Long Live Overflow – Here Comes The Beatsteaks

 It doesn’t happen all that often that you can walk into a gig blind, hit the jackpot every time and come out with every single expectation fully satisfied. The Krapina – Berlin tag team of Overflow and Beatsteaks is, of course, far from a gamble: you know exactly what you’re getting into when you cross the threshold of a venue where an outpouring of punk emotion is on the menu. Overflow have recently become one of the more successful adoption stories of our home label Kapa records, and with their ever more frequent gigging on Slovenian stages they’ve turned into a kind of punk fixture and a guarantee that a good time will definitely be had. Beatsteaks, meanwhile, sit right at the top of the list of foreign acts who’ve picked Slovenia as their second home, and after this, their fourth show here, they’ll surely be applying for citizenship. Since the gig of the year was being announced ever more loudly at AKC Metelkova and we had no intention of missing it, we too pointed our steps toward the epicenter of this Sunday’s action, Ljubljana’s Gala Hala.

Raindrops kept stubbornly slicing the air, and through a light mist you could make out quite a few young lads and lasses in front of the hall who’d decided to make the concert pilgrimage and defy the gloomy weather a bit before showtime. Shortly after eight the doors opened and the guts of this temple of alternative goings-on swallowed up a hundred-headed crowd. The last gap in the room was nowhere near filled yet, but anyone who’s ever been to a gig at Gala Hala simply knows that an already sizable cavalry at the support act is the herald of the main force’s invasion by the time the headliners take their positions on stage. Out of habit, you know. Because before the smoking ban, you had to grow gills after the first quarter of a show to survive the embrace of thick smoke and lack of oxygen… Times have changed, certain laws have been passed, but since old habits die hard… You know how it is…

OVERFLOW (21:00 – 22:00)

Around nine the music from the speakers slowly died down and all eyes turned toward the stage, where a whole lot of gear had sprouted up: mic stands and the necks of dream guitars poking out from backstage. Onto the stage came the figure of the healthily slimmed-down guitarist Nike, who started off slowly, the way a solid overture should, gently rubbing the strings of his black guitar, though the sound drifting through the hall didn’t herald an epic about a guitar of the same color that you might know from the lyrics of a certain local musician. You know who. Gradually the lineup on stage grows to the punk-sized fairytale foursome. Next to guitarist Nikica Jovanović – Nike steps singer Goran Živković – Žika, who starts crooning something like a Sinatra-style schmooze, joined by drummer Dalibor Martinčević – Dado and bassist Zoran Piberčnik – Zoki, and the party can begin. They shift up a gear and rip into the sped-up punk bouncer ‘Hanging’, a sort of litmus test of the mood in the hall. The well-oiled quartet gets the job done, at least at the start still within the realm of healthy reserve, and after pretty lukewarm applause and cheers from the slowly waking crowd, Žika takes a sarcastic bow like some baroque jester. “Ljudi! Ovo nam je prvi koncert u Ljubljani na ovaj dan. Svirali smo u ponedeljak, pa utorak ili sredu ali nikada na nedelju …” (That’s “People! This is our first concert in Ljubljana on this day. We’ve played Monday, then Tuesday or Wednesday, but never on a Sunday…”) and then they launch into the punk’n’roller-style ‘Swallow’, which Res Nullius and Dicky B. Hardy would be proud of. “Still you have me and I have a problem in my brain / He’s in your brain and still has function for you / So young so smart so cool so pretty I am / Do you know my name?”. The already brisk, dynamic pace of the set, in which the lads from Koprivnica radiate an elan and explosive charge that not even teenagers have these days, gets spiced up with an even sharper, catchy Cali-punk anthem, ‘Get Away’, spewing bile and anger. After watching the Overflow phenomenon for the third time, though, you also notice that the lads were a little reserved this time, or maybe just tired. Despite it all, they served up some juicy music, and since obscenity is pretty much expected in punk (remember how a wretched English journalist provoked Sid and Johnny Rotten into showing him the foulest words they could blurt out on air at that moment, one of the less audible ones being “cunt”), Overflow don’t disappoint with shyness and start chanting a hymn to the female nether regions, leading into the song with probably the most provocative title in their repertoire – ‘Pussy Eater (Pička)’. The track is the link between past and present and kicks off the saga of marrying HC energy with uncompromising melody. The catchy chorus quickly began filling the corners of the hall, and after Pička it’s time to connect the slit with a certain name or face, right? The honor and glory went this time to ‘Dorothy’, a high-octane stream of thoughts and free associations, which Overflow present depersonalized, kneeling and humiliated, hollowed out and furious at the whole world. After the final reckoning with the system, Dorothy can only be set free by dropping dead, and Overflow oblige her fully. They carry on this intense dance of rhythm and melody with the valves wide open. After ‘Rapido’ they pour their stage presence into the image and body of someone else. At least on first listen it seems the explosion of melody was penned by someone else, say their better-known and recently much-worshipped compatriots Hladno Pivo, but ‘Wasted’ is entirely the work of the Krapina punk standard-bearers themselves, and after a decadent outpouring of reasons to drink comes a salvo of question marks – ‘You’re Angry’. The pop-punk pleiad of rhythm and laughter is rounded off by the first attempts at stage diving and clumsy pogoing in the front rows, but most of the crowd (by the way, the back rows were already getting pretty solidly filled…) was still saving its strength for the rest of the night, so they much preferred sipping beer and trying to squeeze out something to back up their critical stance. For most of them there’s no help anyway, but for the few still salvageable ones, Overflow offer medical assistance. Under the influence of a healthy dose of humor, irony, rage and relaxing catharsis, ‘Doctor’s Tune’ draws a lot more response, so Overflow follow this track, from the record with one of the sexiest covers in Slovenian-Croatian punk, Extremely Perverted Fantasies Of Mad Milkman’s Disordered Mind from 1997, on which you can’t help but notice the naturally perky little nipples on a sixties-dressed young woman’s chest, with one more tune – ‘Don’t’. Then they take us in a time machine back to 1991 and the record Through Department Store, plucking out one of the pretty much forgotten gems of a dusty past that’s totally foreign to many – ‘Face’ is a memory of the days when they were one of the few Croatian bands able to carry a voice of life and positivity across to the other side of the occupied borders of their homeland, which was burning at the time. Ambassadors of music, peace and punk attitude, and fathers of lovable three-chord wunderkinds in the form of catchy songs, they’ve done plenty since then. But they haven’t forgotten their roots. The show started tipping into its final third. Overflow faced the pressure of the crowd quite stoically and heroically, and their sweat-soaked faces made it clear they had no intention of saving anything for tomorrow. The last maneuver was closing the night with the grand finale of ‘Doraaa’, with its Sting-style singalong chorus (“Doraaa” sounds like “So lonely”, and no, it’s not just coincidence but a personal tribute to one of the biggest hits Sting & The Police squeezed out and brought into this world in their career). Overflow take one last bow, sweep the crowd with naughty, sparkling and ironic looks, and announce the band this gig was really for. It could easily have been a lot livelier if the gentle souls on the floor hadn’t been saving themselves for something they considered better and more exotic – Beatsteaks.

BEATSTEAKS (22:30-00:30)

And we finally got them!!!!!! After the energetic set from Croatia’s Overflow  the stars of the night took the stage, the German five-piece going by the name BEATSTEAKS. After several visits to our stages, they played again this year and wowed us by presenting their new record LIMBO MESSIAH. The five-piece formed in Berlin in 1995 and can already boast five albums racked up in 12 years. On top of that they have a pile of gigs behind them, and probably the most important one in their career was the show where they burned as the support act for the legendary Sex Pistols in Berlin  a good year after forming, already presenting themselves back then as a really quality punk-rock band worth listening to. This time at Gala Hala on Metelkova they served us a mix of songs from the new record, with a few hits picked from their second-to-last creation, SMACK SMASH. Their gigs are usually a proper show, since the singer/frontman is the son of circus performers. He always shows it with the (sometimes downright dangerous) stunts he pulls on stage. Well, we didn’t get that this time. A real peculiarity I noticed was the big light bulbs that lit up Gala Hala the whole show. Apparently they’re the band’s trademark, since they had them set up around the stage at last year’s Trnfest too. This year’s concert at the end of cold October kicked off with the song ‘Panic’, which warmed up everyone in the crowd right from the start. They continued with the newest track, ‘Jane Became Insane’, followed by hits from both the new record and the old, including a song dedicated to the Celje punk heroes Multiball. After a long stretch of playing, my favorite track finally came up, ‘Atomic Love’. The hit everyone knows got even the most tired folks on their feet. And the surprises weren’t over for me yet, because besides the light bulbs, the guys also played hip-hop while we waited for the next song. I found that really funny, since I’d never have expected anything like that from hardcore punks. And to make us gathered under the stage have even more fun, their guitarist put on a not-so-admirable striptease: he didn’t shed so much as a scrap of clothing, and all we got was some writhing around the stage. Still, I have to admit the German nutters put on a show worth seeing this year. For the rest of this long-awaited spectacle they had a few more punk bouncers in store, which in my opinion they played way too fast before leaving the stage. But since nobody was in a hurry to get home and we all wanted to go a bit wild and jump around some more, we managed to call the band back, and they played ‘Soothe Me’ as the last song. That the Beatsteaks really know how to throw a party the way it should be done, they proved to us on Sunday, and if you missed them, they’ll probably be around again next year. And as always, the best live band gave us a heap of positive energy that’s still keeping us going today… at least me! 

Soaked in the smell of testosterone, sweat and beer, and hit head-on by a maximum wave of energy, the crowd could only head for the exits with a smile and, as after really excellent sex, light a much-needed cigarette in the fresh autumn air of early Monday. The feeling of shakiness and total satisfaction was confirmed once again, and this veteran crew of music connoisseurs got to add one more tick to its list of successfully completed stage trials – Overflow have stopped counting theirs, while Beatsteaks have now planted a fourth flag of total success and musical occupation of the ears and minds of local youth under the name of Slovenia. The Rockline crew has no objections. What’s more: we hope we can put the interpersonal chemistry to the test again in less than a year.

 

Intro, closing and Overflow text by Sandi Sadar, Beatsteaks text by Špela Šoba