Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Venue: Orto bar, Ljubljana
Concert date: 18.04.2013
Attendance: 60
Ticket price: €4
Yes! The nice days are finally here and that long, crappy winter is behind us. April is looking especially good this year, and it brought not just warm, sunny weather but also the month-long Orto fest, which every year serves up a few heavier sounds too. This time they mostly come from the Thursday metal nights, which mostly run as part of Kadilnica of Death – and last Thursday, a homegrown technical death/thrash metal herd of camels called Gonoba lit up a fresh pack of Camels.
The guys, who bummed us out a little over a year ago by suddenly calling it quits, surprised us all the more at the start of this year with their (un)expected comeback. And what a comeback it is, because the new album Endless Cycles keeps everything that became Gonoba’s trademark, yet marks a real step forward for the band.
Gonoba returned to the stage like a stampede and proved that a year off didn’t make them lazy. Orto was no different. They greeted the crowd with an instrumental intro that showed we could once again expect a stormy blast of technical death/thrash metal. Once the unhinged frontman Hopsy joined the guys on stage, Gonoba trampled us for a good hour with relentless energy, mixing tracks from the debut Chains of Ignorance and the current record. The excellent sound meant the fantastic bass lines of Brane DiGiorgio, oops, Tkalec, really shone through, weaving masterfully live with the killer guitar riffs of the duo Mitja Prelovšek/Grega Kamenšek. The latter, with solos played with unbelievable ease, once again proved he belongs at the very top of Slovenian metal guitarists, and watching his fingers fuse with the neck of the guitar is always a pleasure. This time Koki’s drumming stampede stood out especially, a clear sign that he’s one of the most prolific drummers on the local metal scene, something he showed with the varied, dynamic drumming on Endless Cycles. Of course, you can’t picture Gonoba without their crazy frontman Hopsy, who spent the band’s hibernation racking up stage mileage with The Canyon Observer. It paid off: he’s become a real vocal beast and a much better, more confident frontman, and his lovably drunken in-between rants remain as unmissable as ever. The band wrapped up Thursday’s show far too soon with the anthemic Camel Metal. Considering they already have two studio albums and two demos under their belt, they could stretch their headline shows by a song or two in the future.
No doubt about it, it’s great to see Gonoba on stage again. The incredible tightness and stage energy are back too, and the band is as killer-convincing as the camels in the cult Atari game Attack of the Mutant Camels!
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