Author: Rok Klemše
Location: Orto bar, Ljubljana
Concert date: 02.09.2010
Attendance: 120
Ticket price: 8€
Summer is over, sadly, and the summer festivals with it. But along with the rain, the gloomy weather and the cold, autumn thankfully also brings the start of the club gig season. So Orto bar, which has been one of Ljubljana’s central venues for years, opened its doors again with September. With its varied lineup, and despite somewhat higher prices, it remains a refuge and a temple for alternative-minded music people. The dirty skunks kicked off the season in style with the best modern thrash metal band around, Warbringer, and fellow Americans Skeletonwitch, and so the Orto stage wouldn’t sit empty for too long, Dweal, the alternative rock/metal outfit Last Day Here and Finland’s Before the Dawn stepped up.
The first Friday of September drew a nice crowd to Orto bar, already warmed up upstairs by Dweal’s rundown of their still-current debut Fate By Coincidence, and Last Day Here were next on stage. The guys keep coming back to the scene of the crime since their first Orto show a good two years ago, which was also their debut in the capital, and this time they stomped into Orto bar for the fourth time. It’s been three years since the release of their debut From Pieces Created, and the guys know it well. Despite a nice stack of positive reviews from both local and foreign media, and a bunch of gigs abroad lately, mostly in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, they aren’t resting on their laurels and have shaken up the setlist thoroughly with new songs, of which there are already enough for a new record, and maybe a few more. With their tight playing and lively stage presence, Last Day Here got the nicely packed room in front of the stage on its feet, singing along with vocalist Marko, mostly to songs from the album, which have already dug in firmly with the fans. The extremely catchy choruses easily draw voices out of the crowd, which Marko encourages and fires up generously, even if he’s still a bit awkward with the banter between songs. But he makes up for it all with excellent singing that doesn’t lag behind the studio recordings at all. With a lovely, warm tone and tremendous commitment to the lyrics, he proves he’s one of the better vocalists on the home turf. And it’s still sometimes hard to imagine that a guy with such polished clean vocals could once growl so properly and inhumanly in Supremacy. The instrumental foursome, meanwhile, keeps everything running like clockwork: the strings of the seven-string guitars bend under the fingers of Uroš and Jure just the way they should, while the rhythm section holds it all together with lively bass lines and simple but effective, well-thought-out drum fills. For the band, playing the new songs probably meant feeling their way in the dark to a large extent, but from what we heard, it’s great to see that they represent a considerable step forward for Last Day Here. The trademark catchiness and melodic feel remain the guys’ priority, but the songs are in many ways far more polished, the melodies in particular hit even harder, and it’s really nice to hear a few deft solos that only enrich the songs further. Last Day Here confirmed once more at Orto that they’re in great live shape, and it’s already time for a new record, one with which they’ll have to prove they can reach their current success and, even more importantly, surpass it.
Friday night was closed out by Finland’s Before the Dawn, who pleasantly surprised the crowd with a quality blend of melodic death metal and gothic metal. The band is a complete unknown around here, and while the crowd had thinned out a bit after Last Day Here left the stage, they got it up to a proper working temperature. Before the Dawn stopped at Orto on the Decade of Darkness tour, marking their tenth anniversary, which they also sealed with the recently released EP of the same name. The lion’s share of the set came from it, presenting the vision of founder and band leader Tuomas Saukkonen: a mix of raw, aggressive but above all melodic death metal and softer, slower, melancholic parts. In places, Before the Dawn remind you of their fellow Finns Amorphis. Tuomas, as band leader, took the center spot and the growl vocals, which were raw but still understandable enough, while bassist Lars Eikind (formerly of the Norwegian black metallers Khold and the prog band Winds) took care of the deep, melancholic vocals and of tying the set together. Drummer Atte Palokangas proved excellent, showing off a varied range of fills, good ideas and effective use of the cymbals, though he could tone down the constant posing with the stick twirling a bit. Before the Dawn were a nice surprise to close out Friday’s show. Their blend of melodic and melancholic metal is interesting and exciting in places, but overall it’s nothing particularly unique, and nothing you haven’t heard elsewhere many times before.
Photos: Nina Grad
Setlist
BEFORE THE DAWN:
1. Disappear
2. My Darkness
3. Faithless
4. Alone
5. End of Days
6. Away
7. Monsters
8. Morning Sun
9. Dying Sun
10. Painless
11. Wrath
12. The Black
13. Deadsong
14. Unbreakable
15. Scar
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