For those of us who just don’t enjoy getting force-fed Christmas hits, a concert by Canadian veterans Voivod and American monsters GWAR was the perfect antidote for the pre-holiday season. Especially the latter, who deliver a heap of tasteless jokes and coarse humor on stage, a show in enormous space-monster costumes, and a proper theater of blood and guts.
Before the main acts came the inevitable necessary evil in the form of Spanish support act Childrain, who were completely at odds with both headliners in terms of genre and theme. The Basque five-piece, unfortunate name and all, took the stage in front of an almost empty hall, though a few extra heads did trickle in as their set went on. Childrain play a blend of melodic death metal and metalcore, and in the spirit of going in blind I hadn’t checked out their recordings beforehand. Not that it would have changed anything; Childrain delivered an at-best average take on the genre that didn’t deviate from their obvious influences in any meaningful way, and on top of that every track sounded more or less identical to the last. The performance itself was hard to fault — the Basques were powerfully energetic and assured on stage, with vocalist Iñi Childrain putting in the most work on crowd engagement — but it stopped there. Based on what you’d see on stage you’d guess they were a new band still finding their feet, yet Childrain have been around since 2007 and have four studio albums to their name, which says quite a lot.
Fortunately, Canadian oddballs Voivod fixed that in an instant, gracing the Slovenian stage with their omnipresence for the second time. The veterans of progressive/sci-fi/oddball thrash metal released their fourteenth studio album The Wake last year, for which they were awarded the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy — the Juno Award — and deservedly so, as it’s one of the best things they’ve put out in their long career. It’s great to see a band as obscure yet genuinely quality as Voivod finally getting a bit more recognition; they’ve been enjoying a well-deserved renaissance since the untimely death of their driving force, guitarist Denis “Piggy” D’Amour. Voivod greeted Ljubljana with the title track from the Post Society EP (released three years prior) and, to my surprise, blasted a nicely packed hall (we’re talking about a band whose music is probably a bit much for the casual listener) into a galactic cloud of punk simplicity, Motörhead-esque rhythms, thrash rawness, prog rock weirdness, and a heaped spoonful of psychedelia. Despite what looks like a schizophrenic mix on paper, Voivod operates as one cohesive stellar entity, impressing with an excellent selection of classics like Psychic Vacuum and Overreaction, and even Fix My Heart, the gem from The Outer Limits.
Voivod operated throughout like a well-oiled silver machine, with guitarist Chewy and bassist Rocky visibly buzzing with energy and in great spirits from a distance — the stage was full of them (and their flowing manes) the entire time. Drummer Away battered away at his minimalist drum kit like he was in a world of his own, but once again impressed with how much he can squeeze out of such a small setup. All eyes, however, were on charismatic vocalist Away, who worked the stage again like a mischievous, naughty kid, cracking people up with a constant stream of grimaces and dance moves that looked less like dancing and more like a drunk T-rex on the loose. Snake also convinced with his well-preserved vocals, which might sound at first like atonal drunk-howling at the moon, but are anything but. Snake teased the crowd — somewhat cheekily — by mentioning that the cult album Nothingface was celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, giving everyone the impression they’d play more than just one song from it; but the superb The Unknown Knows was more than enough to soothe the wound. With a discography as rich as theirs, Voivod could play for hours and still never satisfy every fan’s wishlist, so the closing with the anthemic Voivod came way too soon.
Voivod setlist: Post Society, Psychic Vacuum, Obsolete Beings, Overreaction, Orb Confusion, Fix My Heart, The End of Dormancy, The Unknown Knows, Fall, Voivod
Before the evening’s headliners, American galactic pirates GWAR, could take the stage, an extended stage setup was required. The Americans don’t just perform in enormous, elaborate space-monster costumes — they drag a whole heap of props and other characters from their universe out onto the stage during the show. And they spray. A lot. From bodily orifices. Many bodily orifices. As we’ve written before: cult American HC/punk/metal act Gwar was rocking monster costumes long before Finland’s Lordi brought them to Eurovision. The grotesque costumes worn by the band members represent barbaric interstellar warriors — space pirates of sorts — and their mythology has been weaving and unraveling all the way from their debut studio album Hell-o! (1988) to their current album The Blood of Gods (2017). The costumes were originally intended as a joke — Dave Brockie knew someone who made them for films — but the idea got such a great response that Gwar have remained space pirates to this day. In 2014, founding member Dave Brockie (Oderus Urungus in Gwar) sadly died of a heroin overdose, and since then Gwar have carried on without any of their original members.
And so, in their enormous costumes, Berserker Blothar, BalSac the Jaws of Death, Jizmak Da Gusha, Beefcake the Mighty and Pustulus Maximus marched out onto the stage and greeted Šiška with The Salaminizer, before properly kicking off the unhinged show with Krak Down. Just before that, a space cop had flown in whose mission was to arrest GWAR for intergalactic crimes. That, of course, didn’t go as planned — blood sprayed for the first (and far from last) time that evening, and the cop was skewered on a spike through, shall we say, not the most comfortable entry point. Although Blothar was mostly at the mic (and manning the spray action from his nether regions), he did hand the spotlight to his bandmates on a few occasions. Bonesnapper — you won’t believe it — sang his crossover anthem I, Bonesnapper himself, and GWAR’s arch-nemesis Sawborg Destructo also made an appearance on stage. He threatened the audience that they’d have to file their tax returns with him, and towards the end of his number, proved in a thoroughly tasteless way that he and Blothar still have a bit too much love for each other.
The area directly in front of the stage was mostly pretty empty due to the constant showering of fake blood and other liquids, which made an already sadly under-attended show (there were actually fewer people for GWAR than for Voivod) look even emptier. But GWAR weren’t about to let that faze them, stringing one piece of mayhem after the next. Among the infectious tracks — catchy as hell, though hand on heart not exactly the pinnacle of musical art (it’s solid enough heavy/thrash metal) — they crammed in a heap of tasteless nastiness. Starting with the birth of Blothar’s illegitimate child, accompanied by hectoliters of fake blood, through to the abuse of a space creature-dog and pedophilia. But it’s all fine, because the child puppets were dead, so technically it was just necrophilia. Through well-received tracks Bring Back the Bomb, the already-mentioned I, Bonesnapper, Metal Metal Land and Fuck This Place, GWAR reached their finale after a good hour of risqué entertainment with the send-off Sick of You. Though not before a life-size Donald Trump puppet got what was coming to it — which, of course, always brings crowd approval. The only downside of the night (ok, besides Childrain)? The merch stand, stripped bare by the end of the tour after previously being well stocked.
GWAR setlist: The Salaminizer, Krak Down, I’ll Be Your Monster, Bring Back the Bomb, Black and Huge, I, Bonesnapper, Maggots, Have You Seen Me?, Metal Metal Land, Ham on the Bone, The Sordid Soliloquy of Sawborg Destructo, Beat You to Death, Fuck This Place, GWAR Theme, Sick of You
Photos: Nina Grad
