Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Venue: Stadio Comunale Teghil / Lignano Sabbiadoro
Concert date: August 4, 2017
Summer, sea, punk. Yes, definitely better than summer, sea and the musical abominations of terrace bands on our coast or the Croatian one. At the peak of the summer season, American giants The Offspring played in glamorous Lignano, a two-hour drive from Ljubljana, and they brought Swedish skate punks Millencolin along with them. The Americans picked the Comunale Teghil stadium as the scene of the crime, right at the entrance to town, and before the show there was plenty of time for a dip in the sea too, though the water temperature felt more like a hot spring.
Right before the show the organizers added a third act, almost-locals Rumatera from Venice. The guys are celebrating their tenth anniversary this year and describe themselves as punk rock with elements of electro pop. Rumatera are obviously heroes to the home crowd, because early in the evening, with the heat still bearing down hard, a pretty big crowd was already waiting in front of the stage, cheering them on loudly and eagerly throughout the set. Musical tastes differ, of course, but personally I haven’t heard anything this bad in a good while. The Venetians served up a pile of uninspired songs with goofy melodies and even worse choruses, all sung exclusively in Italian, which just doesn’t work in punk. On top of an already weak foundation, Rumatera add dreadful ska and electro pop bits and at best sound like a really bad version of Blink 182. Not to mention the show on stage, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the music and includes cheerleaders dressed as sumo wrestlers, some kind of quasi-wrestler and who knows what else. Can anything be worse than a bad Italian band? Yes. A bad Italian punk band.
So I had much bigger hopes for Swedish skate punks Millencolin, who marked my early high school years and whose CDs were in my CD player all the time while skating (remember those devices, comrades, hehe?). Since forming in 1992, the Swedes have released eight studio albums, the latest, True Brew, two years ago, and they wrote themselves into the genre’s hall of fame with the albums Life on a Plate, For Monkey and Pennybridge Pioneers. They played the most songs from that last one, from hits like No Cigar and Fox, Penguins & Polarbears, to the ballad The Ballad (duh), but sadly the performance was anything but satisfying. Not only was the band’s sound pretty bad, the guys from Örebro also allowed themselves (way) too many botched parts and flubbed notes, Nikola Šarčević’s vocals were far from the melodic voice you hear on the albums, and the worst off were the backing harmonies, which were mostly completely off. A few songs were so horribly botched that you could hardly recognize them. Even though Milencollin offered a great setlist full of classics (Olympic, Twenty Two, Lozin’ Must, Bullion), the disappointment after the show was considerable, and I think from now on I’ll stick to following one of the biggest Burning Heart/Epitaph bands of the skate generation strictly in the studio.
By the end of Millencolin’s set the »golden ring« was already packed and the security guys had their hands full pulling out people who had fainted, because the heat was truly catastrophic, and during the set by American giants The Offspring, who in the nineties, along with Green Day, brought punk closer to the mainstream, it only climbed higher. The stadium was far from full, but the crowd up to the mixing desk was packed in pretty densely. To the stadium’s roaring enthusiasm, The Offspring walked on stage with the easygoing You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid and won the crowd over right away. Lignano exploded even more when The Offspring served up the hit All I Want next, and from there the great mood just kept building. There was a sizable hole in the lineup this time, since original guitarist Noodles didn’t play with the band, having had to fly to the US because of a family situation, but the stand-in guitarist did his job confidently, and the very talkative and in-great-spirits frontman Dexter Holland also picked up the guitar several times. The Offspring played a great setlist over an hour and a half, with something for everyone. The biggest crowd reaction went to the goofy hits like Pretty Fly (For a White Guy), Original Prankster and Why Don’t You Get a Job, but we also heard the deadlier, truer-to-form punk crushers Bad Habit, Genocide, All I Want and Mota. Interestingly, The Offspring didn’t play a single song from their latest album, Days Go By (2012), and they slipped a partial cover of The White Stripes’ anthem Seven Nation Army into the set. On stage the band members were joking around with each other the whole time, and Dexter saved the crowd from total heat collapse by spraying water from a fire hose. The Offspring closed the main set with the wonderful lost-generation anthem The Kid’s Aren’t Alright, and in the encore said goodbye with the crushers American and the mega-hit Self Esteem, the song that put the band on the map. The Offspring played a great, energetic and extremely likable show that will go down as a fond memory, and the only things that spoiled it were the heat and the annoying mosquitoes.
Setlist
MILLENCOLIN:
1. No Cigar
2. Sense & Sensibility
3. Ray
4. Olympic
5. Penguins & Polarbears
6. Cash or Clash
7. The Ballad
8. Twenty Two
9. True Brew
10. Lozin’ Must
11. Kemp
12. Pepper
13. Mr. Clean
— encore —
14. Egocentric Man
15. Bullion
16. Fox
17. Black Eye
THE OFFSPRING:
1. You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid
2. All I Want
3. Come Out And Play
4. Genocide
5. Seven Nation Army/Original Prankster
6. Staring at the Sun
7. Mota
8. Want You Bad
9. What Happened to You?
10. Bad Habit
11. Gone Away
12. Hit That
13. Why Don’t You Get a Job?
14. (Can’t Get My) Head Around You
15. Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)
16. The Kids Aren’t Alright
— encore —
17. American
18. Self Esteem
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