Location: Krško / MC Krško / Slovenia
Date of the gig: February 19, 2012
Attendance: 90
Ticket price: €5.00
A February Saturday brought the metalheads back to MC Krško. After a break of a good month, the members of the MC Krško metal section were putting on a metal gig again. This time the club stage went to local boys Embrace of the violent, with Vigilance from Postojna and Zagreb’s Eat your brains invited along as guests.
A little after eight in the evening, a black mass of longhairs was already jostling at the entrance. The vibe inside the hall was still a bit sluggish at that point, but it was early yet. The band members strolled around the club, nice and relaxed, and around half past nine the first group of young guys stepped onto the stage.
The metal night was kicked off by our neighborly brothers Eat your brains. The six-piece from Zagreb calls its own style »action metal«. They found their role models in heavy metal bands. With a few lineup changes they’ve been playing since 2008, so they’re not short on gig mileage. The hall started filling up at the first sounds of guitars, and Eat your brains confidently took over the stage. With a mix of songs ranging from ballads to rawer metal riffs, they quickly won over the Krško crowd. You can’t fault these guys for a thing. A flawless performance, plus a lively and just-weird-enough stage show with fun choreography and fashion bits, grabbed the attention of everyone below the stage. And there’s nothing to complain about on the music side either. Five instrumentalists on a small stage in a small club is a great promise of a full sound, provided they actually master their weapons. And these guys did. Marko Baketa and Eugen Makek on guitars took turns trading solos, with Jure Buljević on keys rounding it all out. Igor Vuk on bass and Renato Palatinuš on drums locked down the rhythm together, and the cherry on top was Marko Horvat-Hoky, whose rock-solid vocals tied the sonic harmony together and who held his notes impressively. The crowd was still a bit shy at the start and watched the action from a distance, but toward the end the mood came alive and the audience rewarded the show by joining in.
Eat your brains warmed up the hall nicely, and after a short break the four-piece Vigilance took the stage. Vigilance come from Postojna. This group of young guys decided to step into the music world as professionally as possible, with total commitment to everything, both the playing and the look on stage. In my opinion that’s definitely the right path for a young band. Sadly, somewhere along the way they lost the looseness on stage. The performance was delivered very professionally and very seriously, with none of that youthful immaturity, and every move felt precisely planned, which kind of killed the need for spontaneity up there. The guys handled the musical side with confidence. Even the biggest musical layman would have recognized the influence of early Maiden in every single track of their debut EP Steeds of time, released last fall. Jakob Rejec even outdoes Paul Di’Anno when it comes to vocal ability and know-how, and his voice is backed up successfully by the fast-burning guitar of Gilian Adam and the sounds coming from Jakob’s own fingers. A bit too loud for my taste, but the fast rhythms of drummer Tine Kaluža were complemented by bassist Anže Stegel. A nicely rounded performance from heavy metallers who will gain looseness on stage with experience, and so could become one of the leading heavy/speed metal bands on our scene.
An interesting but very successful tactical move by Nenad Čekrlić, the strategist of the MC Krško metal section, was to let the hometown boys Embrace of the violent onto the stage last, which of course meant the local supporters of the new band got to listen to the entire gig. Embrace of the violent were playing live for the very first time, and they brought a whole bunch of fans along. And those fans weren’t disappointed by what they saw and heard. Genre-wise, the night shifted from the heavy metal-leaning rhythms of the previous two bands into hard death metal. The stage debut did show a little, but the crowd carried the guys past the stage fright and straight into pure enjoyment. The band members soon forgot their initial nerves. It was a confident first gig for the group, with an interesting stage show that drew the crowd in too, and it kept even me, not exactly a fan of this kind of genre, in the hall for almost the entire set. After the last songs the crowd demanded an encore after the encore, and got it. With their performance Mitja Žalac, Adam Božilavić, Mitja Kač, Matija Kovačič and Grega Grajžl satisfied the ears of death metal fans, of whom there is no shortage in Posavje, judging by the nicely packed hall.
And so the 3-hour metal spectacle at MC Krško slowly drew to a close. A more than satisfying show from all three bands – it’ll be a real pleasure to catch them again at some gig in the future.
Setlist
EAT YOUR BRAINS:
1. Where the big boys play
2. Suicide run
3. Eat your brains
4. All is lost
5. Bram stroker’s fagula
6. Piranha sex
7. We are awesomw – you die
8. Whore of the orient
9. Chemical wedding
10. Rockin’ in the free world
11. Breaking the law
12. The trooper
VIGILANCE:
1. Intro (come to the sabbath)
2. Speedwave
3. Out of the sun
4.Night terrors
5. Steeds of time
6.Behind the cellar door
7. Come to the Sabbath
8. Vigilance
9. White Horde
10. Iron Beast
11.Tyrant
12. Ritual of Death
13. The Four Crowns of Hell
EMBRACE OF THE VIOLENT:
1. Insanity
2. Human Stupidity
3. Lying World
4. They
5. What is Real
6. Mind Reset
7. Phobia
8. I Prevail
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