Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Roncade (Treviso) / New Age / Italy
Concert date: 03.03.2012
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: 20,00€ / 25,00€
That’s just how it is: a bigger country has a bigger pool of people discovering and listening to all kinds of music. Despite all the prejudices we hold against the folks next door to the west, which, let’s be honest, have once again proven justified, they also proved once more that they know their way around the modern music scene, because New Age was almost sold out for the Swedish “sleaze” double bill.
But let’s start at the beginning. Arriving at the venue, our twenty-strong Slovenian crew was immediately hit with a nasty surprise: on top of the regular ticket price (25,00€), we had to pay some kind of fee of 10,00€. Everybody, accredited journalists included, just so there’s no confusion. Why? Nobody speaks Italian…. . Those “ten €” would normally go on a refreshing hoppy beverage inside the club, which I warmly advise against at this particular establishment, since they charge you 5,00€ for colored water with a hint of hops. The third, but not the last, brick in the wall of a bad start to the evening was laid by the opening band, the very aptly named Superhorrorfuck.
The four-piece consists of a bassist and a guitarist who probably spend their days working at the local Eurospin, while at night some psychotic makeup artist carries out a massacre on them, someone else shoves two wired-up wooden stakes into their hands and off they go, onto the stage. Keeping them company up there are a local transvestite with a mic in hand, whose makeup job suggests a serious case of Parkinson’s, and a surprisingly solid drummer who gives the impression, considering how good he is, of being in the band under duress. This grotesque conglomerate conjured up melodies in our ears that sounded like a chipped chainsaw scraping down a water pipe, backed vocally by a pack of elderly deaf cats high on crack. A dreamy experience, then, which I recommend only to those with the strongest nerves.
After half an hour of inquisitorial torture for our ear canals and the stage changeover, the first Swedes of the night finally took the stage: Sister. A band that cares enormously about both looks and music cut through the gloom of the evening with a phenomenal dose of hard, dirty r’n’r mixed with heavy metal rhythms and punk punch. A lineup with just one full-length album under its belt showed us in a solid half hour what modern glam sleaze should look like: fast, loud and punchy. Tracks like Bullshit & Backstabbin’, I Don’t Mind If You Die and Unlucky Minority pushed the temperature in the club and the crowd to a dangerously high level, and it didn’t drop until the end of the headliners’ set. These young Swedes are a prime example of how a driven band works: a few years of nonstop grind in their home country, polishing the live show and stage look, gradually putting an album together, then releasing it and jumping straight into the van and touring all over Europe. Add the necessary quality of playing, and that’s probably the only guaranteed recipe for at least some measure of success; I’m saying this to take to heart for all our “up-and-coming” bands too.
After Sister came the headliners, sleaze veterans Hardcore Superstar. A band that was there at the very beginnings of this genre in Sweden has grown over 15 years of existence into a professional outfit that knows exactly what it’s doing on stage and shows it every single night. Over a set an hour and a half long they had the crowd eating out of their hands, whether it was songs from the latest record “Split Your Lip” or older hits from “Dreamin’ in a Cascet” or the self-titled record from 2005. The guys were burning it up and cranking the heat in the room until the end of the second third of the set, when they slowed things down and, during the ballad “Run To Your Mama”, also invited the frankly English-illiterate crowd to join in. There was already a serious shortage of oxygen in the room when HS left the stage for the first time after the song “Bully”, but the crowd, with more or less successful variations on the phrase “we want more”, got them back out there after all, where they played three more of their best-known hits (Moonshine, Last call for alcohol, with the obligatory addition of a reference to You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ by Judas Priest) and the by now evergreen We Don’t Celebrate Sundays, and said their final goodbye to Roncade.
This time the great impression of the concert was once again spoiled by classic Italian “shenanigans”, but still. Sister and Hardcore Superstar make a package that no fan of high-octane hard n’heavy should have missed, and given the solid turnout from Slovenia mentioned above, I appeal to the promoters: next time, bring a similar band (Crashdiet, Sister Sin…) to our neck of the woods too.
The author of this piece for RockLine, Gregor Šujica, is also a writer for the first Slovenian metal webzine, Paranoid.
Setlist
HARDCORE SUPERSTAR:
- Someone Special
- Sadistic Girls
- Guestlist
- Medicate Me
- Dreamin’ In A Casket
- Wild Boys
- Split Your Lip
- This Worm’s For Ennio
- Beg For It
- Run to Your Mama (Jocke & Vic, acoustic version)
- Kick On The Upperclass
- Liberation
- My Good Reputation
- Bully
- —encore
- Still I’m Glad
- We Don’t Celebrate Sundays
- Last Call for Alcohol (includes part of You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ – Judas Priest)
- Moonshine
Photo gallery
