Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Venue: Orto bar, Ljubljana
Concert date: 23.11.2017
The circus is in town! That’s how you could have advertised the gig that went down last Thursday on the upper floor of Orto bar. After a few years away, Norwegian avant-garde eccentrics Vulture Industries came back to Ljubljana, this time climbing down from their Tower onto the bitter ground of Stranger Times. Three years ago at Metaldays they wowed a nicely packed second-stage crowd with their bizarre Turning Golem project. This time around, with Stranger Times, in a roughly half-full Orto, they came across as a bit less theatrical, but still totally in their own style.
Warming things up were Ljubljana progressive death metallers Morost, who are back on stage after a few months in hiding. And it was great to hear them again! Morost may be a pretty poor genre match for Vulture Industries, but it wasn’t hard to spot parallels in certain off-kilter guitar lines, spiced up much more extremely in Morost’s case, of course. The band greeted Orto with a new, ultra-long, epic-sounding song, which suggests the girl and the guys are leaning even harder into the word “progressive” with their newer material. Broken rhythms, melodic passages and unexpected twists and turns are what Morost do best, and tracks from the debut Solace in Solitude, like Mitos and Human Debris, were a reminder of that too. The new drummer, who pounded the skins without mercy, was convincing, as was the guitar duo once again and Jonas’s raw vocals. The keyboards, which were markedly hard to hear again, less so. Still, it was another in a long line of consistently good Morost gigs. Now it’s really time for that new album!
Vulture Industries, who come from the cradle of Norwegian black metal, the country’s second-largest city, Bergen, are old friends of Slovenian stages, since they’ve been gracing us with visits more or less regularly for the last few years. In that time they’ve built a small but loyal fanbase, which welcomed the Norwegians with long-awaited, loud enthusiasm. When vocalist Bjørnar Nilsen joined the barefoot guitar trio on stage, they greeted the Ljubljana crowd with Tales of Woe, the opener of the new album, and made it clear right away that Stranger Times is one strange beast. Even less »metal« than The Tower, but it’s precisely this »non-metalness« that makes it stand out from the crowd like a tightrope-walking rhinoceros, and the Vulture Industries live experience really does stand out. Mostly thanks to the charismatic Bjørnar, who is without a doubt one of the wildest frontmen in the business. Once again he delivered the psychotic staring at the audience, the nonstop dance moves of an epileptic patient, and, during the closing Blood Don’t Eliogabalus, his obligatory and very typical breaking of the fourth wall, jumping off the stage and plastering himself right up in the faces of a few randomly chosen punters. The guitar duo seemed even better than usual to me this time, really coming into their own thanks to the excellent sound, and the only small letdown was that the Norwegians focused exclusively on the last two albums and completely forgot about the first two. That was easier to get over thanks to the top-notch delivery of the new songs, which work great live (with the possible exception of the morbid, suffocating My Body, My Blood), and the unforgettable The Tower, The Pulse of Bliss, the epic The Hound (renamed The Skunk this time in honor of the organizers) and the energetic bomb Blood on the Trail, a gem from the previous album that had been forgotten until this tour. So another excellent gig from the Norwegian oddballs ended far too quickly, but these strange times were truly wonderful.
Setlist
VULTURE INDUSTRIES:
1. Tales of Woe
2. Strangers
3. The Pulse of Bliss
4. Blood on the Trail
5. My Body, My Blood
6. The Hound
7. As the World Burns
8. Something Vile
9. Lost Among Liars
10. The Tower
11. Blood Don’t Eliogabalus
Photo gallery
