Location: Ljubljana / Kino Šiška / Slovenia
Concert date: May 28, 2012
Attendance: 900
Ticket price: 20 EUR, (students/seniors) 16 EUR, 23 EUR on the day of the show
If any reader is puzzled by the title – and I hope it wasn’t the one who’d let it put them off reading – »Yeah« refers to the 4-second »song« from the album Blues For The Red Sun, where John Garcia simply says: »Yeah.« That one word sums up the whole show of the revitalized Kyuss, which went down on May 28, 2012 at Kino Šiška, better than anything else, if you ask me.
Doors opened an hour before the founders of the stoner genre hit the stage, so that’s worth a heads-up. The opening slot went to Slovenia’s own Carnaval, who shook the hall with bass. If you don’t know these prolific Slovenian stoners for their music – and you should – you surely know them because »one dude from their band spat in the SAZAS boss’s face on Facebook«, as one of the people in the crowd put it before the show. Which is of course true. And with that bit of symbolism Carnaval spat in the face of the entire Slovenian music establishment that cashes in on SAZAS policy, but if they’d spat at every one of them separately, they’d have needed to drink a whole lot of beer to keep their throats from rotting, so they spat in the face of Matjaž Zupan (the head of SAZAS) instead. Well, supposedly Kozlevčar’s (the guitarist, in case anyone’s wondering) spit was officially part of the promo for their debut record 2 (for those who only know them by sight – yeah, that’s the one with the mammoth; you can read how they sound live here), which came out before the album titled 1 (how dare they!). Too bad most of the Kyuss crowd was drinking beer outside instead of in front of the stage, because Carnaval burn just as loud as Kyuss, and a bit smarter too (King Crimson aren’t their role model for nothing). It’s true, though, that their singer doesn’t wear sunglasses on stage (like Garcia), but the kind of glasses that got you mocked in grade school. Maybe that’s why they’re not quite Kyuss yet. Anyway – these guys totally rip in their corner of the scene. Their third record is already out, and they play anywhere that’ll have them, whether that’s Metelkova in front of 15 people or Šiška in front of at least 300. Just not at village shindigs. Those are reserved for the finest Slovenian music establishment only.
The second Carnaval finished, the hall filled up. Long-haired, bearded dudes claimed their spots, measured out enough room for headbanging, finished their third beer and started eyeing the arsenal of amps Kyuss had dragged along. The band got a thunderous ovation before it even showed up. Actually, more than at the end, between songs, and when Garcia actually bounded onto the stage. Which kind of sums up the whole Kyuss (Lives?) show.
As you probably know, Kyuss went through some pretty rough postpartum cramps. First, guitarist Josh Homme didn’t want to join the 2010 reincarnation, then bassist Nick Oliveri left the band too. And since that obviously wasn’t enough, the two former original members sued Garcia and drummer Bjork for misusing the Kyuss name. The lawsuit was the peak of egocentric irrationality – Homme and Oliveri wanted money from the tour without doing anything for it or being involved in it in any way. To put it mildly, they made the whole Kyuss Lives! project a lot harder for Garcia and Bjork. Finding a new bassist and guitarist probably wasn’t easy. Things inside the group were surely not the same as in the original band 20 years ago. Garcia and Bjork were, well, 20 years younger back then too. Probably that’s also why not everything was the way it should be.
Already with the opening »Hurricane«, despite his glamorous stage presence, Garcia showed that his voice hasn’t aged in a way that sounds like the albums. His genre-appropriate showmanship and still excellent vocal control managed to disguise the problems of an aging, or maybe just tired, voice pretty well, but at times you could hear that the reincarnated Kyuss is just a (pretty loud) echo of their original bravura. And yet Garcia was the smallest problem, if you can even call it that – he did his job, no matter what, very well, with feeling and charisma. As expected, the biggest drop in quality came from guitarist Bruno Fevery. Not only did he fail to nail Homme’s guitar tone (which is of course the hardest part, the lines you can just learn), his rhythm was out of sync with the rest of the band more than once, the improvised parts were more pop funk than stoner rock (Fevery otherwise plays in a Belgian dance pop band, so he obviously dragged some influences over from there into Kyuss), and on top of that I noticed more than once that he even missed a note here and there. I get it, he’s the new guy in the band – although he’s supposedly been playing with Garcia for ages in the Garcia Plays Kyuss project, and as a kid he allegedly even had a Kyuss tribute band – maybe he was nervous, had stage fright… but whatever the reason, his playing was bad. Basically the thing that made the show completely average for the most part. The thing that now lets me say »Yeah«. It didn’t even bother me that much that after just an hour of playing they said »Good night!« and then came back for barely half an hour more, which means they played less than 90 minutes – something they could have made up for in a big way by playing what they absolutely should have – two synonyms for Kyuss, “Demon Cleaner” and “Catamaran”.
»Okay, cool, I’ve seen them.« That’s exactly how I still feel – I can say I saw one of my favorite bands, but nothing more. Sure, we headbanged, clapped, and screamed. The legendary songs from Welcome to Sky Valley and Blues for the Red Sun slayed. If 15-year-olds played them, they’d slay. The band’s image is right too. The only thing missing is Kyuss. Kyuss might still be alive, but with a dry, aging throat and, at least when it comes to that proper, grimy, desert stoner guitar tone and the riffs in the Kyuss songs, a touch of dementia. Yeah.
Setlist
1. Hurricane
2. One Inch Man
3. Gardenia
4. Asteroid
5. Supa Scoopa and Mighty Scoop
6. Thumb
7. Green Machine
8. Freedom Run
9. Whitewater
10. El Rodeo
11. 100°
—encore—
12. Molten Universe
13. Spaceship Landing
14. Odyssey
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