Author: Primož Novak
Video: Primož Novak
Location: Channel Zero / Ljubljana/ Slovenia
Concert date: 14.05.2014
Ticket price: 8€/12€
Metelkova never sleeps, that’s for sure. That goes for the club Channel Zero too, which lately has been filling its hall more with events like Dublab and Everything Goes, while metal gigs haven’t exactly been drawing crowds. It was a similar picture at this show with Serbia’s Infest and Slovenia’s Eruption and Paragoria. Luckily, a thin crowd doesn’t mean a bad gig. Quite the opposite, actually.
First up on stage were Paragoria from the Savinja region, who have been gigging actively over the past couple of months, so they’ve been pretty hard to miss. Before this they played to a bigger crowd as the support act for Amon Amarth at Kino Šiška, but this time the vibe was a more intimate one again in the small club of Channel Zero. Paragoria naturally served up tracks from their current album Decomposition of Mind, and the crowd could get excited about an original mix of death, thrash and groove metal, full of interesting twists. The performance itself was solid, though the guys are capable of playing better, and the sound guy probably had a hand in that too. The sound itself wasn’t exactly praiseworthy either, but Paragoria still pulled their set through to the end.
If Paragoria served up a more modern version of metal, Eruption took the crowd back to the eighties, when the best thrash metal albums were coming out. The band quickly proved they’ve got plenty of miles on the clock, and the stage performance deserves praise too, including the guitarists’ posing, which was downright comical at times. The sound was on a similar level to the opening band, and that’s probably also why their drummer Ivan allowed himself a few mistakes. But as a whole the band comes across as convincing and, despite how chewed-over the genre is, gives thrash metal itself plenty of hope.
If Paragoria presented themselves as a death metal band and Eruption as thrash metal, the final act, Infest, were a kind of combination of both metal genres. The quartet from Serbia, who already have 4 albums under their belt, presented this year’s release, ‘Cold Blood War’. Infest simply don’t give a damn about modern trends in metal. There was no polish here in the form of melodic touches. With their short, uncompromising songs, Infest were reminiscent of Sepultura’s early work and some of Vader’s more thrash-flavored tracks. Despite the fact that Infest were all about raw »punch«, the whole thing felt like it was made to one and the same mold. The songs unfortunately didn’t surprise with any special twist. Infest are definitely an intense band, but they lack dynamics.
Sadly, Channel Zero saw yet another poorly attended show, one that, given the quality on offer from the bands, deserved a much bigger crowd.
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