Venue: KUD France Prešeren / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 15.04.2007
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: 3.50€
Moonlight Sky have made their first music video, called Štirje svetovi! The “four worlds” are really the four selves inside this young quartet that just won’t stop impressing! By the way, you can find the song Štirje svetovi on the band’s debut “Moonlight Sky” (2006). To celebrate the video, the guys threw a special bash at KUD France Prešeren. It kicked off at 21.20, when the video got its first spin in the small hall. And it’s a great little piece of work, miles away from the standards and clichés that plague our TV screens: no posing, powdered sacrificial lambs, no prowling wolves, none of the usual glitz. Just a bare-bones puppet clip! A guy lights up a “špinelček” with the greatest of gusto, sparks start jumping around in his head, and brain cells synapse with each other unforgettably. In short, a real oddball among Slovenian music videos, dosed with a top-notch helping of cheekiness. On top of that, it nails the essence of the song itself. It takes serious guts, too, because this is an instrumental devoted to progressive experimentation, and these days in Slovenia it’s hard to find a tough nut who’d dare take a risk like that. And yet that’s exactly the challenge! Challenging what’s different!
For me personally, the concert that followed meant more than the premiere of the band’s new video. The screen went up once the little film had run its course, and the Moonlight Sky guys were already waiting on stage to give us “a proper one”.
They opened the set with the most impressive piece from the debut, the song Ocean. The sound, built mostly on a massive curtain of keyboards reminiscent of the melotron craze of the early seventies, really did create the effect of floating on ocean waves. A great warm-up, a transcendental lullaby of gentle, softly flowing sonic collages, it made for more than an excellent overture.
Then came a sudden shift of dynamics into a higher gear. Angel, with Andraž on vocals taking a much rawer approach than you can hear on the band’s studio debut. The stage at KUD was far more welcoming for a band like Moonlight Sky than the little one at Orto Bar, where I saw them in January 2007, since it’s wider, higher and longer. Drummer Aleš Kajtna was raised up at the back with his kit, and that alone conjured up a real sense of depth. The guys keep getting better all the time. This time they served up the heaviest sound since I’ve been following them, proof that they’re shamelessly “pissed off” and tighter with each other than three months ago, and the integration of drummer Aleš into the band over that time has clearly been a total success. You can feel that the guys can play “with full balls”, at full charge, with even more stage authority and charisma that grabs and convinces the listener in an instant!
As is almost standard by now, the guys spiced up the setlist with a brand-new song, When I Look In Your Eyes, which surprised with a solid, tighter, more concise “down to earth” beat, announcing that they really do have exceptional musical knowledge and know how to surprise very pleasantly with their new compositions. By the way, they’re reportedly hard at work on their new album, wisely striking while the iron is hot.
The song Devet osem is back again. It’s a tune that draws a direct parallel with the band’s flirtation with the legacy of Leb i sol, to whom they paid tribute once more with the masterfully played Devetka and, as an encore, Jovano, Jovanke. Personally, I’d love to see how this would go over with Western European ears, say at some festival abroad, where they know how to reward bands of Moonlight Sky’s caliber.
Well, well. We Slovenes didn’t stay indifferent at KUD that night either! In January a measly 30 of us came to cheer the band on at Orto Bar. This time the number of curious visitors at KUD more than doubled. The guys added some light dance moves and playfulness to their show, which also coaxed plenty of deep sighs (and exhales) from the gentler choir in the audience (Michael Jackson’s Dirty Diana). Besides “naughty Diana”, there was another great Red House from the godfather Hendrix! But above all I took the greatest pleasure in the band’s original material, which offers a complex charm that they always cash in on convincingly at their gigs. This is a band that always sounds even better live than in the studio. A band that needs a huge amount of space to express itself and move freely through the spheres of different dimensions offered by musical genres, especially at the points where they flow into one another, which is exactly what makes Moonlight Sky’s fusion so appealing! An hour and 25 minutes flew by in a flash.
The guys had already left the stage and said their goodbyes! But the people had gotten so familiar with the band’s own material by then that they knew what Moonlight Sky hadn’t played. The apocalyptic highlight of their repertoire, The Groove. The guys come back and hit once more with full force, as befits a big finale. Venomous, venomous… soulful! They earned the loudest ovations from the crowd, and it’s clear that The Groove has the potential to become part of an iron-clad repertoire that finds its permanent place at the end of their shows.
Right at the start of their career the guys are already a high-profile unit, both in the tightness of their playing and in the powerful approach that points to excellent stage chemistry, and they also surprise with high-quality original songwriting. The Kržič/Petric duo works great together. We’ve already said a lot of great things about Petric and surely will again. The kid has what clearly puts him in a prominent position, and there’s no fear of him sinking into the gray mediocrity of a merely decent, unoriginal imitator. But it’s not just Miha who’s special, it’s Moonlight Sky as a whole! They’ve got no shortage of witty ideas and bold creativity. A great concert that confirmed the band is marching on and still growing. To close, we refreshed our memory of the Štirje svetovi video, which was shown once more, and during the concert Andraž announced that the band plans to shoot their next music video soon, for the song Moonlight Sky (Lunin svit). Moonlight Sky is, in other words, a band with huge potential. When you meet them on stage, they can’t and won’t leave you indifferent!
Setlist
1. Ocean
2. Angel
3. Devetka
4. Pluton
5. Red House
6. Moonlight Sky (Lunin svit)
7. When I Look In Your Eyes
8. Devet osem
9. Dirty Diana
10. How Much?
—encore 1—
11. So Hard To Leave Someone You Love
12. Jovano, Jovanke
—encore 2—
13. The Groove
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