All photos and background image courtesy of Green Zoo Festival.
Photos by
©Norbert Burkowski
An eclectic, blistering three-band finale with Trupa Trupa, The Band of Endless Noise and Why Bother? kicked off the last night of the Green Zoo Festival at a packed Klub Re on Saturday Nov 20th. The indie festival is the brainchild of music promoter, Cyprian Buś, with Front Row Heroes gig promotion collective, which has been running in Krakow for 10 years and exalting Polish and foreign artists alike over that time. According to the organisers, the main mission of the festival is to “integrate local musicians and those from around the world, DJs, journalists, photographers, graphic designers, promoters, and other artists, as well as regular concert goers, at the festival’s various events.” Now we need live music more than ever, and although last year’s events were still streamed, this year we luckily had the opportunity to see acts live again – this time in the flesh….
And how much flesh there was! The filthy grind of Why Bother? – a project founded by Bartosz “Boro” Borowski (Lonker See, B3-33), Maciej Szkudlarek (Lastryko, Logophonic), Łukasz Kumański (Me and That Man, Mulk) with Rafał Jurewicz on vocal – blew the dust off proceedings and our skewed expectations: think what a Polish fusion of Iggy and the Stooges and the glamy trash of Turbo Negro would look, feel and sound like. The members were showing off some serious unshaven leg, leopardskin blouses hugging all the curves, pouting galore, with lead singer Jurewicz stomping around the stage like a flamboyant, tipsy peacock. It was mesmerizing stuff, but far from purely theatre: the musical performance also went unapologetically for the jugular – naughty, raucous and pulsating with visceral, sexual energy. More importantly, it also maintained a sense of dynamic build and disciplined restraint – particularly on the slow burn dirt of their closing number.
Second act, The Band of Endless Noise, from Raciborz, took a few songs to find their zone, but after shaking off their tentative start, went at it full throttle, precision drumming punctuating the sonic stew that bubbled around them, with Andrzej Witoda’s laid back vocal delivery and tasty bursts of keys luring us into the heart of their set. They tore into numbers from their 2004 album Riders on the Bikes. Later, saw them explore more esoteric, droney and off-kilter numbers, particularly Walking Backwards, You Can Hide and Let’s Destroy the People. They deftly fuse the pop sensibility and quirky mood of The Chills with the psychedelic delights and saccharine bass licks of Spacemen3.
Up-and-coming Gdansk outfit and headlining act of the evening, Trupa Trupa, opened their set with I’ll Find – the last song from their 2020 EP of the same title. The rhythmic strobe of the drums and bass creating the perfect canvas for lead singer, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, to warm up his vocal chords; the reverb-heavy desperation of the pleading refrain echoing out. It sounded at times like he was saying “I’m fine” but of course that’s impossible – the protagonist of the song is anything but “fine”. Tone set.
The band settled into their stride with Dream About You, opening number from their 2019 album Of The Sun. Its sublime bass-line catapults us into a horror-filled, obsession-riddled world. A genuinely nightmarish slice of dark power pop that heralds the band’s undisputed mastery of mood, dynamic, melody and menace: “No one, no way. No one, nowhere.” It just sounds so fucking mean – you cannot help but love it in a perverted, masochistic way. Uniforms is chaotic and grating – most likely deliberately so – shredding whatever lazy assumptions the audience had mistakenly garnered thus far. Remainder has some lovely Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth guitar at the start, and while wearing its 90’s influences rather overtly, it still manages to be comfortable in its own skin. Sonically, it reminds me of one of my favourite bands from that era – Swervedriver – hard and loud but dreamy, with thick layers of sounds breaking over the audience. Twitch is the new single from their new album and getting lots of attention from BBC RADIO 6 MUSIC with Iggy Pop also a big fan of the band. The song’s a demented barrage of pounding drums, a juggernaut of metal and steel sonically hammering you – but rather than move away, you edge closer…
We are taken to places we may not always want to go, but there is a desperate urgency and honest candour to the band’s art and their bold mastery of sound; they blend dream-pop/psych-rock/avant-punk soundscapes and so much more. Maybe a new genre needs creating: doom-/nightmare-pop.
—Shaun O’Neill
Long Time Ago makes it unequivocally clear that the past has never really passed and will never pass for that matter, for each day we live it: “Long time ago! No one! No way!” As Joyce’s protagonist in Ulysses says: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” Trupa Trupa play the soundtrack to that nightmare, with the band’s role to make things a bit more bearable even though the sky might be falling down. There’s no doubting their skill for a pop hook, as encore concluder To Me attests to. The last song on the album Jolly New Songs from 2017, it caresses us lovingly with its ostentatious, sugarcoated backing vocal, only to violently smother us to death with incongruous shards of heavy distorted guitar that unapologetically stab at our delicate frayed nerves, tearing at our wounded psyches like razor wire. Throughout the set, the vocal interplay between Kwiatkowski’s passion and Wojtek Juchniewicz’s high-priest-like delivery of effect-laden, overdriven, guttural incantations is remarkable, perfectly encapsulating what Kwiatkowski – a published poet – calls “vital pessimism”: perhaps the very pith and core of Trupa Trupa.
Kwiatkowski’s lyrics touch on issues that continue to blight us collectively: the failure of civil society to offer up anything but shallow self-interest and convenience at times of crises, insidious populism, the abandonment of basic Christian values, the abhorrent ignorance of holocaust denial – perfect subject matter for our information-saturated post-truth world. We are taken to places we may not always want to go, but there is a desperate urgency and honest candour to the band’s art and their bold mastery of sound; they blend dream-pop/psych-rock/avant-punk soundscapes and so much more. Maybe a new genre needs creating: doom-/nightmare-pop.
The world is on fire and Trupa Trupa offer no easy solutions, but rather introspective reflection on the human condition and the sick society we have unleashed upon ourselves – soothsayers of sorts. The music they craft is both brutal and beguiling – a live setting the perfect place to soak in its bewitchery. Chris Cornell wrote back in ’91, “The wreck is going down – get out before you drown.” Some of us clamber for the lifeboats, but Trupa Trupa are more than content to be part of the orchestra.
Trupa Trupa play their hometown, Gdansk, on February 11 2022 to promote the release of their new album B FLAT A on Sub Pop.
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[…] gigs have been creatively spread over the course of several weeks or months, such as November’s Green Zoo Festival. The latest addition to Krakow’s music festival scene is the Grajdół Festival, which started in […]