So, yeah, I’ve decided I should write this gig report in English because I am dying to use the syntagm guitar driven to describe Mašinko‘s sound and there’s really no suitable equivalent for it in Croatian language (gitaristički just doesn’t cut the mustard for me).
Mašinko, a melodic punk outfit comprised of six strapping young dudes, of which at least two are stalwarts of Zagreb’s punk rock scene (Andrija and Perica in case you’re not sure) have a spanking new album called ”Svugdje je doma, ali lijepo je najljepše” out and this Friday’s gig in Kset was its official unleashing in front of their home crowd. As you might imagine the crowd went absolutely mad with the first notes of the opening song, but I’ll come back to that a little later because I want to mention the opening acts first. There were two of them, Kurve and that other band, and we positively missed the hell out of their performances. Why you wonder? Because my photographer (a guy with a two-bit digital camera) Max and myself are not really musical journalists; not journalists at all really; in fact one would have to stretch one’s imagination to the point of snapping to even classify us as men. What we are is a couple of alcohol loving fucktards with friends who run webzines and are desperate enough to fill them with any amount of verbal pig-swill coupled with some hazy photographs, and thus can obtain free press-passes for gigs we don’t actually care much about, in exchange for which we have to deliver the aforementioned pig-swill verbiage and gorillas in the mist photographs. Having such a haphazard relationship towards our journalistic duties, it is no wonder we’ve spent the better part of the opening acts’ performances outside the club in the nearby park with a huge plastic bottle of cheap beer in one hand and a tin flask filled with liquour so hard and disgusting it could be called A Castle in Scotland in the other. As we finished rocking the 40oz and finally stumbled our way towards the entrance of the club, struggling through the throng of people in front of it, the last song of Kurve was just being hammered into the ears of the few hardcore fans of the band, the rest of the attendance happily chirping away in the front courtyard, puffing on cigarettes and filling their stomachs with Kset beer – if American beer can be described as making love in a canoe, then this stuff should be labeled as having an orgy on the Titanic! I suppose Kurve are an OK band and they play a type of galloping, guitar crunching punk-rawk/D-beat made popular by such acts as Discharge or Mötorhead, but for reasons known and described above we’ve managed to miss them perform yet once again. I’ll try to atone for our tardiness by promising to catch their next gig no matter the amount of alcohol someone might dangle in front of my ever so thirsty beak. Seriously!
As I’ve already said, Mašinko‘s gig was chaotic from the drummer’s opening yell of 1,2,3,4 and the strumming of the first bars on the band’s three – yes, three – guitars. Therefore, it has to be guitar driven, right? I’m so glad you’re with me on this point that I’ll write it once again, just to hammer it home – Mašinko play guitar driven melodic punk rock! Copious amount of beer spillage and do-or-die pogo dancing erupted instantly throughout the club packed wall-to-wall mostly with teenagers and younger students. Old farts like Max and myself were definitively outnumbered by young blooded punks and punkettes dancing frantically in their Vans sneakers and Doc Martens boots, celebrating the sacrament of reckless abandonment only the Friday night gig of one of your favourite bands can bestow. Seeing these kids sing in perfect unison with the guys on stage every single word of every single song made me realize that what I was witnessing was the budding voice of a generation, a birth of the kind of band Hladno Pivo was to my generation, a gig similar to the ones we attended in Kulušić when Džinovski first came out back in the mid nineties. These kids will, and already have accepted and appropriated Mašinko not only as the band which so perfectly voices in their songs all the things they feel but lack the verbosity or pluckiness to say out loud themselves, but as their own new best friend (many of the people in the audience were actual friends with the band members, so I guess that’s one way of cementing your status as the scene’s next big thing). And if they keep on getting bigger, which I’m sure they will, the fate that awaits them must surely follow the path that Hladno Pivo’s fate trod down long time ago – one of reverse-proportional relationship of rising stardom and mass appeal to the dwindling of the true fan-base core to the point where they’ll find themselves completely dismissed and dissed upon by the same people who so adamantly cheered them on during this, and all the other small gigs before this one. I’m not quite sure whether I wish Mašinko become the next Hladno Pivo, with all the trappings the big band business brings with it, losing their naïvete and sincerity along the way, or for them to remain forever romantically snuggled in that one perfect, intimate moment of true blemish-free youthful adoration as was forged at this Friday night’s gig. What I do know is that if they ever were to become giants upon whose shoulders the future bands will perch themselves, I wish for them to become giants like Kud Idijoti, the rare example of a punk band who knew how to grow up and become popular beyond all their wildest dreams, but still were able to look their truest and oldest fans straight in the eyes without flinching. Judging by the three covers Mašinko boys played during the concert, of which two were by the Idijoti and one by Debeli Precjednik, another band which is growing old quite gracefully and with dignity, without a single transgression in the files of the ever watchful punk police, we can conclude that for now Mašinko is safely trodding the path Hladno Pivo veered from right about the time they released their fourth album Pobjeda. May Mašinko continue down the same road they’re following now long after they release their fourth album.
Nenad Lukač
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