Venue: Kino Šiška / Ljubljana
Concert date: 23.09.2009
Attendance: 400
Ticket price: €6
Last Thursday, the renovated Kino Šiška (or the center for urban culture, if you prefer) saw the first part of the YU GO! concert series sprout up. Its aim is to shine a light on the music happening across the former shared country. It’s an ambitious attempt to showcase the buzzing scene of the ex-Yugoslav musical kitchen. It confirmed the suspicion that things are properly happening further south, and that fresh musical forces are pushing out of the southeastern Balkans toward its “civilized European” corner. The first wave of the Balkan landing was run by Trbovlje bigwigs We Can’t Sleep At Night, Belgrade electro alternativos Petrol, and the always excellent Bosnian “chansonnier” Damir Avdić!
WE CAN’T SLEEP AT NIGHT
The first part of the YU GO! concert series was opened by Trbovlje’s We Can’t Sleep At Night, a youthful crew with an avant-garde musical message whose roots go back to 2004. We Can’t Sleep A Night don’t bother hiding their crush on the post-punk grit of the early 80s. Short, raw, stripped-down songs, which the trio lineup used to prep nicely for a bloody charge, are a slick transcription of post-punk’s basic rulebook, with delivery that rarely dips from high intensity. They do trade in nostalgia, sure, but that doesn’t mean the kids from Zasavje shy away from sniffing around beyond their home musical borders. The visibly pumped lads surprised us with a good dose of flexibility. Alongside the fairly predictable, infectious riff-turns of bass and guitar, it brought a few refreshing detours toward surf and pop. Still, there were too few such fresh touches to add real value to their set, which says a lot about We Can’t Sleep At Night being only somewhere in the middle of their early creative growth phase. Keep going boldly, guys.
PETROL
The Belgrade trio Petrol were billed as one of the highlights of Thursday night’s get-together at Kino Šiška. They’re standard-bearers of the so-called new Serbian scene, effectively juggling a wide palette of synthetic sound fillers, sharp guitar lines and booming vocal delivery. It sounds simple, and it is! Petrol are effortless, completely natural champions of the minimalist electro kitchen, and their priority is experimenting with sound and substance.
That Petrol like to drift toward popular culture was shown without shame by the cherry-picked selection of the band’s gems, which predictably leaned on the debut Nezgodno vreme opasni dani. The trio won over the Šiška crowd with a convincing serving of a simple electric pop formula, often danceable. Backed by plenty of electronic gadgets, from a bass synth to assorted sampler inserts, it kept building an exceptional atmosphere. It’s also worth pointing out that the minimalistically served synthetic play of black and white keys comes through all the more thanks to frontman Ilija’s guitar playing. The two elements are strongly contrasting, yet they complement each other brilliantly. The symbiosis forms the band’s vital sonic picture and feeds it with a tangible, organic quality that’s easy on the ears. Petrol don’t overcomplicate things, probably because they don’t know how to, but above all because complicating things just doesn’t interest them. Still, the band doesn’t shy away from improvising, meaning the spontaneous discovery of sonic detours toward abstraction. It’s precisely thanks to that that the Belgraders are easiest to place somewhere between the alternative and the popular. Harmlessly charming, yet different enough!
DAMIR AVDIĆ
As the evening’s main attraction steadily approached, one demanding, academic question kept pushing itself forward. How would Damir Avdić, the lanky shepherd boy from Tuzla, alone on stage, stripped bare in performance terms and armed with just a guitar, build on the mix of energy flows from his predecessors and, as befits a headliner, bring the night to its peak of energy and artistry? The answer lies in a fanatical (read: fantastic), downright psychopathic stage presence that sent around 300 unsuspecting heads down the road of brutal sobering up. Damir’s stage show is completely self-sufficient. Juicy phrasing, raw riff massacring and the resulting heartfelt communication with the crowd merge into an indescribable chaos of childishly simple emotions. It demands so much attention that any supporting cast would have been disruptive, if not outright blasphemous. When it comes to (forcibly) recruiting converts, Damir Avdić isn’t picky about his means. With a typically Balkan, chiseled vocabulary that doesn’t skimp on juicy criticism of the rottenness and depravity of social relations, and even less on juicy curses, Damir threatens and spits all over the place on stage. His provocative lyrics gladly serve up an unvarnished portrait of the ugliness of everyday life.
Doubts about whether Avdić could conjure the raw energy of the album Mrtvi su mrtvi (RockLine review here) on stage evaporated from the very first moment the ragged Bosnian grabbed his Gibson and, on the wings of a heartless verbal cannonade, went kamikaze into a world of madness. In fact, the finale of the first part of the YU GO! revelry gave it away: you’ll only experience Avdić in his most authentic form through direct contact on a concert stage. There, Damir’s uncontrolled facial expressions, together with a choreography that’s anything but everyday, put a final, unforeseen upgrade on the psychopathic ruckus you hear on the album! A one-of-a-kind, no comparison!
Photos: Mojca Perdih
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