Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Klubar / Kranj / Slovenia
Concert date: 25.12.2008
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: 2.5€
Honestly, the Christmas holidays can be awfully pointless. You’re forced to sit at home without work for a few days. Then you get lazy and can’t even be bothered to pick up the newspaper from in front of the door. Still, I headed out in the evening. I was curious what the band Mit gets up to when it isn’t Mit.
Mit guitarist Matevž and singer Uroš have found their groove nicely. By playing bars and covering songs the people love, they innocently pull in an extra coin or two and don’t have to grumble about the miserable Slovenian standard of living, which will be trailing behind European standards for a long, long time (in the eyes of a naive honest guy, anyway – hats off to those of you who can steal). Anyway, the former “Manjana”, today’s Klubar in Kranj, is putting on an organized social evening that offered some fun for young people in an otherwise completely dead Kranj. A few leather-and-iron warriors, nuts about heavy metal sounds, were still holding out in the famous hole that is “Downtown”, which only a day earlier (Christmas Eve) was almost bursting at the seams from the crowds. And that was about all that was interesting in Kranj, apart from the panoramic view of a replica of devastated Vukovar that opens up before visitors on the way to Kranj’s McDonald’s.
So when Mit aren’t Mit, they shift into a duo and entertain people with two folk guitars. Uroš proved himself an excellent vocalist back when I first caught Mit live, and his low-to-mid-range, warm (even soulful) voice is a great lure for the ears when it’s showcased over acoustic, naturally colored sounds.
Matevž and Uroš entertained the crowd in three separate sets, and the last one was the most intense, with the crowd totally letting go and eating out of their hands. Toward the end the evening got an extra kick from their Mit buddy Buco (what would we do without him), who demanded the whole stage for himself, and from the barmaid Špela, who sat down on a bar stool next to him while Buco, with the help of Uroš’s guitar, played an acoustic version of the song Prazna cesta, which you all probably know from the (accidental or deliberate) airplay and video rotation of the Lady’s First original.
Uroš and Matevž are a well-matched pair, they fit together like a key and a lock, and they’ve been playing together for years. They treated the crowd to a nice bundle of well-known foreign rock hits, as well as covers of Slovenian mainstream rock bands Siddharta, Big Foot Mama and Dan D, without which the crowd would surely have lynched them. They spiced it all up with songs by Slovenian singer-songwriters that have become folk staples (Šifrer, Kreslin) and a few southern drinking anthems, a necessary evil of the eternal onslaught of South Balkan influences. No glasses were broken. The club’s management even provided plastic mugs to pour the beer into, which I’d never seen before. Toward the end the guys made a few endearing mistakes, which were perfectly understandable given the growing interference from the audience, who kept pestering them with requests.
A case of combining fun and useful work, the two going hand in hand as an extra relaxation valve and tossing a few more coins into the wallet. The main thing about this weekend unplugging, though, was laughter and positive vibes.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
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