Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: 19.10.2016
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: 8,00€
Sebastijan Lukovnjak (vocals, rhythm guitar), Andrej Knehtl (guitar), Martin Počkar (bass, backing vocals) and Marko Brvar (drums) make up the quartet Leonart. In the first ten days of October, the band put out their studio debut »Visoko v nebo« – RockLine review HERE. It’s an exceptionally lovely album of properly »mainstream«, catchy pop rock aesthetics that almost intuitively blends genre turning points between funk, blues and whatnot into a highly listenable conglomerate of ten polished tracks with serious musical value.
After already playing their hometown Maribor a few days earlier, where they officially celebrated the album’s release for the first time, the band took the new record on the road and stopped by Ljubljana’s Orto bar. The guys really thought of everything (every detail) with this project. The high-quality release quickly found its way into radio rotation, and to date it has seen as many as seven singles, four videos, and all of it backed by a solid PR strategy. The clock struck ten in the evening. You step into the upstairs room, the classic concert space of this legendary club, and find a handful of the band’s friends squeezed up against the bar or at the little tables in the corners. Where’s everybody else? The rainy weather isn’t the real reason. It’s hard to step on stage in a situation like this, bite your lip and play a show with the full-blooded commitment that, say, a gig in front of several hundred people demands.
So that’s the unfortunate spot Leonart found themselves in that night, but they didn’t rack their brains over it too much and just got on with entertaining the small crowd. What the album radiates, the concert radiated too. The band is incredibly tight. You can feel that the guys have known each other for a long time, that there are no games between them, and that they work as one. In the music they stand for, they’re »mentally and inspirationally calibrated« to the same frequency. That’s why the songs hit with such a gorgeous, grabby live impact. A »live« magnification of the studio debut’s energetic vibes, in other words! Still, the interplay of the four building blocks and, of course, the performance that night in Orto bar clearly held some reserve in the delivery, since the band, as mentioned, had to fight through a show in a totally empty room. So the event came with that unwelcome, awkward feeling that likes to creep in on nights like this. The feeling that you’re watching a public rehearsal.
As I said. The quartet’s mutual instincts are excellent, and they were helped on keyboards by a fifth member, Žan Hauptman, who also played on the album. The first magnet of the whole performance is Sebastijan, who has a truly gorgeous voice, warm and mid-ranged, which firmly and penetratingly delivers the message of the verses all the way through, adding lasting touches of movement to the vocal lines as he tackles the soul-flavored spices here and there. On top of that, the guy has an acoustic guitar strapped on practically the whole show, which doesn’t stop him from putting on a polished stage act or from talking to the audience. So the man has real charisma. And of course he’s backed all the way by the superb playing of his bandmates.
Leonart are a band that spent a long time forging and honing itself »hidden from view«, until its perfectionism finally let it set out to conquer Slovenian music crowds. That’s why, alongside the full presentation of the album »Visoko v nebo«, the band played almost as many songs that aren’t on it. These differ from the album material in having a significantly higher dose of blues variations, even exploratory expressive detours, which brings more instrumental dialogue, completely different moods and, as a result, even longer running times. To put it bluntly, those songs can sometimes be even too »progressive« for »Visoko v nebo«, so the band decided to save them for the next album. Over time they’ll surely develop further however they like, as the band matures.
So. At Orto bar, Leonart showed themselves to be a band that takes everything it does very, very seriously. In terms of artistry, an extremely well-thought-out (self-)promotion strategy and, what counts most, as a band that throws a gorgeous concert get-together.
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