Living Colour – Riding the Wings of a Devilish Funk Vibe (2008)

Some bands just make a tradition of visiting Slovenia. Believe it or not, Living Colour are one of them. They once again treated Slovenian music lovers to a show, their fourth visit overall. A quick run through the earlier ones (June 1993 at Hala Tivoli in Ljubljana, July 2001 at Rock Otočec and July 2007 in Maribor) and, adding up all the ingredients of the night, the latest gig at Cvetličarna MediaPark even had a whiff of the glory days, when the guys presented their third album “Staind” in Ljubljana 15 years ago. The crowd had a big hand in that this time too, showing up in solid numbers to prove that we Slovenes have by no means forgotten Living Colour. Clearly the band’s name and reputation have stuck with us over the years, and some 700 people packed into the hall. Before Living Colour, local boys Leaf-Fat raised hell for 45 minutes.

The Living Colour quartet is built from head to toe out of musicians who, at their core, swear by the legacy of jazz. Since these guys carry an innate sense of rhythm in their blood and love to jam, funk becomes a clear building block of their musical expression. A voluminous groove is a must to pull you into the music, so they add toxically infectious guitar riffs that even the most orthodox metalheads could envy, and because Living Colour are masters of their craft, musical perfectionists and gourmets of sonic experimentation, the whole thing is soaked in trillions of delay effects, sample programming and special kinds of excursions that don’t even skip world music. These guys are monstrously diverse in their musical arsenal, and that’s one of the biggest draws bringing the crowds to their shows. Spontaneity and unpredictability are front and center with them, which is quite rare these days and all the more sought after.

After 15 years, Living Colour came back to Ljubljana right to the spot where they left us back then (remember? It was the day after the Faith No More show, also in Ljubljana). With Auslander! The guys are so damn tight that hardly anything can derail them. Corey Glover’s voice is still remarkably well preserved, works more than optimally, and the man still doesn’t skimp one bit on the charisma and power that instantly win the audience’s attention over to his side. Vernon Reid, a totally one-of-a-kind guitarist who, out of all the projects and bands he works in, is most “listenable” for the crowd precisely in Living Colour, kept working chords into the basic motifs throughout the show that smelled strongly of jazz tricks, bending even the lines in the transitions that way as much as he could. Uncompromisingly blissed out the whole time, in a thoroughly “Reid-ian” way. The rhythm duo of Calhoun/Wimbish is a chapter of its own on the music scene, and when you put them together, the final result reaches a quality that comes very close to the musical ideal. The connection between them works like a trance, with unpredictable breaking of rhythms at transition points, and not only there. Within the basic rhythms too. In short, the guys fired without brakes from all the arsenals of rich musical knowledge and priceless experience they had at hand. And that’s exactly why we love them most!

Living Colour built the repertoire to the audience’s taste, meaning the bulk of the songs came from the first record “Vivid”, with mostly tracks from “Time’s Up” and “Staind” added to it. The setlist also featured Bless Those, a brand-new song we already heard last year at the show in Vrba in Carinthia, Austria (RockLine report HERE), and the whole thing sounded even more nostalgic to everyone who saw the band in 1993 at Hala Tivoli, when the guys tackled the Clash cover Should I Stay Or Should I Go in the encore.

Of course, none of this came without the playful fun the band is famous for. This time it was mostly Doug Wimbish entertaining the crowd, triggering dog-barking effects through his computer gadgets between pauses and cracking up mostly himself while watching the reactions of the other three guys on stage.

During the longer “jams” that adorned the basic skeletons of the songs, Corey made quite a few laps around the stage to kill time during these moments of wild experimental flailing from his comrades. Living Colour are poison above all for metalheads who want the stage to deliver an identical copy of what their studio work sounds like on tape. This very disregard for following set templates sets the band apart from everything known on the planet and makes them extremely unique and one of a kind. Even though they’re 15 years more mature, they get the masses on their feet with no trouble, because the atmosphere they create is literally hypnotic, especially thanks to that invasive rhythmic power.

The guys tore it up for a good two hours. In the front rows, where I (once again irresistibly) mingled myself, the sound was very distorted. Reid was too loud, so Glover often couldn’t be heard properly. In the back (closer to the bar) and in the VIP lounge the sound was reportedly okay. Calhoun didn’t forget to add a fantastic drum solo that took your breath away. Usually such spots just steal the audience’s time because of their unoriginality, but in William Calhoun’s case such a spot in Living Colour’s repertoire is an absolute must that lifts the band’s show to a higher level of quality.

People definitely hadn’t forgotten the band’s classics like Desperate People, Middle Man and of course, in the finale, Cult Of Personality, which sounded most intense with the whole hall joining in. Interestingly, (against expectations) the evergreen hit Love Rears Its Ugly Head got the fewest modifications of all the songs in the repertoire. The band, for example, didn’t play it at all in Madrid a few days ago when the tour kicked off.

Given the excellent turnout and the decent audience participation during the show, which in itself livened up the band’s response (and they were nowhere near holding back in their playing and performance on stage), this show was a clean sweep and an absolute upgrade over the much blander experience of last year’s visit to Vrba in Carinthia, Austria, in the hotel casino there. What fascinated me most of all, though, was the ability to walk onto the stage in such a ridiculously simple way and come across as spontaneous, genuine and unpredictable at every single moment. Living Colour are a band that never plays a song the same way twice (say, during a given tour). Often different jams get folded into a completely different song; one night’s jam can end up in one song, and the next night’s in another entirely. The same goes for the choice of rhythm, sound effects, programmed samples, Vernon’s way of “picking” chords. It’s constantly flowing, with no set form, yet at every moment in perfect harmony, dictated by musical perfection combined with an extraordinary dose of wit and the breadth of musical horizons these guys possess. True to the band’s name. A harmonious merging and stringing together of full, vivid color palettes in games without borders, dictated by the freedom of drifting through musical experimentation.

Living Colour (approximate) setlist:

photos: Barbara Milharčič

words: Aleš Podbrežnik