2024-01-06 09:21:40
The hard rockers Obús (Madrid, 1981), Spanish rock classics led by a very vocally and physically fit Fortu (Fructuoso Sánchez Prado, a Burgos native who will turn 70 on April 24), have been on tour for two and a half years. celebration of its 40th anniversary, and they have been to Bilbao at least three times: at Fever with the public seated during the pandemic, at the Urban Hall of Euskalduna in an indoor festival promoted by the bars La Perdiz de Portugalete and Billares de Romo , and the one at hand, this Friday at the Kafe Antzokia, the best of all, in terms of repertoire, great sound and dedication in the last moments of a tour that only has stops left in La Rioja (in Aldeanueva de Ebro, today Saturday), Valencia, Segovia and the goodbye in Madrid on February 24.
Then they will get to work on a new album and another tour with a different repertoire, and Obús’s set list remains very similar, almost immutable, in recent decades. Thus, this Friday at the Kafe Antzokia, before 250 souls, the people from Madrid played 16 songs (counting the presentations and solos as such, since that is how they recorded it in the setlist and we wrote it down in the notes along the way) in 96 minutes where everything worked wonderfully (rock music, powerful voice, acoustics of the venue, dynamism of the performers, immediate delivery of the respectable hey-hey-hey…) and where you could only turn your nose up at the presentations (with nods to Motörhead, Christmas carols infiltrators, drum solo culminated on top of a ladder planted in the middle of the stage…) and in some interaction with the public that was not heavy (when Fortu asked that the group turn on the lights of their cell phones).
In the eighth, the only slow one, ‘Complacent and cruel’. OC
What the songs are, except for the mid-tempo rock opera style of ‘Complaciente y cruel’, which they played sitting around the drums, they were all hard-hitting, rocking, rocky, with cane roots and cani spirit but with an international level and argumentative between the farrero (the drugs of ‘La Raya’, the alcohol of ‘Vamos very well’ covered by Siniestro Total) and the deliquencial and suburban (‘El que más’). And with such wickers they gave a concert that was unbelievable, incredible, and if instead of lasting 96 minutes they took away the quarter of an hour of somewhat childish interaction and the presentations, they would be left with a monolith of sinewy rock that a gypsy couldn’t skip. and that would enter any list of the best of the year.
As I said, they did not stand still, from the drummer Carlos Mirat who was juggling the drumsticks to the leader Fortu (the only one of the four who wears hair), who leaned over the edge of the stage and collided with the audience, who knelt down. in the middle of the scene and did not make the cut in his little talks, passing through the blood brother Paco Laguna, the guitarist and founder, and the new bassist, the recovered Fernando Montesinos (who will produce the next Obús album, with which It will be the fourth that Montesinos directs), four subjects, four Spanish hard rock and heavy metal professionals who unloaded or rather fired integrated, greased, lubricated, rolled, or however you prefer, readers.
Fortu close to his audience at the inaugural ‘I need more’. OC
They started rock and roll (‘Need more’), the Germans Accept (‘El que más’ and ‘Juego dirty’, two of the best songs of the evening) and the British Judas Priest (‘Corre mamón’, with the peña pureta) resonated chanting arm raised), and good old Fortu blessed us and crossed himself (‘Death will visit you’), he was able to croak with authority (‘Fuck you’) and told us that he had come from Almería, in his car with a radio -cassette, a txiki car that fills the tank with 40 bucks (he told it before ‘Autopista’, a rock between transitional and brutalist a la Idles made in Spain). Furthermore, they did not leave out their original personal hit (‘The Howitzer is Going to Explode’), and reserved for the double encore two great songs of the caliber of ‘Nuclear Nightmare’ (the peak of the event, a pioneering speed metal) and ( me) ‘I only do it on my motorcycle’ (epitome of thuggish and suburban rock).
More or less this is how a philanthropist ball went, adorned by a gigantic backdrop and three sporadic smoke chimneys (they were fired by a little girl who was yawning hidden on the side of the stage, and we believe she is Fortu’s daughter), a great rock and roll concert. , because Fortu already clarified it: «Boys, girls, do you know where you are? We’re at a rock and roll concert! For many years, as they say!
#Howitzer #years