ock-music-festival-2012-ljubljana
Location: Ljubljana / Gospodarsko razstavišče / Slovenia
Date: Friday, June 15, 2012
The Slovenian capital has finally landed an event that carries the “rock festival” label. And it’s called Rock Music Festival. Are your ears not perking up yet? It’s an event worth looking forward to in the years ahead too, provided the organizer stays interested, which depends on whether the event brings in enough money for them to keep following their chosen path.
But let’s take it from the top! The first Rock Music Festival served up a wildly mixed, many-colored lineup. The idea was to tap into the generational shift in musical taste, and especially to go after the younger, let’s say (still) MTV generation, the one gripped by a “heepster” obsession.
The event started to “shake” a little after six in the afternoon, when the first performer, Yulia Schmidt, took the stage. We skipped her, along with The Toronto Drugbust and Billysi, out of sheer necessity, and showed up at the venue just as Tide were kicking off. So a bit after 8:30 p.m. Tide! After a short lull, you could really call Tide “comeback kids” these days. The lineup is revamped: Kevin Koradin (vocals, guitar), Tine Čas (guitar), Matej Batelič (bass) and the freshly baked drummer Blaž Stotošek (ex-Puppetz). The band is announcing its fourth studio album for this fall, and the guys promise another dose of sneering rock n’ roll drive, a return in arrangement style to the album “Nothing To Lose”. So alongside the staples from the first two albums, they threw in the brand-new songs Riot Act and Mud, signaling full-blown reactivation! Kevin Koradin is a man with tons of experience handling the music business. International too, and with Tide as well! Add to that a long stretch of live mileage, including gigs at huge European festivals like Exit in Novi Sad and opening slots for major (legendary) bands, like the two Ljubljana shows in June 2007 before Iron Maiden and in December 2008 before Uriah Heep! It all shows in an excellent stage performance, a full-blooded execution. Most eyes were glued on Kevin, who unleashed the most energy on stage as the main point of contact with the crowd. A confident, polished character as a musician, and as a quartet, combined with a genuine rock n’ roll sound with the swagger of new-wave punk edginess, backed by loyalty to classic amps and the sound of a Gibson guitar, suggests this fall and next year will be marked by a whole lot of boldly rocking tides.
The band us pickier fans were waiting for most feverishly on the lineup was surely the American hard rockers Warrior Soul. This is a legendary outfit that got going way back in 1987 and released its studio debut in 1990! Its leader, the first rebel soul, the engine without which there is no band, remains of course the untamed vocalist Kory Clarke, joined in the current incarnation of the band by guitarists Johnny H and Rille Lundell, drummer Freddie Cocker Kvarnebrink and bassist Danny Engström. With the middle finger of his left hand pointed high in the air and the arrogance of a cheeky, hugely theatrical stage show, Kory instantly provoked the crowd, whose age hovered somewhere between 17 and 21! Hardly anyone in this audience knows anything older than The Killers and/or Coldplay. The crowd got an unexpectedly served-up treat, and showed no signs of indifference whatsoever. They started licking it up with gusto. The show by a classic hard rock band, with a heavy dose of punk rock, came across as cocky that night. Kicked out “in your face,” full of blood and balls. The main thing in this extremely short but dynamically high-voltage performance was of course Kory Clarke’s voice. It still sounds as if a circular saw got stuck in Kory’s throat way back when. Raw and rasping, like the scraping of the coarsest lathe, in full ecstasy! With full commitment and run-up. The rest of the band reacted the same way, and the mildly extravagant guitarist of Swedish roots, Rille Lundell, stood out in particular, on stage at Kory’s far right. He wielded his guitar in all sorts of acrobatic stage poses. The setlist was excellent. Songs taken from the first three Warrior Soul albums, with Fuck the Pigs thrown in from the latest album Destroy The War Machine«, released in 2009. Warrior Soul’s performance was absolute bliss for the impoverished Slovenian music scene, as far as gigs by proper, (eighties) “classically trained” hard rock bands go. On top of that, it was one of the band’s few appearances in Europe this year. The band instantly justified the sky-high expectations going in, and a wave of loud approval from the crowd, for whom Warrior Soul were a total unknown before the set, confirmed it. The band reportedly is preparing its own European tour for the fall. Let’s hope they stop by somewhere near Slovenia, if not in Slovenia itself again. In short, congratulations to the organizer for showing a generous dose of imagination in putting together the festival lineup and for totally surprising us with Warrior Soul. We want more moves like that in the future!
Elvis Jackson from Nova Gorica are right now one of the most sought-after Slovenian live acts. They’re constantly active on all sorts of stages, and their gigs in Slovenia are known for being packed to the rafters. The quintet recently got back from a successful club tour of the UK.
Never mind the screaming of the girls, who went into a mass frenzy right to the brink of hysteria when the guys hit the stage again, that’s not the yardstick for the quality of Elvis Jackson. When the conversation turns to the quality of Elvis Jackson, it’s not worth wasting words. This is a band that guarantees a combination of outstanding fun and excellent stage execution. A fusion of punk, ska, funk, reggae, a dash of hardcore and even the fieriness of metal riff vocabulary, it ignited fully this time too. In an hour-long landscape of a repertoire that didn’t skip Street 45, Not Here To Pray, Dry Yourt Tears, This Time, Hawaiian Club,… with the obligatory dose of mocking clowning and a bag of sarcasm, as befits Elvis Jackson’s usual habits of joking around, deadly somersaults, getting pelted with inflatable toys, it was further boosted by the most favorable time slot of the festival evening, when the guys took the stage, as well as by much better stage lighting compared to the other bands’ sets. An hour of Elvis Jackson theater that can’t hide what it is. The guys have way too much drill behind them and are greased with every ointment there is, they know every stage rule and all the laws of the stage game have been revealed to them. An excellent performance by an excellent band that, on top of that, is extremely hot and in demand in Slovenia right now! All we’re waiting for now is a new studio album!
Sunrise Avenue are among the representatives of alternative rock that’s of course tuned to MTV, meaning commercially conceived. The starting point is the endearingly simple melodic form of arranging their music, which is instantly likable in its undemanding nature, aimed at the least demanding listeners of the new generation of teenagers. The “boyish” look of an otherwise seasoned band, which has been holding its ground on the scene since 1992, helps too. But the commercially successful period only began for Sunrise Avenue after they added Avenue to their (original) name Sunrise in 2001 and finally released their studio debut in 2006. Their skyrocketing popularity is especially signaled by the freshly released album “Out Of Style”, which went gold right away at home in Finland and even platinum in Germany. In a span of five years Sunrise Avenue climbed up to halls holding several thousand people, even capacities of over 10,000 heads. And the peak was the invitation to a stadium gig this May in the middle of Munich, at the Champions League soccer final. In a fan-rounded hour and a half set, with a repertoire that didn’t skip the big hits, the commercially breakthrough Fairytale Gone Bad and the universally known Holywood Hills, Sunrise Avenue delivered yet another in a line of extremely solid, confident performances, and the sight of the heated, participating crowd below the stage said pretty much everything. Devoted to creating a kind of alternative rock variant, with a contagiously melodic contour and a fine touch of jangle sound resting on a genuinely organic use of sonic structures, which the old-school Gibson guitars don’t hide, the right amount of dynamics in stage movement, positive energy and cheerful mood, mostly thanks to the band’s vocalist and guitarist Samu Aleksi Haber, Sunrise Avenue brought their first show in Slovenia to a triumphant close.
After Sunrise Avenue’s set, which ended at 2 a.m., came a performance by the British Maybe Winehouse, a “tribute to” Amy Winehouse act, and the poppy rest of the festival was rounded off by the Slovenian-Croatian duo Lollobrigida, with whom the festival partying carried on until five in the morning. Sadly, the RockLine crew couldn’t keep up with the brutal festival pace dictated by the marathon march of this Friday, so after Sunrise Avenue we headed off to some well-earned rest.
Rock Music Festival is a venture with the potential to grow in the future, both in terms of lineup and in stretching the dates. In that case it’s also worth thinking about moving the event to another location. Gospodarsko razstavišče and its hall, as many times before, once again showed its teeth when it comes to sound, so the festival couldn’t exactly boast quality sound for the individual bands. Still, let’s hope the promoter’s math worked out and that they’ll stick with it, keeping the festival’s place in the middle of Ljubljana. Let’s hope it grows into the kind of festival they know in, say, our southern neighbor and its capital Zagreb, where they call it InMusic festival. Let’s give it time and keep our fingers crossed for Rock Music Festival.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
WARRIOR SOUL:
1. Intro
2. Interzone
3. Love Destruction
4. Drugs, God and The New Revolution
5. Punk And Belligerent
6. Blown Away
7. Shine Like It
8. Fuck The Pigs
9. Charlie’s Out Of Prison
10. Downtown
SUNRISE AVENUE:
01. Out of Tune
02. Damn Silence
03. I Gotta Go
04. Sex and Cigarettes
05. Forever Yours
06. Angels on a Rampage
07. I don’t dance
08. Destiny (Reggae/ Cover Medley)
09. Stormy End
10. Welcome to my Life
11. Fairytale gone Bad
12. On the Way to Wonderland
—encore I—
13. Sweet Symphony
14. Hollywood Hills
—encore II—
15. Dream like a Child
