Venue: Športna dvorana Postojna
Concert date: 24.12.2008
Attendance: 2000
Ticket price: 15 €
This year Postojna once again hosted the traditional Christmas rock fest, which for 15 years running has been dutifully taking care of burning off the excess calories of the Littoral region’s youth. The lineup of musical attractions was definitely more colorful than last year’s adventure. Besides Postojna old-timers Mary Rose, up-and-coming Metalsteel and their metalhead colleagues Divine Illusion, Santa spiced things up this time by sprinkling folk-rock perfume over the crowd with Lybra, and Ljubljana’s Anavrin added to the general genre variety. But just so there’s no mistake: the main attractions of the night were definitely the punk rock troublemakers Zablujena generacija and the local hard rock heavyweights Šank Rock. So, something for everyone! RockLine obviously couldn’t miss it!
Intro text: Daniel Pavlica
DIVINE ILLUSION
The 15th Christmas Festival in Postojna was kicked off by Littoral locals Divine Illusion, who served us an interesting mix of power metal and progressive metal. The epic sounds produced by the keyboards and guitar stood out especially. During the instrumental parts it looked like these guys have a lot of promise and could put out a decent epic metal album down the road, but unfortunately the vocals drag them down. If the other instruments were paired with a singer who sounded a bit more pleasant, this would be a very promising band. Even though the vocals were a slight distraction from otherwise good music, I was satisfied with their set (which also included a cover of Madonna’s La Isla Bonita) and I’m hoping for even bigger things from them in the future.
Text on Divine Illusion: Rok Podgrajšek
LYBRA
Next up were the lads and lasses of Lybra, who are fairly fresh faces on the scene, but definitely seem to have good commercial prospects. The first thing you notice about the band is the two good-looking young women (what can I say, testosterone does its thing) – one on vocals, the other on violin and backing vocals. And I think that was also Lybra’s main attraction, because they convinced me neither with their stage performance nor with their music. This is typical watered-down rock, the kind you hear from the likes of Tbilisi or I.C.E. The female vocals alone are pretty nondescript and awfully generic, and I can say the same for the music, where the only real surprise is the violin. I think Lybra could have made better use of the violin, as it is the violinist feels more like decoration than someone who actually contributes anything. But so I don’t just go on dishing out negativity again, let me mention that the lead guitarist threw in a couple of tasty solos that were slightly reminiscent of Hendrix. Lybra were pretty static on stage and played their songs well, but if original ideas are missing, a good performance doesn’t help much either. The fact is, though, that everyone in the band is still very young and there’s plenty of time for their music to develop. Maybe we’ll hear something better from them in the future, and if they stay in these waters, we can surely expect them to soon become one of the biggest attractions on both radio and TV.
Text on Lybra: Rok Podgrajšek
METALSTEEL
For me, the high point of the night (along with Mary Rose) was the heavy metallers Metalsteel from Medvode. They played tracks off the cuff from their already quite extensive repertoire. In many ways Metalsteel are a pretty typical heavy metal band with typical lyrics about sex and assorted horrific mishaps, but the guys know how to cash in on that and you kind of just trust them. They’ve got energy and exactly the kind of fast melodies that force you to move. Two guitars are up front, often playing the main melodies together in classic metal style, and Rok and Beny complement each other nicely when it comes to solos too. It’s also interesting that they have a female drummer, who lacks nothing in metal pedigree and was driving the rest of the guys along nicely. In the end it bugged me quite a bit to find out that the guys got a shorter set than the other bands, since Lybra played a little too long. That strikes me as a dumb move, because it was obvious that up to that point Metalsteel knew best how to pull the crowd along with them. I honestly couldn’t believe how many people knew this band. Plenty of them knew the lyrics by heart, and it was clearly more packed up front than for the first two bands. I think they’re currently one of the hottest metal bands in Slovenia, and I hope I’ll get to see them live again, with a somewhat longer setlist.
Text on Metalsteel: Rok Podgrajšek
ANAVRIN
The Ljubljana band Anavrin, who are getting ready to release their second studio album these days, are already regulars in Postojna. But it doesn’t happen all that often that the guys play with a depleted lineup. Bassist Anej Kočevar was playing that night with Gušti and Polona in Murska Sobota, so Anavrin did the show without a bass guitar. In a good thirty minutes, Damir, backed by his “fellow sufferers”, chirped his way through some of their best-known tracks, such as the slightly older “Slep”, “Kot 2 otroka”, “Pri filozofiji”, “Mesto spi”, and the slightly newer “Better U”, which is, by the way, the first single from the upcoming album, plus their latest self-titled “hit” “Gola”. The guys also launched that one into the “little” sea of music videos. As with all the bands so far, during Anavrin’s set the front row was packed with members of the fairer sex, who sang along, cried, laughed and swooned over the handsome young men. Here and there a male head peeked out of the cluster of girls too, but there were incomparably fewer of those. After their recent successful concert at Orto bar in Ljubljana, the guys unfortunately didn’t reap as much enthusiasm in Postojna as they deserved. Could their somewhat rattled lineup be to blame?
Text on Anavrin: Lea Lesar
MARY ROSE
The Mary Rose story is an old one, quite possibly even too lemonade-sweet for the quality of a band that has been making us wait shamelessly long for a new album. It’s been two years since Feniksovega vstajenja (RockLine review here), and since then our Postojna friends have been pretty sparing with their energy. Which is a shame. They’re rarely caught in action, and even then they mostly camp out somewhere in the immediate vicinity of Postojna. Anyway, when they do play, especially on home turf, Mary Rose leave nothing to chance. As befits kings! Even if only for one night.
The show Mary Rose served us on Thursday night did, however, hint at certain shifts toward the band’s further creative development. What’s especially nice is that, by swearing by tightness, Mary Rose skillfully avoid too much muscle-flexing, that is, showing off with various solo intermezzos, whose educational approach, aside from stroking the souls of a handful of music gourmets, always falls on deaf ears with the masses. The appetite of that very crowd was surely what Vikingi was aimed at. It’s a new song that recently reigned as the hit of the week on the airwaves of “our national pride”. Vikingi is catchy, but compared to the deadly arsenal packed onto the Phoenix’s wings, it’s not scary in the slightest, more predictable. The rest of Mary Rose’s repertoire was known in advance. Ironworks like Strah pred užitkom, Sam, and Izgubljen v času are still gems that make you feel the real rock & roll pulse in your blood. It’s just a pity about the admittedly solidly put-together medley with Sad But True, Enter Sandman and Black Sabbath, which, as expected, resulted in the humming of evergreen “engines”. Without that medley, Mary Rose would surely have left a better impression.
Everything with Mary Rose seems so polished, often seemingly played with barely half of the available power, that at times you’d wholeheartedly wish for some big screw-up with which the guys would show they aren’t a spotless, immaculately conceived rock & roll machine after all. But no luck! Eki and company, as expected, blew all the competition out of the Postojna ring, this time, to the great delight of all the sober-minded, also thanks to the duo of Sandi Trojner and David Debevc, who have settled well into the gears of one of the most attractive rock bands in Slovenia. Trojner may not have the classic flashes of inspiration and the magic of his predecessor Davor Kastelec (I do believe that amid the rattling of the band’s full-battle-ready iron material he’s simply not allowed to breathe more concretely), but his contribution was definitely a welcome upgrade to the Mary Rose sound, which live is now tighter and rawer than ever before.
Text on Mary Rose: Daniel Pavlica
ZABLUJENA GENERACIJA
Zablujena generacija were the only real punk Santas of the night. With white beards and red hats (all except Hanson, who had to give up his hat because of his hairstyle) they cut into the night with “Pobegli vlak”, which practically begged you to start dancing. Everybody was moving: old, young, sober and a little less so, single, in love … It seemed like nothing could stop them. And the Zablujenci proved it from song to song. In a set a little under an hour long they “strolled” through their entire discography, which consists of six studio albums and an enviable number of hits, among them “Pozitiv vabrejšan”, “Extrasupermegafakinnujno”, “Patricija” and “Mokre sanje”. They didn’t forget the cover of šank rock’s “Metulj”, during which we had a power outage, or the Eurovision song that never was, “Kdo hoče plesati z menoj”. Both tracks are on the album “Mi smo stare pizde”, released in January, which the media declared the best rock album of the year. The record rightfully earned that title, since it’s one of the best albums released this year on the Slovenian music scene. An enviable success, for sure.
Text on Zablujena generacija: Lea Lesar
ŠANK ROCK
One more hop over to our main hard rock invaders from Velenje, who today are anything but. Of course, we’re talking about Šank Rock, legends of the Slovenian rock grind, who wrapped up this year’s Christmas bash in Postojna in a dignified way and in line with expectations (out of respect, of course, and polite deference to the pulse of public opinion). Šank Rock are rehearsed down to the smallest detail. 25 years of wearing down concert stages naturally takes its toll, and the fact that the backbone of the band has sat comfortably in its original position practically the whole time surely adds an extra helping of polish to the whole thing. That surely gives the Velenje crew more cohesion, and with it more recognizability and character, which shows most of all at their live shows. Despite this harsh professorial assessment, it seemed the gentlemen took the Postojna show pretty lightly, at least judging by the number of disharmonic screw-ups, whose presence was above all the result of sloppiness, maybe at times even apathy. Despite these shortcomings, Šank Rock got through the show correctly, that is, without overexerting themselves, with a heaping dose of routine, wrapped in a reserve that offered no peaks. Which in its own way isn’t even surprising. The arsenal of ironworks at Šank Rock is so impressive that the guys don’t need to step on the gas too hard to raise the temperature. There were favorites aplenty, from the fairly predictable but very welcome opening with Jaz nimam noč za spanje and the rather cautiously sawed-off Rokerji, through gems from the current album, which serve their purpose excellently live, all the way to the folksy nonsense like Dej bolj naglas radio, Delam kar paše mi and Hočeš nočeš, with which the band’s commercial potential gets exploited on an already absurd scale. And if trampoline jumping at a Šank Rock show counts as something perfectly ordinary these days, then I really don’t know what I’d have thought if someone had told me 15-plus years ago that I’d one day see Matjaž Jelen as a rapper! The crew saved their adventure without competition for the very end, when, already thoroughly worn out from being assaulted with third-rate crossbreeds of pop and rock, we were additionally forced to bite into a soulless, stiffened bundle of rock evergreens, during which Mercury would most likely have sprung from his grave with a bayonet between his teeth and a slightly bloodied mace in his hand, and Eddie Van Halen would have put a bullet in his head without a second thought. Sadly, covers of dubious quality are still considered normal for garage bands, but with legends of the Šank Rock caliber, this kind of behavior is truly regrettable!
Text on Šank Rock: Daniel Pavlica
Photos: Mojca Perdih
Photo Gallery
