2013 Caliban Session – Oslo Edition – Rockefeller

‘Caliban Sessions’ is a yearly tradition centered around Duplex Records and Petter Andreassen’s Caliban Studios and their parties that took place at John Dee or Garage or So What! for the past six years. In 2013, the Oslo concert of the session actually managed to fill the big Rockefeller stage with old and new friends of the studios and with a lot of happy faces willing to see the impressive amount of bands that were due to perform for the evening (10 bands, that is). The night was a very interesting mix of genres and sounds, thus bringing together crowd types that wouldn’t usually attend the same kind of concerts.

I was dead tired after a mad Friday concert in Bergen and a long train ride back to Oslo, reason for which I missed the first 2 bands and I only caught a last long solo of the third band (which I tend to believe was called Last Heat). That song ending was rather impressive so I made a personal note on checking out their music. Then I started looking for some familiar faces. Together with them I watched Sweden, a band so proud of their name that they even wear the national flag over the keyboards. But we all soon decided the music was not the most entertaining and we didn’t mind that each band only played max five songs.

If memory serves right, next on stage came Egil Hegerberg with his guitar and performing as Bare Egil Band. While I certainly missed a good deal of the ironies and jokes in his lyrics, I surely had a good laugh when he started singing about Bergen, the city where they had performed the night before and where I happened to be as well. And he actually described my impression of the city. He also kept the fun level elevated by singing about the Nord Fjord or oil drilling and asking the crowd to sing along to words he’d continously change.

Luckily for my lack of sleep, the next two bands were two explosions of energy: The Dogs and Blood Tsunami. First one is another of Kristofer Schau’s projects, an old style ‘garage’ sound band who doesn’t sing about the happiest of subjects. But the music is so rough that it doesn’t allow the band members to stay still for too long, all culminating with the singer’s intense expressiveness and the way he acts the lyrics. I’m yet to see a boring show of this dude. The metalheads in the crowd got their special treatment right after this, via Blood Tsunami, the thrash metal death squad from Oslo. They play their music hard and fast and few seconds in their gig you’re expecting the crowd to go bananas. Then you realise you’re in Norway and the guards wouldn’t let you have too much fun anyway. But I can also appreciate their intervention during an argument about to turn into a fight.

Once the fast metal riffs get silent, El Doom & the Born Electric take the stage. They’re groovy and progressive and have very interesting guitar parts that represent good show off moments for their guitarists. I liked their show much better this time than few months ago, when they were much too static on stage. I hope they’d always perform at least like this.

The crowd started packing up in front of the stage as soon as the Black Debbath members started tuning and fixing their guitars or bass or drums during the short change over. The band treated them with a nice surprise from an older album and then, making sure that everybody is very involved, sang about the statue park in Ekeberg. The time for the third song was used on presenting their newly launched rock quiz book and asking us to answer some questions in the book. Black Debbath ended the show by explaining once more how often we should change the kitchen cloths.

Without changing too many of the band members from the previous band, Thulsa Doom started rather soon and the sound made by the enthusiast crowd showed how much they are actually loved. They are full of charm and they already announced to fully play the "She Fucks Me" EP, so the night was already arranged to have an awesome end. To me, it had to end after the first song when some dead drunk dude missed the stairs and landed on my leg instead and ruined the rest of the night. But, despite all the personal issues, I find Caliban Session a highly entertainment musical event where you get to experience a bunch of artists in a short time and I keep my fingers crossed for them to be able to fill Rockefeller, year after year.