mts Dvorana's Rock Autumn: Nazareth, Divlje Jagode, Osvajaci

There is a sound every generation believes it invented, and then, once it nears fifty, listens to while seated. The programme mts Dvorana has announced for its autumn concert season is precisely that sound, spread across dates from October 5 to December 11, with enough accumulated decades to furnish a small museum, and enough living people on stage for the word museum to be refused as a description.

The schedule, briefly, runs as follows. Scotland’s Nazareth open on October 5, on the world tour for their twenty fifth album “Surviving the Law”, a title that reads like the autobiography of a band that has lasted since the late sixties. Divlje Jagode follow on October 22 with the acoustic concert “Sa malo struje”. On October 30 comes “Queen Symphony Sensation”, performed with a symphony orchestra and choir, with guests Mickey Callisto and Cosmic Glas. Osvajaci play on November 7 to mark 35 years together. December 2 brings a concert dedicated to EKV, and on December 11 Elektricni Orgazam mark four decades since “Distorzija”.

What happens when rock is unplugged from the mains?

The most interesting dramatic gesture of the whole season is also its quietest. Divlje Jagode, a band whose entire reputation was built on guitar overload, arrive with a programme that admits in its very title that there will not be much electricity. Sead Lipovaca Zele, guitarist and founder, performs his catalogue in arrangements deliberately stripped of the thing that made him recognisable. The peak of that decision is “Sejla”, which will be played acoustically for the first time.

This is not a gimmick, it is a test. “Sejla” has functioned for decades as a collective chorus, something the audience sings instead of the band, and the question is what remains of it once you peel away the layer of distortion that served as both its armour and its credentials. If the melody holds, it proves the thing was always a song rather than an effect. If it does not hold, that is information too, only less comfortable.

Osvajaci do the opposite on November 7. “S kim cekas dan”, “Maska” and “Krv i led” belong to that hard, direct melodic rock of the early nineties which in the post-Yugoslav context was often dismissed as too simple, only for that simplicity to turn out to be the sole reason the songs are still remembered. Thirty five years is exactly the interval after which a band stops being current and starts being a fact.

A season that closes in someone else’s voice

The December stretch is the most delicate. The EKV tribute on December 2 enters territory where every note carries the weight of comparison with something that cannot be repeated, because EKV long ago crossed over in Serbian music from discography into canon. Concerts of that kind always balance between remembrance and imitation, and they succeed only when they admit they are not trying to replace the original.

Last in line is Elektricni Orgazam on December 11, closing the season by marking 40 years since “Distorzija”. An album that was a shrug at everything serious is now performed as an anniversary, an irony the band probably enjoys more than we do.

What makes this season coherent is not nostalgia but the fact that each of these concerts answers, in its own way, the question of what you do with rock once it stops being rebellion. Nazareth answer with persistence, Divlje Jagode by stripping down, Osvajaci with an anniversary, EKV through other people’s voices, Elektricni Orgazam through a joke that became an institution.

Do you prefer rock that defends itself with distortion, or rock that dares to play without it?