Tickets for the fourth edition of OFF Festival Club featuring Mount Eerie disappeared from box offices long before March 24. The venue, Kraków’s Alchemia, was filled wall to wall with fans eager to see the alternative icons.

No Kids, the four piece support band from Canada were first to take the stage a few minutes past 8. The band is touring Europe alongside Mount Eerie, with the trio of Julia Chirka, Justin Kellam, and Nick Krgovich backed by Marissa Johnson playing the third keyboard. Their music’s lively and slightly bouncy vibe, paired with Nick Krgovich’s warm vocals were a perfect match for the first truly springlike evening of the year. No Kids’ set included songs from their debut record “Come Into My House” (Tomlab, 2008) and their EP “Judy at the Grove,” due out May 25.

The next band put on the most high-strung show off this year’s edition of OFF Festival Club. Chain and the Gang was led on stage by a man clad in a fancy white suit and an impressive black mane. Those lucky enough to swap a few words with him before the gig found him to be quite an open fellow, which didn’t change a bit on stage, where he quickly built a rapport with the audience, before winning them over completely after only one song. Ian Svenonius, the one and only. Known as one of the best band leaders in the world, the Kraków gig proved that Svenonius’ title is well deserved. Those familiar with The Make-Up and Nation of Ulysses, with whom he has played in Poland, knew what to expect, but for most, the man’s stage presence and new band were the evening’s greatest discoveries.

“(…) The band’s frontman didn’t stop for a second — he danced, chatted, sang, talked, and joked. The Polish audience was eating out of his hand, from the first notes of “Reparations” to the closing “Deathbed Confessions.” The crowd sang along to the choruses, screamed, and danced.” Onet.pl

Chain and the Gang played ten songs, half of which were off of their debut album “Down With Liberty… Up With Chains!” (K, 2009). The applause was loudest after this show, with a crowd of fans chanting the US band’s name in unison in hopes that they would come out for an encore. Ian Svenonius and his three bandmembers are unlikely to forget this warm welcome for years to come.

The time finally came for the headlining stars to take the stage, although “stardom” is the last thing you would expect from an artist like Phil Elverum. If you hadn’t seen him before, you wouldn’t suspect that the inconspicuous, quiet, modest man walking around the club was a alternative icon — one of the most relevant figures in independent music. Phil stood in the audience during No Kids’ set, but Julia Chirka and Nick Krgovich joined him on stage for his show, both of them on keyboards. Two drummers topped off the Mount Eerie roster.

Those who hadn’t had a chance to listen to the project’s latest record and whose knowledge of Phil Elverum was limited to his folk incarnation were in for quite a surprise. “Wind’s Poem” (P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd., 2009) is not an album of solo songs with vocals and an acoustic guitar, but is an illustration of a “slow and constant force behind all change in the world,” best depicted, according to the author, by wind. “I wanted to create an album that I would listen to myself, one that would be metal in a perfected form,” he explains in an interview for Onet.pl. His vocals do in fact sound more like TOOL’s Maynard James Keenan than his own previous recordings at some moments. To hear the melody of “Wind’s Poem” in the noise and apparent chaos coming from the stage, you had to abandon any preconceptions of Mount Eerie for the evening. A few years ago, Elverum cut himself off from civilization and spent a few months as a hermit in Norway, listening to the words of the wind. Today, he presents its poetics and terror. The OFF Festival Club audience became witnesses to a tribute paid to the forces of nature — forces whose paralyzing power was truly tangible in basement of the club. The sheer torrents raining down from the twin drum sets, the crackles and drones emanating from the keyboards, and the crushing wall of sound pumped out by all the instruments playing along to the distorted electric guitar made an awesome impression. Elverum’s emotion-tinged, hypnotic voice pierced through the din. He sounded great alongside No Kids’ vocalist Nick Krgovich, who joined him in singing a few songs.

It wasn’t until he had finished playing the entire track list from “Wind’s Poem” (in somewhat different arrangements, but in almost the exact same order as they appear on the album) that Phil Elverum gave in to requests for earlier songs. He joked that the current lineup of Mount Eerie had only learned to play the eleven songs planned for the show, but to the delight of fans of The Microphones (his stage name from 1997 to 2003) present in the audience, the band served up live renditions of “The Moon” and “I Felt My Shape” (off of “The Glow, Pt. 2”, K Records, 2001) and Phil came out for a solo encore of “Wooly Mammoth's Absence” off the EP “Mount Eerie” (P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd., 2004).
Mount Eerie’s Kraków show was definitely a successful start to the European promotional tour of “Wind’s Poem.”

For those fortunate enough to be at Alchemia on March 24, it was a great finale of the fourth edition of OFF Festival Club. Phil Elverum, who is now touring the rest of Europe behind the wheel of a blue van with No Kids, and Chain and the Gang, with the uncontrollable Ian Svenonius, all managed to whet the appetites of music fans for Poland’s most important alternative festival, this August 5–8.

“Of the three editions of OFF Festival Club that I’ve been to, this one turned out the best. There are bands that sound best live in small, smoke-filled venues, where communication between the audience and the artist isn’t blocked by barricades. The two first bands definitely belong in this category. As far as Mount Eerie goes, their music needs quite a bit more room to fully unravel. Nevertheless, the band managed to turn a small room in Kraków’s Kazimierz into a forest of dark, poetic winds and hidden rocks. May future editions of the show be as unpredictable and surprising. See you in Katowice!” Uwolnijmuzyke.pl 

“After the sold-out and artistically successful OFF Club comes the anniversary edition of Artur Rojek’s OFF Festival. The lineup is already the best in the festival’s history — all that’s left to do is keep our fingers crossed and hope the tickets for this one disappear as well.” Onet.pl 

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