Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: 24.10.2013
Attendance: 40 – 50
Ticket price: 16 € presale / 20€ on the day of the show
I’m picky, and I don’t fall for every lure that a promoter or a band itself can dangle. I don’t buy the fairy tales that every lesser-known exotic convoy of musicians is automatically a lost treasure just because of its obscure underground status, or that every album with a slightly more intellectual edge instantly points you toward Nirvana, the Eldorado of inner peace, fulfillment, inner catharsis. Still, the news that progressive multi-genre provocateurs and inspired Norwegian sonic rebels Leprous were coming to Ljubljana just a few months after Metal Days, with Poland’s utterly unconventional (by Polish standards) progressive sludgers and doomers Blindead keeping them company, a band that grabbed me on first listen with the album Absence – all of that added up to one conclusion: it would be nearly stupid, even unfair, not to point my steps toward the Ljubljana club Orto Bar, where anything but an ordinary dive into the musical essence of more contemporary sounds was on the menu. The fact is that modern post-apocalyptic rock, metal, alternative and their musical parallels tend to get a bit neglected and overlooked on this side of the Alps, in favor of the more direct, old-school thrash and HC stance. Apart from djent, Meshuggah, the occasional Tool and anything else even slightly more visible, the youth rarely reach for the exotic derivatives of progressive sound from bands like Neurosis, Isis, Pelican, Veil Of Maya or, say, Cult Of Luna, since this kind of offering is anything but easy to abstract, consume and grasp. I’m not saying people here are intellectually frigid, but anything that demands more effort than something average and commercially force-fed rarely lands on fertile ground in our little corner of the universe. So the expectation that Orto might be packed to the last corner was pushed way into the background, and I felt a little sympathy for both bands in advance.
First to take the tight, gear-crammed stage were the Poles Blindead. The boards received the drum kit of phenomenal rhythmist Konrad Ciesielski, with guitarists Mateusz Smierzchalski and Marek Zielinski, armed with a Fender and a Gibson, lining up smartly in front of it, along with short-haired, lost-in-thought bassist Matteo Bassoli. On the right side of the crowded stage, Bartosz Hervy’s keyboards and samplers sprawled strategically, along with a makeshift podium, a pulpit, which the band’s orator, singer Patryk Zwolinski, with his brooding, faraway gaze, stepped onto last. The band, which has been making music in Gdansk under the name Blindead since 2003, has strapped four completely different records onto its belt since the final termination of its predecessor Incorrect Personality. After the albums Devouring Weakness, Autoscopii, or a murder in several phases, and then the even more systematically incomprehensible album Affliction XXIX II MXMVI, this year is, for the sextet, marked by the nihilism, catharsis and dreaminess of the album Absence, which the lads decided to play in its entirety at their Slovenian stop on the Coal tour. Opening track b6 booms out over projected images of a cardiogram like an ecstatic tale, a melodic fairy story of well-balanced, sonically saturated guitars, bass, otherworldly keyboards, heavily weighted drums, and the atypical, dreamy, contemplatively powerful Maynard-esque vocals of the phenomenal Patryk. There’s little eye contact, but the story of emptiness, passing, fragility, finality and mortality squeezes into the space of Orto thick and heavy, with resonant tones that Neurosis, Isis, Pelican, Tool and the other giants of melancholy-minded metal would gladly sign as their own. Yet this time Blindead present a completely original and brilliantly executed set of songs, proving that these guys are an elite of geniuses on a mission to completely conquer the world. The gorgeous rhythms and full melodic vignettes of saturated progressive sludge, doom and modern cataclysmic fiddling with your nerve endings are closer to the feeling I get when diving into the essence of A Perfect Circle, Ashes Divide, Tool and Isis than to the inverted Satanism of some cruder, simpler relatives from the garage world of obscure-club offerings. Blindead have refinement and inner balance, and the trembling of Orto’s wooden floor shows they’re also well aware that to plug into the cosmic currents of this band you need the right frequencies, volume, power. Under the dictate of emptiness, nihilism, melancholy, sorrow and resonant pain, the lads and lasses in the audience also gave themselves over to a lost-in-thought state of hypnosis. Some forty heads half-closed their eyes and surrendered to an atmospheric glide through the lesser known, accompanied by the sounds of a shamanic chant that Matteo handles flawlessly in the song s1. Maynard-style suspense seeps from every pore, while in the background the image of an aged body weaves into the evening. Passing, death, decomposition – it all goes hand in hand with a story that touches people rationally, emotionally, sonically complete. Mateusz, strapped with a twelve-string Gibson, allows himself to pile still more brilliant undertones of warm distortion onto an already full sonic picture, the dot on the i is added by Deadman, the lovely catalyst of the Fender’s warm undertones, Marek, and I can’t imagine the band without the sonic touch of keyboards and sound extras served up by Bartosz. Blindead allow themselves no soft tissue or weak spots, and, accompanied by half-darkness and strobe bursts of white light, they steer their mighty uninterrupted composition of bitterness and intelligent music onward without a hitch. The guys keep putting on new sonic contours, and between the suspense, the swaps of guitars and sound tools, the feeling is constantly being built up. Patryk pulls it off more than brilliantly, switching between a deep resonant baritone, narration, guttural full-blooded metal screams and a dreamy tenor reaching into the more sensitive spheres of pure melody, without any sense of being subordinate to the evening’s headliners or being bothered by the piercing gaze of a crowd that couldn’t fully grasp the quality unfolding in front of them. The performers’ distance from the audience is deliberate, and the lack of words about the meaning of the songs, their content, was more than welcome. The steel thread continues with the more resolute, industrialized chill of c7, which, after post-industrial repetitiveness, ingeniously weaves in undertones of jazz improvisation and the juicy sounds of a tonally completely liberated saxophone, thickening the feeling of claustrophobia, pain, shock even further. In the band’s narration, that pulls me even more magnetically toward a state of total fusion with that something transcendent at the very gravitational center of perfect music. The more melancholically light, lilting song of lovely guitars on e2, in the manner of my beloved Opeth (I don’t know, but the softness of the album Damnation comes to mind), is the overture to the closing act, in which everything culminates and fully unravels. A7bsence closes the story like a gorgeous revelation. What if everything you imagine is exactly the opposite of the facts? Blindead allow themselves to breathe the spirit of seventies progressive undertones into the whole thing, with organs ringing out, and the entire six-headed core of this Polish soldiery of superb musicians, with slowed-down collages of guitars, bass and Nick’s emotionally charged, electrified vocals, brings the action to a cataclysmic finale. As drums, guitars and the low undertones of thundering bass boom, the unreachable singer leaves the hall of Orto, while the remaining five feast on the last fractals, the last remaining atoms of energetic magnetism in a thick forest of instrumental building blocks. The state of catharsis is complete, and the Poles dominated the first part of the evening beautifully and without a gram of weakness. Anyone who missed the first half of the show can be forgiven for regretting it, while the appetites of those present were in every respect more than sated.
The appetizer was hearty and filling, no doubt, but the main course was yet to come. The Norwegian oddballs Leprous, sailing out of predictable genre frameworks, are anything but a conventional specimen of metal, since they can’t agree with labeling and similar crap under any circumstances. The record Coal, which they came to present and defend in Ljubljana, is the mental continuation of the album Bilateral, which surprised with the feeling of pure prog rock. Mars Volta and Muse undertones, already with the opening track Foe, show up as the first concrete projectile in the quintet’s barrel. The megaton pressure of guitars, bass and atonal keyboards is built up by the crystal-clear tenor of the blond Einar Solberg, who’s decked out in a tie and elegant attire. The elegance can be ascribed to the whole band. Besides the systematically restrained guitars of Tor Oddmund Suhrke and Øystein Landsverk, the evening was also marked by the christening of the new bassist, the red-haired, slightly oddly cropped Viking Martin Skrebergene. More than him, though, I’m drawn in by the phenomenal, flawlessly executed three-part harmonies of both guitarists and the fully concentrated Einar. Insahn and Emperor elements are connected with a feeling of total progression and experiment, while King Crimson, Muse and Mars Volta are only reference points that would give a full-on erection to all the fans of the genius Devin Townsend or Opeth too. The band functions with confidence, but at least at the start they don’t grab me the way their predecessors did, since this main course is a bit more kitschy and filling than the usual culinary offering, so patience is required, and later more than richly rewarded. The two guitarists strap on eight-string Ibanezes and the play of atonal beauty can go on. After The Valley comes the gorgeous distorted blow of Chronic, on which Einar proves his complete range from clean tones to total brutalization. A wonderful cascade of slithering melodies and leaden weight carries on, to the delight of a somewhat larger crowd, in the manner of the sweaty, empirical testing of the frequencies of the latest record in full. The listening challenge that Leprous, with an operatic lift to a level of complete liberation from genre imperatives, undoubtedly pose for purebred, purism-sworn metalheads is, as far as I’m concerned, a total invitation to stick with it, since there are no recipes for predictability here! The beautifully executed The Cloak is even fuller of blackness and ominousness than on the album, and Leprous, with a construction of superbly executed falsettos, dominates mostly with a perfect vocal performance, even if the guitars lack a few grams of weight that would have been more than welcome. The djent-tuned Restless brings back to the mouth the feeling of the complete show of the album Bilateral. A bit of Korn-style dirt and rhythm mixes in with the progressive rock tones, and Leprous burn it down in a totally relaxed way, committed to the mission »domination of Slovenia«. The playing is flawless, toying with the crowd’s senses close to the state of ecstasy, and then the guys mix in a bit of the psychogenic edge and sharpness of the album Tall Poppy Syndrome with the playfulness of the song Dare You. The test of ability and sense of rhythm builds as Einar weaves his “strange” keyboard sounds into the interplay of guitars, bass and drums, and the guys toy with both intensity and rhythm. The Opeth-like climax just thickens with baroque kitsch, and even patterns from the Meshuggah playbook creep into the subconscious, ominous and beautifully covered with lighter, if you can call it that, trinkets of more old-fashioned prog. Sexy, in short! After the phenomenal symphonics of Thorn, the guys carve a path to the confused center of your bewildered heart and mind with Forced Entry. The schizophrenic dance continues with the title track of the latest album, which brings a bit more of the dust of miraculous multi-genre-ness into Leprous, something everyone can have fun with: metalheads, rockers, lovers of jazz experimentation, pop, or, as they put it themselves, everyone on the palette between Miles Davis, Meshuggah, Michael Jackson and whatnot. With the emphasis that Leprous can’t and won’t stay faithful to a single recipe, the sonic collage is very ragged and damn complex, but at the same time wonderfully, strangely digestible! People do have a bit of taste, don’t they? The song Acquired Taste also follows this bilateral testing of the limits of the possible, and the effort to slip past every convention is rewarded with every note by ever louder ovations, applause and cries of delight. Like an echo of the militant undertones of the song Echo, they travel from the stage to the center of the crowd’s hearts and back. The dreaminess and playful acceleration of the cycles of ecstasy thicken to a state of utterly grotesque violence and an explosive desire to transcend the limits of the body. The bodies are chalices into which a perfect honey nectar of thick, elusive madness is poured this time, and, with trembling to the brutal aritmic sounds of a countdown to the zero state of total nihilism, the contagious Contaminate Me brings the expected sweaty continuation and a reward for perseverance. The soaking-wet Leprous squeeze out of their bosoms the phenomenal songs Passing and, with the asphyxiating finale of Waste Of Air, a disharmonically accelerated tale of the rabbit or the hatter from Alice in Wonderland. Leprous are out of the ordinary, and after the deafening cranking of every parameter past the red line and the permitted, the finale unravels the way you could only wish for – in total surrender to rhythm and melody, with which space and time, at least for those few extended moments of shamanic enchantment, become completely irrelevant.
Leprous cast their spell over the Ljubljana crowd, and a phenomenal show of rebellion, elusiveness and escape from any conceptualization achieves its purpose. I can easily venture to say that Thursday’s concert was among the best we’ll get this year on this side of the Alps. The double treat was so atypical this time that in the whole fairy tale, the story of a world of darkness, dusk, pain and cathartic redemption, there was something for everyone. Personally, I could more easily picture Leprous this time paired with, I don’t know, Fair To Midland or some similarly minded prog rock or prog metal band. But it’s also true that Blindead made my evening better with their truly magical performance of domination, sorrow, hopelessness and total emptiness, which reflects both our world and our hearts marked by crisis and recession. The Poles completely shook me and filled me up, and the Norwegians gave me practically everything I expected from guys of their caliber – an avant-garde excess that will rightly be talked about for a while as an event that, well, doesn’t happen every day in Slovenia! Thank the gods for such rare but oh-so-sweet surprises!
Setlist
BLINDEAD:
1. b6
2. s1
3. e5
4. n4
5. c7
6. e2
7. a7bsence
LEPROUS:
1. Foe
2. The Valley
3. Chronic
3. The Cloak
4. Restless
5. Dare You
6. Thorn
7. Forced Entry
8. Coal
9. Acquired Taste
10. Echo
11. Contaminate Me
12. Passing
13. Waste Of Air
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