The venue for the Korpiklaani/Swashbuckle/Tyr show on January 12 has been moved from The Jaguar Club to Reggie's.
Thanks so much for the timely info! Without this post, I wouldn't have gone. For some reason, I hadn't even put this on my upcoming-shows list, so I was nearly unaware of it. Probably because I had no interest in going to the Jaguar Club, and because I'd never really had any interest in listening to Korpiklaani.
But when I saw your post, I remembered that I kinda love Tyr, and that Korpiklaani is supposed to be a lot of fun.
And holy hell, that was the most fun I've had at a metal show in a while.
Local opener Waves of Amphitrite was alright, and a perfect fit for the bill. Folky-epic-synthy metal with clean and growled vocals. No confusing them for a band with a lot of live experience though.
White Wizzard's NWOBHM-isms were kinda fun, especially since you don't see that too often these days, though their energy seemed a little low. Maybe because they're a band you'd expect to see go on at 2am rather than 7pm on a Tuesday.
Swashbuckle play generic thrash while wearing pirate costumes. The guys are pretty funny between songs, but you'd think by now they would have worked out a way to inject some of the pirate-theme into their actual music. Oh well. They were roadie-ing for the rest of the bands on the tour, which is probably a better use for them than playing. Maybe that's their deal? "We'll be the techs for all of you, and you only have to pay us in stage time"?
Tyr was so much better than the first time I saw them (at the Paganfest/Powerfest), because they actually played a bunch of their "hit single" songs rather than their progged-out weirdisms (which are great on record, but not so great for the live show). The sound wasn't as good as it should have been (second guitar was really low, lead vocalist would sometimes sound incredible, sometimes nearly inaudible), but they still sounded plenty fine. They closed with "The Wild Rover", the world's only prog-drinking-song; it's a perfect example of how they make their odd rhythms and timings nearly unnoticeable, for it literally got a line of 20 metalheads arms-around-shoulders singing and swinging along.
Then Korpiklaani. I don't know if I've ever heard a note of their music before (I missed their last tour here), but they were exactly what I expected them to be. Music that provides the perfect backdrop for one of the rarer-but-most-beautiful things in metal: the Dance-Mosh Pit. I honestly have no idea if the band was any good, though I really liked their bass player (who looks like he sits in Saturday afternoons with a country band), and I added yet another live-band-with-accordion to my ever-growing list. What I do know is that the spirit of the crowd was incredible. It was an absolutely perfect level of jumping around and bashing into each other. Almost everyone was groovin' on the exact same vibe, and those few who had a tendency to be a bit more asshole-ish were calmly advised against it by the excellent and almost-unseen security staff. Arms-around-shoulders circle-dances would form regularly, but unlike the three-too-cool-friends doing it to be "ironic" that I've seen at other folk-metal shows, these were equal-opportunity, everyone-welcome affairs. There was one guy who would bash his bald head into people's arms and shoulders in time to the music, which was strangely awesome. The only downside was that their 90-minute set was a little longer than most of us could handle cardiovascularly, so our energy started to flag a bit by the end. Oh yeah, and I didn't have a drop of alcohol, it was the music and the spirit doing all the talkin', not the beer.
Any fan of live-Korpiklaani needs to go to a concert from Gogol Bordello, who, hard as it is to believe, are at least twice as awesome at doing almost the same thing.
True. There are a LOT of good shows coming to Chicago now thru April it seems.
Yep, already been to 2 this week (Hypno5e/Revocation/The Binary Code on Monday), and have one more on Saturday (Earthen Grave).
Neil
I didn't find out until the day before the show, and I figured that other people probably didn't know, either. So I thought I'd post in hopes that someone benifitted, even if it was last minute.
Now that's funny right there! I don't care who you are, that's funny!
