Venue: Linhartova dvorana (Cankarjev dom) / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: October 28, 2007
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: 17.00€ 13.00€ 7.00€
Black and white clung to everything Melodrom touch. Through the band’s look, and just as much through their sharp, precise, polished and yet remarkably simple stage choreography. With the odd scream of blood red or velvet violet thrown in, of course. It seems nothing is left to chance with Melodrom; everything is thought out and meticulously crafted. This show included: two precisely measured one-hour halves. So is it any wonder their music feels a little black and white too? A monochrome soundtrack to a film that hasn’t been shot yet.
Somewhere along their path of influences and experience, Melodrom settled on industrial noise as the foundation of their sound. They flirted shamelessly with it already on their self-titled debut and deepened the affair with last year’s album The Guide. Both of them, plus a few songs that are still unreleased, were presented almost in full in a slightly reworked form this time too, in the Linhartova dvorana at Cankarjev dom. And the sound and visuals we witnessed fit such surroundings really nicely, after all.
Part I (with guests)
The evening started with an expanded lineup, as the five official members were joined for the first four songs by two guest musicians, Boštjan Gombač on theremin and Jaka Jarc on electric double bass. The theremin in particular pushed the whole industrial noise vibe a few steps further. An instrument whose presence would be more than welcome on the band’s upcoming releases. Although the sound they made was already quite full, a standard double bass with its mighty, hollow body – plugged in, rather than a fully electric instrument that’s sonically a bit closer to a bass guitar – might have added a little more to an even fuller sound.
The plan was pulled off successfully, as the first part was meant to show the gentler side of the evening, which was also obvious from the arrival of the second guest, Jelena Ždrale on violin, whose warm tone nicely let the melodies flow between the natural and the artificial. Or between the emotional and the mechanical. Though unfortunately at times a bit too hushed.
A static video projection fit right in too, with motifs of something woven, sometimes lace, sometimes something more abstract, decorating the backdrop. All the songs got a fresh sheen, and some really came alive, e.g. the opening Taking Pictures and the superbly played untitled instrumental (from The Guide – #13) with the added theremin and double bass, and Zasebne Sobe and others. With the added viola.
Part II (with a guest)
After the break (for the smokers) the band returns to the stage without guests, except for the song Duet, which, in Mina’s words, truly became a “duet” again this time, and while thematically, and in uniform black, it’s slightly reminiscent of the duet between Einsturzende Neubauten and Meret Becker in Stellamaris, it still has enough charge and charisma of its own to come alive on its own terms. In the song, Jaka (Jarc), the former double bassist, strolled over to the other pole this time, being the original half of the duet on the album recording anyway. What’s going on between the two is clear from the lyrics, but what was going on behind them? Besides a much more aggressive and almost entirely electric sound; Polona, who sat at the piano the whole first part, moved to electric keyboards for the second; the bass sound was almost completely gone, as Jaka left his double bass, and Miha, who otherwise takes care of the band’s bass lines, devoted himself much more intensely to programming artificially produced sounds; there was also an immeasurably more active video projection behind them. The mute, woven patterns were replaced by screaming human silhouettes that at moments gained almost recognizable faces and, in sync with the music, stretched somewhere between marching, dancing and brawling, exhaled cigarette smoke and a very plastic imitation of chewing. The music at times hinted at easygoing disco, elsewhere at a claustrophobic and repressive atmosphere; imagine Siouxie & the Banshees in Eraserhead. A true negative of the first part of the show: if everything is caught within a black-and-white pattern, the first was white and the second radiated blackness. Or the other way round, with certain variations in between.
Well, what in the first part, mainly thanks to the extra instruments, rested on a, at least seemingly, freer and undoubtedly subtler form, evoking the creative drift of Tindersticks, turned in the second part into a sonic assault similar to what Depeche Mode create when melancholy strays into the territory of synthetic sound experiment. The song selection itself played its part in this shift: while the first part was shaped mostly by songs from the album Melodrom, the second focused mainly on The Guide, with the opening Start The Fireworks, Anything Goes and the closing Counting Days standing out most. As we learned, the band is about to put out a mini-album collecting five songs, most of them already released, only reworked, and they played them in their new guise too. That nudges the songs a bit more toward remix territory, and some were translated from English into Slovenian, which perhaps gives them the strongest stamp.
It was easy to guess which songs would close the two parts, September for the first and Counting Days for the second, i.e. their two biggest hits, but unexpectedly, of the two songs played in the encore they also did Industrial Girls, which isn’t on any release yet. That song was a kind of milestone between the sound of the debut and its then still unmaterialized successor. It always drew considerable approval from the crowd too, so for a while it was quite puzzling why they hadn’t included it on The Guide, but then it became clear that it doesn’t yet fit any of the frameworks set up so far, except the live one, in which it’s a real little shining star, as it proved once again.
All in all, it’s a commendable achievement, with plenty of aces still up its black sleeve.
Setlist
LINEUP:
Mina Špiler – vocals
Matevž Kolenc – guitar
Miha Žargl – bass guitar, programming
Polona Janežič – piano, keyboards, percussion
Matej Nolda – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Boštjan Gombač – theremin
Jaka Jarc – electric double bass, vocals (duet)
Jelena Ždrale – violin
