Venue: Channel Zero (Metelkova) / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 03/18/2008
Attendance: 225
Ticket price: 10.00€
It’s customary for bands that release an album to play a handful of live shows to promote it properly. Psycho-path did just that, announcing gigs all over Slovenia as well as abroad. Personally, I think an album like The Ass-soul of Psycho-path doesn’t need extra promotion, since its quality is the best advertising there is. Still, a band known for unconventional live shows is well worth seeing, and no fan of alternative music should have missed this one. Psycho-path announced that a special guest would join them at the shows on April 19 and 20. Who could that be?
The first guests of the night were fellow Prekmurje natives Dežurni Krivci (read the report on their headline show at Channel Zero HERE), who warmed up the crowd good and proper with hellish rhythms and heavy riffs. Dežurni Krivci’s music is noticeably different from Psycho-path’s, rawer and wilder, in short a different beast, yet still very compatible with Psycho-path’s sound. The main course was of course their album Strup, which got mostly positive reviews. I can’t fault Krivci for anything. They played at a high level, full of energy and “venom” (strup), if I may borrow the title of their album. At one point Melee joined them on stage and sang a duet with Dežurni Krivci’s guitarist and vocalist. The opening act drew just as big a crowd as the headliners. I don’t know what to put that down to. Maybe the fact that the show started late and everybody was already waiting for Psycho-path? I’d rather say people simply came to enjoy good music, and Krivci definitely delivered on that.
Close to midnight, we finally got the arrival of the mighty Psycho-path. I was really curious what they had in store for us. The emphasis was on their latest album, from which they played most of the songs. And why not? The album is so good it’s worth playing almost in its entirety live. Of course, a few evergreens from earlier releases weren’t missing either. The band took the right approach and found the right mix of older and newer songs. Since I don’t know the earlier albums as well as the new one, I was quite happy. Not just because I knew the tracks, but also because the album is truly top-notch and I can’t find a single major flaw on it. The songs were played with confidence, the band really got into a great groove, and you could see they were enjoying themselves. When they finished, the crowd didn’t want to let them go off to their well-earned rest. So for the encore, their producer Bobby MacIntyre joined the band on stage, taking over the drums from the regular drummer, who was busy with the keyboards that were brought on stage especially for the song Cookie Jar.
Psycho-path can boast an enviable lineup. The rhythm section is very strong. So are the two guitarists, who are equals and trade off the solos. Despite the efforts of the other members, though, the one who impressed the most was singer Melee, whose charisma outshone everyone else in the room. She knows how to bring her talents from the album to the live stage, and if anything she comes across even more convincing live. Much like the album title, she combines two sides – gentle and raw, feminine and rough. And she’s utterly convincing. Her flawless English pronunciation also deserves praise, which means a lot to me as an English major. Plenty of bands have tried writing in English, but only a few have pulled it off as well as Psycho-path, where the lyrics are at an enviable level too, not just the pronunciation.
At the Psycho-path show, the Slovenian crowd got to see truly outstanding performances from everyone involved, and it was great to see Channel Zero packed to the last corner. Clearly the alternative crowd in Slovenia is hungry for legendary bands, which Psycho-path can by now rightfully be called, and for legends in the making, like Dežurni Krivci. Sure, the whole thing dragged on for a very long time (until two in the morning), but if you asked around in the crowd, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a bad word to say about either band or the event. Here’s hoping Psycho-path come back to Ljubljana soon and we won’t have to wait so long again for an experience like this.
text: Rok Podgrajšek
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
DEŽURNI KRIVCI:
1. Grem
2. Shut Up!
3. Kdo se boji črnega moža
4. Senca
5. Freedom Fries
6. Moč v senci
7. Devil Daemon
8. Strup
9. Wanna Kill
10. Črf
PSYCHO-PATH:
1. Battle Royal
2. New Blood
3. Gut Level
4. Lynch (the) Girl
5. No-Fi
6. Sonny
7. Clean Slate
8. Incommunicado
9. Yukio Mishima Is Real!
10. Musical Moment
11. Lobo
12. War
13. Bekkognition
—encore—
14. Tough Cookie
15. Air Rager/Hell Outta Dodge/Cookie Jar
17. Recognition
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