Location: Ljubljana / SOHO klub / Slovenia
Date: Thursday, 25.04.2019
Šinobusi are a rock band from Novi Sad who hit Slovenian club stages every year. The band formed in 2001, and in not quite two decades it has put out five albums, the latest and still current one being “Ljubav i dalje diše” (roughly: Love Still Breathes) from March 2017. Not long ago our Seba caught a gig by their fellow Vojvodinians Pero Defformero at Trainstation Squat in Kranj, where he didn’t hold back on the superlatives in his concert review. Why? Because Novi Sad is a hatchery of outstanding musicians. Get there, settle into some night spot, meet a bunch of new faces who call this Serbian city home, and it quickly becomes clear that pretty much every one of them plays an instrument. Almost all of them are musicians. And what musicians. RockLine got a taste of that too, especially in 2014 and 2015, when it caught a string of Šinobusi shows. One of them was even in the Vojvodina town of Bački Petrovac near Novi Sad. Every April the band does a short Slovenian tour, and four years flew by in a flash before we at RockLine found the right date again to catch one of their gigs.
Šinobusi have played in an unchanged lineup since 2012: Milan Korać (vocals, guitar), Nenad Patković (guitar, vocals, backing vocals), Stefan Stefanović »Gile« (harmonica, tambourine), Predrag Dmitrović (bass) and Đorđe Bubnjević (drums).
Soho klub, aka the former Guliver, where Šinobusi already played last April, drew a nice crowd, though it could easily have been a lot bigger. A Šinobusi show would especially have done some members of other Slovenian bands a world of good, the ones who blend the genres of old-school seventies rock, held up by a solid blues backbone, even prog rock and jazz. If only for the “networking” and swapping of experiences, if not for the fact that turning up at gigs like this sets a shining example of how to support the local club scene, something the Slovenian music public, forever stiff and reserved toward musical novelties and “exotica”, could do with learning.
The band “killed it” again. In a concert of more than two hours, Šinobusi played almost 30 songs, mostly originals pulled from all five albums, plus covers and crowd-firing moments like, among others, Taxman (The Beatles), where Nenad took over the vocals and tacked on a very neat copy of the original’s (psychedelic) guitar solo at the end, then Brown Sugar (The Rolling Stones), Robert Johnson’s If I Had Possesion Over Judgement Day, Diggin’ A Hole (Big Sugar) and Whipping Post (The Allman Brothers Band). Toward the end, their loyal friend Slaven Kalebič (Mojo Hand) joined the band on stage again, and with juicy guitar licks in duels with Nenad, deep in proper blues territory, he proved once more that he’s been badly missed on stage in recent years.
A unique and instantly recognizable musical stance with a chiseled art profile, a one-of-a-kind conglomerate fermented from the retro sonic influences of pioneering rock and blues bands from the late sixties and early seventies, keeps Šinobusi in the league of the finest and most prominent groups in the so-called geographical “basin” between the Alps and the Black Sea, a band that has driven its musical life’s work to perfection in sound, style, performance and composition alike.
The band remains brilliant, flat-out superb in everything they take on up on stage. You couldn’t expect anything less. Outstanding chemistry, polished execution, a real feel for one another, and a heap of cheekiness and lovable tricks to keep the crowd glued to them. The infectious Milan Korać on vocals and guitar, the subtle Nenad on guitar, who interestingly isn’t using keyboards on this tour even though he plays them on the albums. Gile kept the adrenaline and the wildness up the whole time with fiery escapades on harmonica, and our Miha Erič (Prismojeni profesorji bluesa) really ought to meet him, if the two of them haven’t crossed paths already, that is. And as always: an incredibly well-organized, alert and sharp-eyed rhythm section that gives the musical landscape its warmth and a fiery, contrasting breadth.
The band likes to open its shows with Moje ruke sad su ptice, which right off the bat points to Milan Korać’s outstanding poetic talent, and it was followed by Mirna Bačka, Potera, Bio sam tu, Kada svrake bulje u mene, Raskršče, Skačem visoko, Naš dan, Ja moram da te vidim što pre, Iz drugog ugla, Čamac na Tisi, Ravnodušna pesma, the instrumental Prašina,… From the new album “Ljubav i dalje diše” we heard Preko polja, pa u brda, which Šinobusi already performed at their 2015 shows, and then U nevreme, Ćudno voće, the instrumental HOP, Ljubav i dalje diše and Boka.
Šinobusi remain a band that stuns with perfection and magic. Their music is still a kind of symbiosis of infectious musicality and sparkling jam. They’re remarkable wizards who suddenly hit you with rocky, piercing phrasing, or morph into incredibly sensual creators of subtle sonic shimmers. All of it is driven by an unbelievably supple, witty and brilliantly tight crew, where emotion and passion do the heavy lifting, casting a spell on the listener and taking them on an adventure of wildly successful revival of the good old era of rock and blues pioneering. A band you can never get enough of seeing or listening to, let alone get tired of. Hanging out at Soho klub with another outstanding Šinobusi performance was far, far too short.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
