Rock Monsters Romania

“How am I supposed to write about it?” was the first thing I told myself when I left this gig. So I have to be honest. This one took me too long, maybe for this exact reason. Not to give stupid excuses for stupid actions, but a part of me knew this was going to happen right after I took off. 

I went to see Kadjavsi live for the second time, at Expirat Club on March 11th. Now, to start this story the right way: as a woman in STEM, I felt the need to make a statement which is pretty similar to the ones at the beginning of a science paper, where they declare a lack of bias or conflict of interest. However, this name has been very dear to my ears for a few months now. I knew this concert was going to be good, and so I described this experience according to my confirmation bias. Pardon me. Or go see them yourselves live. To peer-review, if you will.

Kadjavsi is the sound persona of Nikita Dembinski, a local multi-disciplinary artist, accompanied by his band: Laura Benedek on bass guitar, Horia Stanciu on drums, and Luca Calaras and Lucas Contreras on guitars. As a member of the underground local scene, and also working in film music and delving into various artistic hobbies, Nikita wants to be every man. The hero. The villain. The theater kid. The poet. This may sound like the description of an ultra niche artsy boy who encrypts his internal world into his creations and doesn’t expect to be understood. However, I believe his music is not an acquired taste. His asset is the very fact that his records are incredibly palatable, at least on a surface level. He mingles with sub-genres track by track, from pop rock to post punk, from ballads to diverging electronic sounds with jazz inflections. The result is sometimes funky and fun, other times bittersweet, oftentimes relatable. Sure, there is plenty of room to ponder over the metaphors. To think that this track reminds you of Thom Yorke, that other one of Chris Martin, or that you could swear he’s got something for Julian Casablancas.

For most of this set, everyone in the crowd was vibing in unison, moving and being moved at the same time. It was often that I felt like I was floating between the scenes of a 2010s indie film. Immersive, firm, but not overbearing. Just enough to wake up a spark which, for me, had been dormant since I was about 19. I think that especially about the tracks from the latest album, “Above Albatross.” This record, both lyrically and musically, contains a mixture between an apparent numbness, comfortable, maybe even performative, and the insatiable desire to burn down the city just to find something meaningful in its ashes. I can’t pin-point it, but only someone who grew up along with the indie sleaze culture could have written something like this in the 2020s. Another few years younger or older, and the essence would have been lost to a completely different universe.

One of the quirks of the Kadjavsi Cinematic Universe is the tango between the natural and the synthetic. There is a pure, distilled rock sound that only a classically trained person could extract, but then the same craftsman shamelessly throws it into an electronic mix, probably hoping for the best in the process. He aggressively pushes buttons on a pad and lets out a chimeric creature, like “Castillo,” for example. You can sometimes feel like you’ve been thrown into a synesthesic mumbo jumbo, unable to understand where the artist is coming from or where he’s trying to take you, but eventually he picks you up along the way.

I felt Laura Benedek’s basslines deep in my bones, just as I saw her joy in playing live. But the performance, the composition, and sometimes even the band’s converged body language on stage, would reveal some of the band member’s Jazz backgrounds.

The highlight of the show, or probably the moment that stuck with me personally was when they played “Comet, Yes Mercy.” Or, as I like to call it, the “pew pew” song. Starting with a striking, sinus-opening sound effect that reminded me of a fire alarm, it served as a declaration for a symbolic war. Even the pattern of the riffs resembled the orchestrated, rhythmic attack of an infantry. Whom this was waged against, or if there is a true opponent on the other side, only the author might know. But he is ready to take the bullet. I mean it when I refer to a singular warrior, since the little choreography in the bridge suggests so. When the instrumentals take a bow from the heavy battle, and the melody becomes simple, tangible, the lead singer steps out of the stage and slowly walks into the crowd. He takes a few steps, and kneels. Maybe for show, for impact. Maybe from an ego-driven wish to be, ultimately, seen. Whatever the fight, he fights alone. An “army of me”, like Björk said. With the current socio-political climate, I wish I would have thought of a more optimistic, peaceful comparison. But that was the very nature of the feeling I had when I experienced this music live. From the crowd’s perspective, it was when the artist bled, when I felt I was the very blood. Funny how you can write about your own battles, make something beautiful out of it and parade it for the people to see. Just so that, at the end of the day, the listener finds a way to make it about themselves. Find a way to relate. Strip off the original meaning, and make a new one. Selfish, but human.

Eventually, this concert ended gloriously and was followed by an afterparty by Dru. I felt the need to make a point about the discrepancy of the lightened up, cheerful crowd during the concert, and the sheer, almost instant absence from the party, since everyone spent the rest of the night outside on the terrace and didn’t bother to dance it out for a bit. The DJ’s set was great and worth the bother, but the silence was louder. It felt so strange when me and my friends were almost the only ones left at the party, but we still danced like no one was watching. Maybe because no one truly was. The people left the fantasy when the band took off. 

Experiencing Kadjavsi live was, to me, an exercise of gratitude, that we have such projects in Bucharest. If I could recommend a local band worth seeing blindly, without knowing a single bit about their music beforehand, this would be an easy pick. I’m going to close this one by quoting my friend Alin, who went to this gig at my suggestion, and came to this conclusion: “It’s a shame these guys weren’t born a little more to the west.”

“Crowd Diaries” is a series of heartfelt articles with the purpose of reviewing live music from a personal experience.

Text by Raluca Baciu