once again clustered around the bars. This is an octet of seasoned musicians renowned for their very precise playing of blues standards. The band, with no fewer than three guitarists, put all three guitars to concrete use in their reinterpretations of the classics, especially in harmonizing individual parts. The Dream are an extremely juicy, tasteful live experience, built for playing at party events like this one, where the main goal is switching off and total relaxation. Student parties. They have an incredible range of standards in their arsenal that they can pull out of their sleeve endlessly, while still astonishing you with excellent reinterpretations. Hats off. “Thermal velour” doesn’t normally belong on a stage, but the freshly saturated, cool air from the Logatec hinterland, generated by the nearby (for now) vast expanse of Dinaric fir and beech forests, simply forces you to dress for the outdoors even on nights at the end of May, like the fur of a Kočevje bear.
No messing around with Dan D. This is a quintet that applies perfectionist treatment to every musical step they take. In a relatively long career of 16 years, just four albums. Each is a story of its own, each different, each artistically recognizable, so you can’t help but say instantly: “Yes. That’s Dan D through and through!” If you ask me personally, I’d pick the latest of them as my favorite, “Ura letenja za ekstravagantne ptice”. All four albums reflect the gradual artistic maturing of a band that pushes its unique musical face in a manner of flexible comprehensibility for translating musical information, in the glow of an artistic reach with which Dan D keep raising the bar of quality in enriching how they deliver their musical message.
Dan D are gentlemen you can’t fault for anything whenever they get on stage. Their perfectionism simply doesn’t allow slip-ups. In Logatec too they delivered excellent sound, with an excellent balance of all its building blocks. Tokac, sporting a short, cropped haircut in keeping with the Dan D code, lifted the by-now properly staggering youth together with his crew, with the favorites “Katere barve je tvoj dan”, Plešeš and the title track of the album quoted above. Dan D know how to enjoy themselves. They set up their repertoire so that the first part was mostly material from the first three albums, while saving the songs from the latest album, “Ure letenja za ekstravagantne ptice”, for the second half. The first part closed with a cover of the Niet classic Lep dan za smrt, which, frankly, Dan D play in a far more ingenious arrangement and stage execution than today’s version of Niet. Into one of the transitions of this song the band mischievously slipped the main motif of their favorite Čas. The band wrapped up the first part with the song Roke, when Tokac straps on a second guitar with a clean sound. That could in principle mean only one of two things. Either Google Me, or Moj problem. They went for the latter first. The rebellious song packed the crowd under the stage even tighter, and they made even more racket. The band, meanwhile, fascinated once again with their sound, where the confident, solid and compact rhythm of Tokac’s clean-toned guitar breathed in an equal sonic picture with the riff-sharpened guitar of Marko Turk.
In the sonic picture, the rolling, clearly incisive, organically warm character of Sekulovič’s bass once again took over, covering the bulk of the space on the sonic platform where the front line of both guitars, Grubar’s keyboards and Tokac’s central vocals can build their expression with complete peace of mind. After Tokac picked up an African drum, the band surprised with a performance of a brand-new song called “Tak kot ti”, in a semi-acoustic manner commanded by an almost pastoral rhythmic pulse.
Songs like Put slonova, Love song or Tiho, the last with guest vocals by Borut Marolt of Niet, are the moments that make a Dan D show worth it, the ones where Dan D conjure up a distinctive musical experience that breathes with full atmospheric sonic yield and where Tokac’s full-blooded, deeply felt vocal shines brightest and, in its penetrating depth, touches even the most hidden corner of the listener’s soul. Marolt’s arrival on stage wasn’t a return favor to Dan D for playing the Niet song Lep dan za smrt; the reason was simply that Borut Marolt lives across the street, right next to the Grajski park. Total hypnosis therapy. In Tiho, Marolt brought a special note to the stage and, in a duet with Tokac, lifted the song into a distinctive live experience with his occasionally deliberately frenetic, escalating yet manly, thundering approach. In fact, one of the highlights of the band’s set. It was only the second time Marolt had stepped on stage with Dan D. The first was at the two jam-packed concert spectacles in mid-September 2009 at Ljubljana’s Križanke, where Dan D recorded both shows for the later double CD release called “Dan 202”.
The intense experience with Dan D ended with the expected hit Voda combined with Male roke. This number was stripped-down rock, raw and fierce, and in it Dan D pushed the gas pedal to the floor in sheer noise, driving their excellent and hypnotically infectious set to an explosive finish. That ideal blend of rock sinew, art pop sentiment and harmonious eclecticism marks Dan D out today as a one-of-a-kind musical figure on the Slovenian scene, one you can’t find any parallels to. A band that has played endless concerts in its career, including gigantic ones (within the limits of life in Slovenia, of course), showed with the Logatec gig, in front of a decimated crowd, that they don’t turn up at shows primarily for the paycheck, but to wholeheartedly revel in the musical skin of a self-made stance and their very own rock identity.
As the long night, which by now had slid heavily into the early morning hours, rolled on, the Idrija-based funk, blues and reggae fusionists Divje jezero took the stage and immediately made it clear that they’re an excellent musical package, with a completely unusual culture of expression in Slovenia. Still, we were already badly running out of fuel, so we decided to put catching one of this band’s shows off until another time.
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* Special thanks to ultra Dan D fan Tanja for her dedication in reconstructing the band’s setlist, which lets this report bring the pulse of the show to any reader even more objectively.
Setlist
Photo Gallery
