Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Vintage Industrial bar / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: 19.11.2014
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: 50,00HRK
Madbal, the most prominent and most notorious representatives of the NYHC scene, with their eighth studio album in their pocket, tellingly titled »Harcore Lives«, conquered the Croatian capital for the second year running. Almost exactly a year ago we caught them in Nova Gorica too (at Mostovna). This year the guys, who have clearly become practically local heroes in our southern neighbor’s territory, stopped at Vintage Industrial Bar, a club that properly kicked into life two years ago.
This time around Madball brought Bulgarian hardcore band Last Hope from Sofia along on their tour. These guys have been around the block, active since 1995 and considered one of the most dominant names of the genre on the Balkan Peninsula. Already at nine o’clock the local boys Upset, from the town of Zabok, which sits somewhere halfway between Krapina and Zaprešič, climbed on stage. The seasoned quintet delivered an excellent experience. A chiseled performance, plenty of tightness and a whole bag full of hunger. In a good half hour of intense stage gymnastics, Upset made it clear that their original material draws the best from the legacy of the NYHC scene, led by their big role models Madball, for whom they opened the show. As a band, they ran into a fair bit of indifference from the crowd, a lot of whom were still standing outside the club hall at that point, even though the band proved with their superbly crafted stage presence and an excellent raw, angry sound, generated by classic-brand guitars and bass, that they could easily open shows on the entire current tour with Madball. If you’re a fan of the genre, you absolutely have to check out Upset. At the first opportunity.
That also came through during the Last Hope set. Even though the Bulgarians are damn experienced and have racked up some serious mileage in their career so far, you just couldn’t shake the feeling that Upset had actually stolen their show. Last Hope, who had a similar good half hour in their hands, just like Upset before them, served up a much more metallized, sharpened sound, and for that very reason also a somewhat more crunchy and smeared riff rumble. The band did draw a few more people into the venue and coaxed a few more neck-vertebrae-loosening moves out of the folks at the front of the stage, but they definitely didn’t leave a deeper impression, since it’s all imitation of old, worn-out phrases that their role models established long ago. In the closing stretch the band hit with the most recognizable song of their career, F.P. (Fuck Police), which woke up Industrial Vintage Bar. The crowd surged to the front and Last Hope finally got a more concrete response from the audience right at the very end. It really is a song that stands out in their repertoire! A committed, engaged, likable performance with a somewhat expected course of events, and plenty of sweat spilled, which of course counts for a lot!
Shortly before eleven in the evening the venue went dark and Madball walked on stage through the intro. The place filled up to the last corner. The quartet has kept a solid lineup since 2011, commanded by the tireless frontman Freddy Cricien, alongside the band’s no less iconic, “irreplaceably” charismatic, broad-shouldered bassist Jorge Guerri, with guitarist Bryan Daniels and drummer Mike Justian rounding it out. From the first beat to the last riff, for an hour and ten minutes the band generously fed the crowd an old-school Madball show of unbridled energy and a high-octane cannonade. Freddy once again boxed and kicked his way through the whole stage atmosphere, while wild fans climbed on stage nonstop and dove back off the monitors into a sea of giant waves from the churning crowd! The club hall soon resembled a furious hornets’ nest. A good chunk of people had to stay in the front area where the main bar is, since it was impossible to even cross the threshold of the club hall! The band didn’t serve up the best sound that night. The guitar riffs sounded muffled, and Freddy’s vocal form on the day had seen better times too.
A quarter of the setlist came from the new album. Madball arranged those tracks so that they actually played more of them in the second half of the show. The band had already set the place boiling and kicked off a proper hellish session early on, when the ancient Set it Off from the album of the same name, their studio debut, rang out soon after the opening, followed right away by Smell the Bacon and Get Out from the EP »Droppin’ Many Suckers«. Because of that, you got the feeling that the band’s performance, especially in the second half, was losing a bit of intensity from minute to minute. In a theatrical finale full of emotion and passion, the band, as expected, didn’t forget to bow to their fathers Agnostic Front, playing their It’s My Life. The temperature shot up violently again with the classic Pride, and the band saved the last three minutes of the show for one more new song, confirming their own enthusiasm for the contents of their current record »Hardcore Lives«.
There was no shortage of eruptive energy, boosted and shaped above all by the ferocious reactions of a crowd gone mad and wild, and nobody could really complain about the show or the night as a whole, dedicated to reviving the true, original spirit of the NYHC scene! Even if this time the perfect HC spell was just missing the dot on the »i«.
Setlist
1. Intro
2. Hardcore Lives
3. Smell the Bacon
4. Set It Off
5. Get Out
6. DNA
7. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
8. Hold It Down
9. Infiltrate the System
10. Never Had It
11. The Beast
12. Spit on Your Grave
13. Born Strong
14. Down by Law
15. 100%
16. Look My Way
17. Heavenhell
18. Doc Marten Stomp
19. It’s My Life
20. Pride (Times Are Changing)
21. Hardcore Still Lives
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