Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Cvetličarna MediaPark / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 10.10.2011
Attendance: 600
Ticket price: €19.00 / €24.00
A cold second Tuesday in October drew a crowd to Cvetličarna from not just every corner of Slovenia, but from all the neighboring countries too. Ljubljana played host to a seriously interesting guest: the American outfit Melvins, who don’t exactly roam around Europe every day. The Melvins belong to the same circle as bands like Mudhoney, Green River, and Screaming Trees, who in the second half of the eighties each added their own piece of the puzzle to the mosaic later dubbed grunge. Every one of those bands is a one-off with its own recognizable style, and that’s probably truest of the Melvins, the singular connoisseurs of heavy alternative music.
This wasn’t the Melvins’ first time in front of a Slovenian crowd. They made their debut here as the opening act at the famous second-to-last Nirvana show in Hala Tivoli in 1994, and a few years later they also played No Border Jam. Worth mentioning too is the memorable gig from 2004, when Cvetličarna, again under Buba’s wing, hosted the supergroup Fantômas with Melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne in the lineup.
Despite the big occasion, at nine in the evening Cvetličarna was still almost empty. In every corner you could spot a few diehards chatting among themselves, and even the instantly recognizable guitarist Buzz strolling through the middle of the club didn’t disturb the calm. My dark thoughts about a possible lousy turnout popped like a soap bubble right before showtime, when the crowd, Italian style, filled the club up nicely just as the set was about to start.
The heavyweights took the stage completely unnoticed and, away from the glare of the stage spotlights, kicked off their minimalist show of caressing your eardrums. After a long instrumental intro to the signature track Hung Bunny, the charismatic Buzz Osborne dressed up the screeching guitars with a hoarse but resolute voice. The bandleader with the famous, now gray-haired afro knew the answer to how to satisfy a crowd. Slow, sludgy, low-tuned riffs, with surprising twists thrown in by the drum duo of Dale Crover / Coady Willis, filled Cvetličarna with sound and put the front rows of the most loyal fans into a state of nirvana. The Melvins don’t pay much attention to the basic rules of songwriting and composition, and the unusual pounding and musical self-irony were a (too) tough nut to crack for the casual concertgoer.
A big part of the musical and visual spectacle fell on the shoulders of that drum duo. The Melvins build their minimalism on three basic rock instruments: guitar, bass, and drums, but they left the experimentation and free-flowing music to an unusual combination of a double drum kit set up in the middle of the stage. The synchronized pounding of both drummers was occasionally spiced up by Crover’s individual experimental excursions. The show had no highlights. The whole show was the highlight. The musicians, with Osborne at the helm, poured the songs into one another and, without a word to the crowd, charged in a straight line toward the end of an hour and a half of garage burning. The vocal lines held a special place. From track to track they were redefined into completely different harmonies, with only a psychedelic and at times aggressive approach in common, as in the tracks The Water Glass and With Teeth.
The Melvins proved that absolute truth doesn’t exist. What draws one person in repels another just as strongly, and the biggest proof of that is the band themselves. These connoisseurs of idiosyncratic convictions delivered their set right on expectations and gave all the doubters who no longer believe in the Melvins in 2011 a solid slap in the face. Big thanks for this event also go to organizer Buba, who makes it possible for us to catch a whiff, every once in a while, of the music that ruled our planet in the early nineties, right here in our own backyard.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
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