Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Menza pri koritu, Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Concert date: December 13, 2008
Attendance: 200
Ticket price: €13 with reservation, €15 on the day of the show
This year’s fruitful concert season is slowly tipping toward its end, with only a few last gasps left. One of the final shows went down on Sunday, December 14, when Voodoo Glow Skulls played Menza pri koritu together with local heroes Pridigarji. Even though it was a Sunday and the gig wasn’t advertised much, a surprisingly big crowd showed up, skanking (late) into the night to ska core rhythms with intoxicating substances in hand. As usual, the show didn’t start at the announced time, since at half past nine there were precious few people in front of Menza. It was also a little odd that the soundcheck happened only a few minutes before the set kicked off.
Then it got real. Pridigarji up first to warm things up. In a good forty-five minutes, the eight-piece mostly played their own material, which didn’t win everyone over. But a handful of hotheads did gather right under the stage and danced for everybody else. The band, a fixture of the Slovenian music scene, led us through humor-fueled litanies from their entire discography in ska-punk-core rhythms. That catalog spans five studio albums and an EP, plus quite a few compilations born from collaborations with other (mostly Slovenian) bands. For their enviable anniversary, the guys also guested on one of the episodes of Izštekani with Jure Longyka on Radio Val 202 this summer. The radio appearance probably went better than the Menza gig. Toward the end of their set the crowd stirred just enough to earn one short encore. For one evening, songs full of goofing around were plenty.
So how did Voodoo Glow Skulls do? Despite big expectations after their excellent show last year, the giants of the American ska core scene were a bit of a letdown. Was it fatigue, since the guys had played the night before as the opener for Ska-P in Milan, or did they just not feel like going all out and delivering the show the way it’s supposed to be done, because they’d been crammed into a small, “trampled” Ljubljana club? Or maybe it was because Menza emptied by almost half in the blink of an eye once Pridigarji finished. It’s all just guesswork … Questions without answers.
The sextet, fronted by brothers Frank, Eddie and Jorge Casillas, played a set a little over an hour long, made up mostly of all the major Voodoo Glow Skulls hits, kicking off with “Southern California Street Music” from the album of the same name, released last September on Victory Records. Frank’s getup matched the song, too, as he charged onto the stage with a black leather mask on his head, which later ended up on the mic stand. All in the spirit of the line “Mask it up with your down home pride and cheesy loyalty“. The guys, who got noticed in 1991 when they brought a horn section (sax, trumpet and trombone) into the band, have stayed true to political and sociological lyrical themes over their twenty-year history, as in “Exorcism”, “Say Goodbye” and “Steady as She Goes”. Every now and then they spice it up with a bit of humor, which gives us “Charlie Brown”, “Fire in the Dancehall” and “Fat Randy”.
Voodoo Glow Skulls, a band that’s been stomping the earth for a good two decades, left a crowd hungry for a great show a little let down this year. What might confirm the speculation laid out a few lines above, we don’t know. What we do know is that the guys have to come back to our soil soon and fix that Sunday impression.
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