RockLine fest II (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Orto Bar / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: May 17, 2009
Attendance: 0

An important event comes along, more important than you’d think, when after more gigs than you can count, all of them played out live in front of your eyes, you finally slip into the shoes of the concert organizer yourself. Ufff.. what on earth is going to come out of all this?

Picking the bill for the second RockLine fest took a long round of negotiations. Slovenia is simply loaded with very good bands. You’d want to give every single one of them a shot at the stage, because quality bands all deserve the best promotion possible for their defiant grind and their faith in their cause. What counts as quality here, what separates the wheat from the chaff, let’s save for another debate. But with the trio of Shutdown, Chaosstar and Lene kosti, you really can’t go wrong when it comes to great music. And when it comes to a great party, even less so.

And so the long-awaited day arrived! It was beautiful and sunny. The southwest wing of the Orto bar roof gave itself up to the sun’s rays without a fight, and the rooms where the gigs happen got pretty muggy during soundcheck, instrument setup and everything else that falls under the “running around like maniacs” category of calibrating whatever’s needed to set off the spectacle. The minutes flew by ridiculously fast. People are already downstairs. Sitting, cooling their heads, lighting cigarettes.

The clock strikes nine (in the evening, obviously). ShutDown have to hit the stage. The poor guys, cheated out of a soundcheck, will remember the night mostly for nearly knocking the gods off Olympus with the noise that gnawed painfully into the ears through the snarling monitors. The right monitor in particular was crackling away and practically forcing everyone present to go deaf. There weren’t that many people in the hall when the up-and-coming lads from the coast started to “tear into it”. The band is hugely driven. You could feel in the performance that they know exactly what they want. They’ve got a nice dose of tightness and the obligatory bit of stage theater, which is mostly down to singer Egzi, who proved to be a supremely confident force, skillfully using the stage to move around dynamically and wow the crowd. These guys are definitely not bored. It so happened that the left guitar, played by Dominjo, went silent for a few moments, which threw a bit of confusion onto the stage. The Tesla glitch was sorted out quickly. 

The band’s expression and energy on stage has some serious balls to it, which lets the guys successfully defy the generic design of their own original material. They’re hardened heavy metallers who also love listening to classic old-school hard rock and melodic hard rock. The songs Valkira and Križarji stand out for a huge amount of accelerated marching dressed up in epic melodic pomp, which they use skillfully in their maneuvers to win over general listenability. Today’s power metal bands do that, and ShutDown definitely aren’t one. So closer to Riot than Helloween, but with Guns N’ Roses mascara! The lads also entertained the crowd with Diamonds And Rust, a Joan Baez cover that many know better thanks to the version Judas Priest did. ShutDown smashed out an “all-out assault” speed metal version of the song.

Let me sum up my impression: the guys played a set that showed a self-confident band that knows exactly what it’s doing and where it’s going, plays its own songs convincingly, and that proves they believe in themselves. That’s a trump card, of course, and it wards off any danger of the lads getting lost in a sea of generic phrases from the established standards of classic old-school heavy metal, which is ruled by clean, melodic vocals with a nice dose of the obscure. The guys pulled out the optimum given all the factors that shaped their show. As the opening act, they conjured up a truly excellent performance. Considering how young the band is, they’ll definitely keep progressing strongly on the wings of enthusiasm. Let’s wish them all the best! May the talent tap its reserves!

The band that took care of the entire backline for the show is also the only act on that day’s bill with at least one CD out. Ljubljana’s Chaosstar. We waited a very long time for the debut, but the guys polished it for so long that in many ways it stands as one of the better achievements in heavy metal as the general Slovenian standard understands and defines it. The guys can be rightly proud of that album. And they are. They used their hour-long set to present the whole thing. The guys respond to their surroundings on the principle of a 100% drive to bring their original material to life physically. They don’t bother with typical metal clothing, they’re drawn to fashion in the “alternative” class, which easily takes in Primož’s heavily set, upright, needle-spiky hairdo as well as Vasja’s headband, which somehow stirred up the karma of kamikaze pilots from the ancient days of ritual sacrifice above air battles over the blue Pacific. The rest of the crew in shorts just puts the dot on the “i” of the band’s fashion guru status.

The guys played “better” with every passing minute. Once the fingers warmed up to the right working temperature, it ran like clockwork and nothing could stop them anymore. Chaosstar rewarded the crowd with excellent sound. Given the perfectionism the band chases, that’s definitely not something you solve trivially. Primož’s drums dominated the stage, which didn’t bother the other three, Jure Jurca (guitar, vocals), Vasja Čepič (guitar) and Dare Ramot (bass), in the slightest, since Chaosstar are, kinetically speaking, a fairly static band on stage. Like I said, they earn their winning points by executing complexly built songs. And this time too they didn’t let anyone down. They played flat out. Considering the demanding material, the many atmospheric turns the band creates by stringing together motif sequences (which guarantees their very varied, colorful image), and the more complex, fuller sound spectrum of the studio originals in general, it was only logical that the foursome would have to turn into a foursome of octopuses to play all the keyboards on top, reproduce all the added programmed samples, sound loops, extra underlying rhythms, percussion, and blah, blah, blah… So you guessed it? The backing track solves everything, and it’s infallible too.

What’s fascinating is how tightly rehearsed the quartet is, shaking out 50 demandingly crafted minutes of the debut. You can feel, as with Shutdown, that countless drops of sweat from some serious grinding were woven into this execution. Really, there’s hardly any point explaining how the performance went. Somewhere in the middle of the set the room filled up nicely, people in the front rows were happily going wild, the crowd overall was seriously fired up, and with their look Chaosstar definitely delighted the audience, who rewarded the band with truly excellent energy that the band gave right back.

The band closed its set with Slave To The System (an original that isn’t on the album “Lifetime”), and it’s known for liking to play other artists’ interesting songs, if for nothing else then for daily conditioning. From Dream Theater to Dire Straits. This time, with the crowd insisting, they took their places on stage one last time and surprised absolutely everyone with a cover of Toto’s Africa. The thing was played from head to toe “the Chaosstar way”, which is the whole point of covering originals. Besides the basic rhythm they added only a percussion backing track. The original synths were covered over, or rather replaced, by the massive sound of both guitars’ riffs, building an excellent dark atmosphere typical of Chaosstar, which means the intro was the boldest moment of the whole rendition. Vocally it of course hid plenty of reserves. Playing Hold The Line would actually be easier, but 1000x less interesting. It wouldn’t be any challenge at all for a band of Chaosstar’s caliber, and if we’re nitpicking analytically, Yes’s Close To The Edge would come way before it. The guys pulled as close a parallel as they could, but with a song like Africa everything revolves around the vocals and vocal harmonies. If that’s okay, the song works, otherwise it doesn’t. But you can lead the listener down a side track by offering them the richness of a typical metal atmosphere, which Chaosstar did create. It’s a cover that, with some vocal calibration down the road (right, guys?), absolutely belongs in the band’s live repertoire, even though the lineup probably feared before playing it that they’d be stoned, tied to horses and quartered. Quite the opposite. A few people even headbanged to the cover, and a special compliment to the band came from two girls who spun around in a wild waltz in front of the stage for the occasion.

I also have to give big praise to J.J.’s singing. The guy is first and foremost a guitarist, a hellishly well-trained guitarist, forming an equal twin act with Beast. Concentrating on demanding guitar playing while singing decently at the same time is anything but an easy task. The high (up to the highest) registers are J.J.’s home turf and he defies them completely. At the same time he adds that dose of obscure energy metal needs. Think of American old-school speed metal singers like James Rivera (Helstar) and the like. Iron Maiden on steroids, high praise! A big gain for Slovenia, and let’s hope Chaosstar reap a rich harvest for their effort. An excellent gig which, compared to what I saw at Rollbar, when I first caught the band at the release of the album “Lifetime”, showed a big step up (as far as stage performance goes)! The quartet’s creative working chemistry is firing on all cylinders.

After 17 years, Lene kosti quietly rode back like mice from the dimension of forgotten metal graveyards and the ruins of the previous millennium. They came together in the lineup they’ve had since May 2009 very spontaneously. The period from October 2008, when they played their first gig, to this lovely May evening at Orto bar in 2009, the band used to close ranks. It made quite a few chess-style swaps. The most important one, besides the band’s show opening for Grave Digger in Ljubljana on February 3, 2009 (when they finally convinced the metalheads that they exist again), was recently rejuvenating the ranks with a completely new rhythm foundation. The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree most of the time, and so the new bassist is Gregor Brenko, son of the band’s former bassist Dare Brenko, who honored the band’s show and his son from below the stage, eagerly wielding his “photo-beast”. Miha Nedoh (Forgotten Eden, Requiem Razvaline,.. did I forget anything?) was, given the Kavaš brothers’ membership in Requiem, a kind of logical and very handy choice for Lene kosti. Anyone who knows Lene kosti and their 7 classic songs can just close their eyes, sing one of the riffs to themselves, and add the rhythmic Judas Priest gallop from the late eighties. So, double bass pedal, Miha’s varied and rich bag of knowledge, 100% enriched the new face of all of Lene kosti’s original songs. The band was ready to finally push its destructive power to the extremes and use all the energy reserves that until then had been hiding from the Slovenian community in the riffs of Russian Girl, I Got The, Warrior etc… By the way, can anyone today picture heavy metal without a double pedal? Only Iron Maiden, but they get a pass anyway.

This was a very important show for the band. It was the first presentation of a finally consolidated crew that can confidently and without restraint keep developing its vision and finally build the dream that never got built in the late eighties and (early) nineties of the last century. At eleven o’clock everything was ready for the band to shoot out into the open. At a quarter past eleven (at night, of course), they finally darkened the room, and the air floated on a sampled orchestral intro that sounded terrifying, villainous, yet at the same time saving and pompous. Seen the movie Godzilla? That’s it. In that darkness, the figure who blew me away at the Lordi gig in Cerknica on March 13, 2009 finally appears on stage. Mad surgeon, lover of bizarre limb-sawing tools, dialysis, organ transplants, maybe even decapitation (you never know), Doctor Evil. Milan Krušič! Every Lene kosti gig, even in the new era, is crowned by that bubbling, quiet anticipation of what Milan’s cooking up on stage, what surprise, what kind of “silliness”. That’s the factor that makes the band’s shows so attractive, dynamic and unpredictable.

This time Milan was a surgeon! I was doubled over below the stage from the shock! Lene kosti are a band that needs a lot of stage space because of Milan Krušič’s show, which somehow couldn’t be pulled off this time at Orto Bar. And yet who would dare doubt that the show was a full-on Lazy Bones orgy? From the first moment the lineup stomped the gas pedal venomously and kneaded, kneaded and just kept kneading its riffs. The small club space, packed, with the sound engineer’s excellent sound, conjured up an extraordinary energy flux that took over the club ambience from the first moment of I Got The… People were sucked right into it, and many were going wild below the stage. Krušič was fully inspired again, high on the prowl, just like the rest of the guys! He was brewing up the juiciness we kind of demand from him. After the projectiles I Got The… and Stones Of Death, he fired up the crowd: “Breaking the what? Breaking the what?!?!” “Let’s break that…What?” Those familiar with Judas Priest’s live releases give him the answer: “Law”, and Milan: “No! Diamonds And Rust!” Here come the horns, you think, a part of the theater that’s missing in many ways from other Slovenian metal bands. But Diamonds And Rust in Lene kosti’s hands is done roughly after the example of Judas Priest’s “Angel Of Retribution” tour. So the fear of a repeat of the stylistic approach to the very same cover, under Shutdown’s galloping baton two hours earlier, was unnecessary.

I don’t remember this much loose voltage at Orto Bar all at once. Maybe I haven’t been going to real concerts until now. Lene kosti were truly at their highest level of stage performance this time, since I’ve been following their shows from December 2008 until today. The solid riff cannonade of both Kavaš brothers, the witty and heartfelt guitar antics of soloist Marc Kavaš, the firm frame of the excellent Brenko-Nedoh rhythm section and of course the evergreen Krušič, who already in I Got The was firing off real thunderstorm salvos of the highest “Halfordesque” screams that squeeze your balls in a vise, made for a one-of-a-kind show. Milan of course used his charisma at full tilt. He entertained us with the most venomous looks and the peculiar knack of his elastic facial stretchability, staging some unbelievable grimaces. The band also fired off Tube Snake Boogie by ZZ Top, which they hadn’t played live since getting back together, and Milan kept the show’s dynamics high with the (expected) tossing of clothing, which once again rained down on the crowd. Surgical injections, a surgical mask (honestly, Anthony Hopkins’ one from “The Silence of the Lambs” would suit him even better, but for that he’d need an endorsement deal with some erotic shop), a surgical cap,…. And for the grand finale an extremely washed-out, worn-out white T-shirt with the Lene kosti emblem, which he bestially ripped apart and hurled into the crowd! Devilish, evil, snorting, yet insanely fun and hypnotic. This is the world of Lene kosti. Welcome.

The introduction of the crew itself was also really interesting. Milan gave special recognition to Giovani in particular, introducing him as the main and first instigator of Lene kosti even coming into existence, and he didn’t leave Miha behind the drums out either, announcing him the way Lemmy announces his Mikkey in Motorhead: “The best fuckin’ drummer in the world!”, at which Miha logically blushed behind the kit. Milan has studied the approaches of all the major and mid-sized foreign acts from our planet’s rock and metal arsenal down to the last detail. And he’s not afraid to show it on stage and share all that energy with the crowd. Marc then returned the favor, and the ball bounced back roughly like this: “Maybe not the greatest singer, but definitely the broadest singer in Slovenia. Milan Krušič!!!!”

The crowd got especially fired up for Russian Girl. Lene kosti stretched the show past midnight and nobody complained. They played Russian Girl once more as an encore, and it was 00:08 when the concert spectacle finally wrapped up. A speedy show and gear change of “short but sweet” that left us still riled up and buzzing. The excellent sound, full, voluminous, dialed in to the right level for the club dimensions of Orto Bar, was the real “sugar daddy”, or silent concert godfather, that crowned this uncompromising Lene kosti performance. If any of you woke up in the morning in a bathtub, surrounded by ice and found fresh surgical stitches on one of your vital organs, or perhaps “felt” under a sterilized bandage an open skull vault, you can be sacredly certain that Dr. Evil paid you a visit in the night with his “squadron”. Merciless thunder!

Everything turned out fantastic. The whole spectacle. All three bands gave their current maximum. That’s the most an artist, a performer, can offer at any given moment. No calculating. Even after the show people were in no way heading home, instead giving themselves over to hanging out on the ground floor, where all the accumulated positive energy released during the three bands’ sets kept spreading through the crowd. A truly fantastic metal night, the kind we want as many of as possible. Forgotten were the envy, the intolerance, the biting highly intellectual sarcasm, the hair-splitting, in short all the proverbial character traits of your average Slovenian-ish Joe, as we for a change finally transformed into proper Slovenes, closed ranks and showed how invincible we can be together. May these bonds always unite us.

photos: Robi Lipej

Setlist

CHAOSSTAR: 1.Lifetime I-IV 2.Devil’s Whisper 2.Hurricanes Of Madness 3.Rebirth 4.Lifetime V-XVIII 5.Dreams Of Reality 6.On My Way 7.Lifetime XIX 8. Slave To The System LENE KOSTI: 1. I Got The… 2. Stones Of Death 3. Iron Dragon 4. Warrior 5. Russian Girl 6. The Sting 7. Rock Power 8. Do Or Die —encore— 9. Russian Girl

Photo Gallery