Location: Ljubljana / Gospodarsko razstavišče / Slovenia
Concert date: June 15, 2012
Attendance: 2000
Ticket price: €26.00 (standing) / €38.00 (standing – fan pit)
Slovenia’s capital has finally got an event that carries the »rock festival« badge too. And that event is Rock Music festival. Haven’t your ears pricked up yet? It’s an event worth looking forward to in the future as well, provided the organizer’s interest holds out, which depends on the financial returns, so they keep sticking to the path they’ve laid out.
But let’s take it from the top! The first Rock Music festival served up a hugely mixed, many-colored lineup of bands. The aim was to target generational shifts in musical taste, and especially to zero in on the younger, let’s say (still) MTV generation, the one tossed around by a »hipster« obsession.
The event started to »shake« a little past six in the afternoon, when the first performer, Yulia Schmidt, took the stage. We skipped her, along with The Toronto Drugbust and Billysi, because of unavoidable commitments, and showed up at the venue just as Tide were kicking off. A little past 8:30 p.m., then. Tide! Honestly, after a stretch of lying low, we can call Tide »comeback kids« today. In a revamped lineup: Kevin Koradin (vocals, guitar), Tine Čas (guitar), Matej Batelič (bass) and the freshly baked drummer Blaž Stotošek (ex-Puppetz). The band is announcing their fourth studio album for this fall, and the guys promise another properly sneering rock n’ roll drive, meaning an arrangement U-turn back toward the album »Nothing To Lose«. So alongside the standards from the first two albums they worked in brand-new songs Riot Act and Mud, signaling full-on reactivation! Kevin Koradin is a man with a ton of experience handling the music business. International too, and with Tide as well! Add to that a long concert mileage, with the guys boasting shows at massive, big European festivals like Novi Sad’s Exit and opening slots for bigger (legendary) bands, like the two Ljubljana gigs in June 2007 before Iron Maiden and in December 2008 before Uriah Heep! It all shows in the excellent stage performance, a full-blooded execution. Most eyes were glued to Kevin, who fired off the most energy on stage as the main point of contact with the crowd. A confident, seasoned character, both as a musician and as a quartet, combined with a genuine rock n’ roll sound of punk-flavored new wave irritation, backed by loyalty to classic amps and the sound of Gibson guitars, suggests that this fall and next year will be marked by plenty of boldly rockin’ surges.
The band we picky ones were most feverishly waiting for on the lineup was definitely the American hard rockers Warrior Soui. A legendary outfit that started way back in 1987 and put out their studio debut in 1990! Their leader, the first rebel soul, the engine without which there’s no band, remains of course the untamed vocalist Kory Clarke , joined in the band’s current incarnation by guitarists Johnny H and Rille Lundell, drummer Freddie Cocker Kvarnebrink and bassist Danny Engström. With the middle finger of his left hand raised high in the air, and the cocky arrogance of an exceptionally theatrical stage show, Kory instantly challenged the crowd, whose age hovered somewhere between 17 and 21! Few people in that crowd know anything older than The Killers and/or Coldplay. The audience got an unexpectedly served-up piece of candy, and showed absolutely no signs of indifference, instead starting to lick it with enthusiasm. The show by a classic hard rock lineup with a strong injection of punk rock came off as cocky all night. Kicked out »in your face«, with full blood flow and full balls. The main thing in this extremely short but dynamically boiling-over set is of course Kory Clarke’s vocal. It still sounds as if a circular saw got stuck in Kory’s throat way back when. Raw, grating like the roughest lathe, in full ecstasy! With full commitment and a running start. The rest of the band reacted the same way, with the mildly extravagant guitarist of Swedish roots Rille Lundell standing out in particular, on Kory’s far right on stage. He swung his guitar around in all sorts of stage-acrobatic poses. The setlist was great. Songs taken from the first three Warrior Soul albums, with Fuck the Pigs from the latest album Destroy The War Machine«, released in 2009, mixed in. Warrior Soul’s show was absolute bliss for the impoverished Slovenian music scene, as far as gigs by real, (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 lived up to the high expectations going in, and that was confirmed by a wave of loud approval from a crowd for whom Warrior Soul were an absolute musical unknown even before the set. The band reportedly is preparing a headlining European tour for the fall. Let’s hope they drop by somewhere near Slovenia, if not right back in Slovenia. In short, congrats to the organizer for showing a hefty dose of imagination in putting together the festival lineup and for the full-on surprise of bringing in Warrior Soul. We want more moves like that in the future!
Elvis Jackson from Nova Gorica are right now one of the most in-demand Slovenian live acts. They’re constantly active on stages of all kinds, and in Slovenia their shows are known to be packed. The quintet recently returned from a successful club tour of Great Britain.
Never mind the screaming of the girls, who went nuts en masse again as the guys hit the stage and were driven to the edge of hysteria — that’s not the yardstick of Elvis Jackson’s quality. When the debate turns to the question of Elvis Jackson’s quality, it’s not worth wasting words. This is a band that guarantees a combo of outstanding fun and excellent stage execution. A fusion of punk, ska, funk, reggae, touches of hardcore and even the fieriness of metal riff vocabulary, fully ignited 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 sheer mockery and a pinch of sarcasm, as befits Elvis Jackson’s well-established wisecracking habits, Buda’s death-defying somersaults and the hurling of inflatable toys, the guys also got a boost from the most favorable slot of the festival evening, as well as from much better-worked stage lighting compared to the other bands’ sets. An hour of Elvis Jackson theater that can’t deny itself. The guys have way too much drill behind them and are slathered in every kind of ointment; they know all the laws of the stage and every rule of the stage game has been revealed to them. An excellent show by an excellent band, which on top of that is insanely hot and in demand in Slovenia right now! We’re just waiting for a new studio album!
Sunrise Avenue are among the representatives of alternative rock that’s aimed, of course, MTV-style, meaning commercially conceived. The starting point is the endearingly simple melodic form of arranging their music, which instantly lodges itself, in all its undemandingness, in the least demanding listeners of the new generation of teenagers. The »boyish« looks of this otherwise experienced band help too, and they’ve been holding their ground on the scene since 1992. But the commercially successful period only kicked in 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 shown above all by the freshly released album »Out Of Style«, which quickly went gold at home in Finland, and even platinum in Germany. Within five years Sunrise Avenue climbed up to halls that hold several thousand people, even to capacities of over 10,000 heads. And the peak was the invitation to a stadium show this May in the middle of Munich, at the Champions League football final. In a fan-rounded hour and a half, in a repertoire that didn’t skip the two big hits, the commercially breakthrough Fairytale Gone Bad and the universally known Holywood Hills, Sunrise Avenue delivered yet another in a string of extremely solid, confident performances, and the sight of the heated, participating crowd below the stage said it all. Devoted to creating a kind of alternative rock variant with infectiously melodic contours and a finesse of jangle sound that rests on a genuinely organic use of sonic structures, which the old-school Gibson guitar models don’t hide, with just the right amount of dynamic stage movement, positive energy and a cheerful mood, taken care of above all by the band’s vocalist and guitarist Samu Aleksi Haber, Sunrise Avenue led their first appearance in Slovenia to a triumphant close.
After Sunrise Avenue’s set, which wrapped up at 2 a.m., came the British Maybe Winehouse, an Amy Winehouse »tribute to« act, and the pop continuation of the festival was rounded off by the Slovenian-Croatian tandem Lollobrigida, with which the festival partying carried on until five in the morning. Sadly, the RockLine crew couldn’t keep up with the brutal festival tempo dictated by the marathon march of this Friday, so after Sunrise Avenue we headed off to some well-deserved rest.
Rock Music Festival is a venture with the potential to keep growing in the future, both in terms of lineup and in terms of extending the dates. In that case it’s also worth thinking about moving the event to a different location. The Gospodarsko razstavišče and its hall, as so many times before, bared its teeth again when it comes to acoustics, 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, thus 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 it’s called InMusic festival. Let’s give time some time and keep our fingers crossed for Rock Music festival.
Setlist
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
Photo gallery
