Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Aquarius club / Zagreb / Croatia
Show date: March 11, 2009
Attendance: 550
Ticket price: 170,00HRK
The Soulfly show, fronted by charismatic boss Max Cavalera (the unmistakable ex-Sepultura man), was first announced for Zagreb’s Tvornica but got moved to the Aquarius club, which, capacity-wise, is a less than ideal space, at least when it comes to metal gigs. Where to look for the reasons? Maybe the sky-high rent Tvornica’s owners demand? Given the perfectly respectable turnout of a good 500 people, it was a real shame this time that Soulfly didn’t at least play Boogaloo. But that’s how it goes…
| COLD SNAP: |
The Varaždin-based rowdies Cold Snap hit the stage at 8:30 p.m. and presented their take on metal as a noisy, groove-heavy wall of sound built on lower-tuned seven-string guitars, avalanche-like thrashy riffing and “screamo rapping” vocals. Into that sonic backdrop they wove a whole host of interesting effects, and the opening even went to some didgeridoo playing. By this point about 350 people had gathered in the club, mostly distant onlookers, but the band managed to get a few temperamental heads going in the front rows. The singer came across as a bit reserved, and his communication with the crowd didn’t go beyond a few repeated “Hvala ljudi!” The sound was way too loud. From the mic to the bass, everything was piercing, and if you stood in line with the main speakers, even several meters away, your ears literally started to hurt. The band played seven songs, including the fan favorite Insurrection. Considering Cold Snap have, among other things, a MetalCamp appearance from 2006 under their belt, I expected more looseness and liveliness onstage than we got. Maybe the small stage had something to do with it, and the sextet simply felt a little cramped.
| INCITE: |
Incite, from Phoenix (Arizona, USA), play metalcore that hardly needs a detailed introduction. It’s an aggressive mix of high-speed “thrashified” riff-spraying paired with the brutally screeching vocals of Richie Cavalera, the adopted son of Soulfly boss Max Cavalera. Incite also played no more than half an hour, and through songs like Divided We Fall, Army Of Darkness and especially the closing Die With What You’ve Done, with its classically built lead riff of a higher degree of melodicness (which isn’t exactly the band’s idea of what metal craft is about), they delivered a show charged with energy that sucked the crowd into a few intense mosh pits below the stage. The problem was the sound again: the riffing was pretty muffled, while the bass zealously and mercilessly tore at the speaker membranes. I should also mention that the Incite guys are at the same time the techs who handle Soulfly’s sound setup. During the break we could watch them first unload their own stage gear and then dive into prepping the ground for the Soulfly show.
| SOULFLY: |
The slight 10-minute delay, for a show announced for 10:30 p.m., already hinted that tonight’s get-together with Max Cavalera and his companions would be one of a kind. The band, who put out their sixth studio album “Conquer” last year, are on tour with Max Cavalera (vocals, four-string guitar), the excellent guitarist Marc Rizzo, who was also part of last year’s live lineup of Cavalera Conspiracy, bassist Bobby Burns and drummer Joe Nunez.
After a short intro, the Aquarius erupts as Max Cavalera appears onstage and the band launches into the first song off “Conquer”, called Blood Fire War Hate. Cavalera is an exceptional stage figure. He has incredible charisma and a straight-up, or rather direct, way of communicating onstage and with the crowd. And he didn’t hold back. This time in the truest sense of the words. At first everything went normally. Cavalera got the entire Aquarius on its feet in no time, and a good 500 people went nuts as one, squeezed into the small club space.. The set list was mostly made up of Soulfly songs. It’s nice that Cavalera has finally given Soulfly songs priority over Sepultura classics.
Max was extremely lively this time. Already during the second song he theatrically poured a plastic bottle of water straight over the photographers in the front row. With his trademark shaman-like gesticulations and eye contact, he held the crowd tightly in his grip. They sang the verses as one and unleashed a real delirious wave of aggression, caught up in true gig euphoria. People surrendered to ecstasy and everything felt like the genuine, authentic collision a metal show can conjure up. But… Somewhere around the 30-minute mark, fans in the front row somehow grabbed Max and started pulling him. I was about 20 meters away on the far left, because anywhere closer the wild crowd would have trampled me. Then I noticed Max abruptly hurl his guitar toward the floor, and in the next moment one of the fans climbed onto the stage. A security guard stepped in, but Max waved the guard off and let the fan share the stage with the band for a while, followed by the inevitable stage dive.
From there on, Max was no longer a “normal” performer. In a pause he addressed the crowd: “You are my fans. I watch your back, you watch my back! But don’t you ever touch my hair again!” He then snarled at some fan in the crowd, as well as the security guard, with “Get the fuck off!”, basically trying to send them away from the stage. The show turned into a real onstage mess, because in the next 20 minutes, which is all that was left until the show was finally cut off after a mere 50 minutes, Cavalera hurled everything he could from the stage into the crowd.
First he sulkily smashed the mic against the cymbals while a tech set up a new mic on the stand. That wasn’t enough to soothe his ego, and Max took off his fantastic Soulfly sweater and flung it into the crowd (lucky whoever got that precious gift). But that still wasn’t enough. After that you could watch the man theatrically smash the neck of his guitar against the stage monitors’ membranes, deliberately get in the way of Rizzo and Burns while they worked, and not bother with playing guitar or singing at all. Bobby Burns covered the vocals as much as he could, Max just occasionally let out a growl, and actually took the mic away from Burns, even preventing him from saving the songs that way. Then came the shirt coming off. And when he almost started unbuttoning his pants too, his adopted son Richie (the Incite singer) flew onto the stage and tried to calm him down, but Max slipped away and kept on having his fun. A few moments later someone in the crowd held a Croatian national football jersey, with the famous checkerboard, high in the air. Cavalera signaled from the stage for the fan to throw it up. When the jersey reached Max, he spread it out toward the crowd, and on it was Šuker’s number “9”, with the name Cavalera above it. This whole massacre went down during Frontlines, and when the song ended, Soulfly left the stage. In this part of the show Cavalera kept leaving the stage and coming back, his guitar served as nothing but a decorative accessory, and he never even “sniffed” it again.
Still, they come back out and play one more Sepultura classic, Roots Bloody Roots, where of course Max didn’t even open his mouth, and the crowd, heated to boiling point, did it all for him. He put the cherry on top by flinging his guitar into the crowd mid-song. At the same time a security guy leapt from the stage like a panther, but didn’t get far in the heap of people. I don’t know whether the lucky guy who caught the guitar managed to get this gorgeous gift out of there, or whether the Soulfly techs caught him later in the club and took Max’s checkered beauty off him. Max kept up the madness, grabbed the mic stand, smashed it against the stage floor with all his might and handed it to one of the fans who happened to be next to Max onstage at that moment. The guy did a stage dive during Eye For An Eye and then disappeared from the stage without a word of farewell. The remaining trio wandered around the stage confused without their boss and needed quite a few moments to take a bow together and say goodbye. It wasn’t long before the techs took over the stage, running around with their heads down and, visibly shocked, started carrying off the stage gear.
The crowd refused to budge from the stage and demanded Soulfly come back. That didn’t happen, even though people stubbornly stayed put below the stage and shouted: “Soulfly, Soulfly,…!” In the end this resulted in thunderous whistling, and from the crowd you could even hear someone yell: “Cavalera! Ne dolazi nam više ovamo!!!”
You really don’t know what to say about all this. You come to enjoy the energy of Soulfly’s one-of-a-kind music, and instead you get a thoroughly unprofessional kick in the teeth from the great Max Cavalera himself. Unacceptable behavior that could shake a person’s musical career. The whole thing was saved by the perfect guitarist Marc Rizzo, who by far showed the most stage commitment and action, and by Bobby Burns, who rescued with his vocals the songs Cavalera deliberately and demonstratively refused to sing.
Let me add that the Soulfly sound in the club during the show was catastrophic. That Rizzo’s guitar was totally “muffled”. One more thing. Cavalera must have “swallowed” some miraculous combination of “opiates and alcohol” before the show, because he wasn’t functioning “normally” in anything. Honestly, it’s not even worth rambling on any longer about these sorry feelings of great disappointment. Maybe just that the Soulfly show took place on March 11, 2009, in Zagreb, under a full moon, and that we sincerely hope Cavalera makes a decent amends to the Croatian audience for his great sin at the first opportunity. The crowd showed fanatical devotion to Soulfly during the show. With his senseless escalations onstage in Zagreb, Cavalera definitely didn’t deserve such a loyal and devoted Soulfly crowd, not even in his wildest dreams this time! So let’s forget about this show as soon as possible.
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Blood Fire War Hate 2. Sanctuary 3. Prophecy 4. Back to the Primitive 5. Enemy Ghost 6. Tribe 7. Umbabarauma 8. Mars 9. Guitar solo 10. Refuse / Resist 11. Propaganda 12. Frontlines —encore— 13. Roots Bloody Roots 14. Eye For An Eye
Photo Gallery
