Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Channel Zero (Metelkova) / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 30.11.2006
Attendance: 50
Moonlight Sky. Why was this the first time I’d ever seen them live? Hell knows?!! And yet, let me tell you something. When I first spun their debut, which came out on the day of this gig and which the gig was dedicated to – the official album-release party and music promo – I was floored by how enormously all the songs had grown in the two years since the Demo (2004). In quality, of course! And in simplicity. I just had to be there that night.
GENERAL MUSASHI: 21.45 – 22.15
The evening was opened by some up-and-coming fans of power blues rock, nicely spiced with boogie. A four-piece with a supremely witty name. You’d think you’d be watching a samurai showdown on stage, a feast with rice liquor and so on… but no, hehe, heh… a budding geisha…
The time-limited lads warmed up the admittedly small crowd enviably well, and the crowd sure didn’t sit on their hands or go easy on their own boozing and drinking. The guitar flirts diligently with Jimmy Page here and there and often leads the band into a seductive “boogie drive”. This kids can play! Definitely. Of course the guys lack experience when it comes to stage presence, so at first they need to build more on self-confidence. The drummer, guitarist and bassist dropped into impressive short “jams” a few times, even flirted with traditional “seventies funky” lines, and at one point, when it was “only instrumental bangs”, the vocalist didn’t know exactly what to do with himself on stage. Maybe next time a tambourine or a triangle wouldn’t go to waste in his hands, if even Deep Purple were better off in their golden years and sent Gillan off to the congas in moments like that. The guys can play, but sadly they don’t offer anything all that distinctive or thrilling. On top of that, they urgently need to work on their look. A plain T-shirt and jeans just won’t cut it. Guys, you need some “glamour” and some offbeat flair so the women stick to you. Must!!! The vocal is appealingly dirty, as befits a rough-and-tumble bunch like this, and listening to the vocals you can almost “smell the whiff of alcohol fumes”, if you know what I’m getting at? Target audience? All the “down-and-dirty dogs” and “bikers”! General Musashi are something for you. Party rock’n’roll scumbags. All that’s left is to build the proper “bastard image”, and they’re set.
MOONLIGHT SKY: 22.35 – 00.07
By Slovenian standards, an extremely attractive band and a real asset. The creation of four brave musketeers, they’re an exceptional presence on our music scene, in their own way. Sadly, far too few Slovenes realize it. What Moonlight Sky play would be snapped up with bare hands in a heartbeat by, say, Scandinavians, Germans, and also the hot-blooded people of the Romance-speaking countries.
To top it off, let’s go hunting for possible parallels. Does anyone still remember the band HELP? A band that was never destined to exist. And where does the name come from? Add Hendrix to ELP and you get HELP. Why Hendrix, exactly? If Hendrix had survived until HELP was formed, maybe Moonlight Sky would be the “Slovenian HELP”. Ask Miha Petric. And yet the guy is developing his own identity. You can feel the influential spirit of “Voodoo Chile”, just as you can feel it in the sound, which is supremely venomous thanks to the howling, razor-sharp wah-wah. The experimental venom of Jeff Beck’s “Wired” is no longer far off! The guy plays guitar with his fingers, and the left hand does the bulk of the work. You rarely see that; even the kings of “finger picking” like Mark Knopfler often wear a plastic extension at least on the thumb, but our Miha has “only” his long fingernail there! So perfectionism, no “artificial” extensions. So, fans! You’ll hardly ever catch a pick from Miha! Miha has “polish”. He’s basically already a fully formed guitarist. What else comes with that, by my reckoning? A great image that sets him apart from the “insecure Slovenian stage peasants”, and he’s armed to the teeth with excellent tech gear that he masters “to a T”, which justifies all the “dangerous toys” he owns, and he simply, in one word, commands them! With polished playing. The basic platform is built. A springboard that now offers him anything he might want to vault himself toward as a musician. The guy is definitely the band’s number one attraction. He has what Slovenes lack. When you hear him play, he sounds like himself and he’s got “balls”. What I miss in so many Slovenes is precisely their own identity. That doesn’t mean we don’t have excellent guitarists. We’re just too obsessed with pleasing, with imitating. Miha stands out and manages to conjure that basic beat that English and American bands, the ones who got rock back on its feet, have! Watch out for this guy! He’s got plenty left to say!
Add the other three, who build on the point of rock music hidden at its core in the guitar riff, and what you’ve got is an advanced four-piece that “aims” at more demanding listeners as its basic fan base. An excellent melodic interweaving of keyboards (Ensoniq KS – 32) with guitar and, on the other side, a jazz rock fusion rhythm line from the completely fluid, free-spirited Moder/Kajtna section, which gives plenty of room to keyboards and guitar. Plain and simple, a jazz rock fusion band that carries a touch of Weather Report, of Chick Corea in the keyboards and, by extension, the electric 70’s Miles Davis era, Return To Forever, but without the supersonic racing across the keys. Moonlight Sky build atmosphere. There’s no room for “shredding” and wasteful shaking out of notes. Atmosphere and the expression of the main motifs come first.
The guys kicked off with Angel, with a punchy vocal chorus that grabbed the crowd’s attention, then quickly switched to their instrumental repertoire. They spiced up the evening with Hendrix’s classic Red House, which I’d heard ten days earlier performed by the legendary Pat Travers in Salzburg. The broad musical spectrum Moonlight Sky offer, practically without genre limits, lets them roam freely, and that’s the biggest draw in them as a musical phenomenon. Unpredictability, a pinch of spontaneity, live jams stretched out even further with solo improvisation. The guys shine in tightness and the chemistry between them works. The new member, drummer Aleš Kajtna, who comes from pure jazz waters, also proved he’s absolutely the right choice for the band.
There was Pluton – a song of apocalyptic skepticism, saturated with a heavy guitar riff of transformation, then the more radio-friendly, gently rolling Lunin Svit, which Anže sang in English, while the concert hit its absolute peak at the close with one of their strongest originals, Ocean, plus a one-of-a-kind rendition of the Leb i sol cover Jovano, Jovanke. Along the way Miha showed off his versatility in So Hard To Live, slipping on a fingertip slide and coaxing out a thin “Gilmourian tone” in his solos! Perfection, flawless!!! Refinement mixed with rocker aggression. A sensual swell of atmosphere and dynamics. Fluid, with a touch of spontaneity, and heartfelt. Anyone who’d heard the band’s album and came to the gig like me – for the first time – could be totally shocked, because on the studio recordings the band sounds fine and softly floating in the production, but live they’re devilish, bold and wound tight. From Moder’s bass playing, Kajtna’s cymbals shook resonantly more than once. Channel Zero really isn’t the optimal place for music like Moonlight Sky’s. They absolutely need more stage space. Must! I’d slap a psychedelic transcendental backdrop on that stage for them right away. Ahhhh, I’m dreaming of a Slovenian Yes again,…. I’d give Kržič a Peter Gabriel costume….. philosophizing again.
The band closed the regular set with the neo-prog-rockish (mostly because of Andraž’s way of singing) How Much? The crowd rewarded them with enthusiasm. Too bad there weren’t a few more of us to coax out an even bigger “groove”, which the band definitely earned.
So they came back on stage once more and played exactly that! The Groove. An attacking Black Sabath “Ozzy era” riff under Miha’s direction and his devastatingly cranked “distortion” flooded Channel Zero and got the crowd on their feet, who let loose at Andraž’s excellent, soulful vocal approach. Here Miha showed his horns, venomously rode his “wah”, and his guitar growled and howled into the night in twisted fashion. Andraž topped off the finale with excellent “screams” which, unlike those in the opening Angel, which flirted with good old “seventies” Gillan, had the frenetic, schizoid effect of “Carefull With That Axe Eugene”. Bravo, guys! Rock “mayhem” at the end!
Moonlight Sky have incredible potential and are built for the world. At their very foundation they outgrow “Slovenian smallness”, and yet they absolutely need support from our side, at home. Like I said! Abroad they’d be eaten alive. They need “gigs” out there. And they’re only just getting started. An exceptional asset we can be proud of and should help grow and keep developing, enriching us with their legacy, the legacy of the basic meaning of the word “progressive”. Moonlight Sky are a band playing music for today’s time that you have to be damn brave to play. And they play exactly what they want to play. They’re the avant-garde in opposition. Just like the still-immortal King Crimson, with an always off-kilter, up-to-date sound. Music for purists! With depth and a playful intellect.
Setlist
1. Angel
2. Devet osem
3. Rigg’s Family Shot
4. Pluton
5. Red House
6. Štirje svetovi
7. So Hard To Live
8. Lunin Svit
9. Ocean
10. Jovano, Jovanke
11. How Much?
—encore—
12. The Groove
