... you know, it's quite annoying seeing Finnish band in Finland. Their stage banter is all... in Finnish.
Start time was advertised as a brisk 10:30pm so we arrived at 9:30 to Club 25. This looked like a real rock/metal club, dammit! A real stage that wasn't six inches high, crappy floor and badly painted walls. I'd only previously seen metal shows (Sonata Arctica and Steel Attack/Celesty) at this place called Hullu-Pullo which has a dress code and gambling table and all sorts of stuff that's silly for a place with metal bands playing. Club 25 wasn't quite as shitty a space as the Somber Reptile or The Wreck Room that I was familiar with from Atlanta, but it had that grungy atmosphere anyway.
Entertainment of the night: Some drunk (I hope) guy walking on stage during two different performances trying to grab the mic and sing. One vocalist seemed amused and got rid of the guy, the other vocalist was about two seconds away from hitting the guy over the head with a bass guitar I think.
Enter My Silence was up first and, well, they were not so good. The vocalist was sick or something, as his voice was totally shot and the big guitarist moved around more than he did. It wasn't as horrible as it could have been since the vocals were all harsh anyway, but too many of their songs had extended screams that were just killing this guy. The guy was apologizing for sounding like shit. As Sanna translated for me, "If you want to know what we really sound like, check out our new CD we're selling in the back!") Musically they were OK I guess, but it had the wrong kind of groove to make me appreciate their style of melodic death metal. Crowd was very sparse for these guys, so they're either totally unknown or unliked.
Enter My Silence's bass player is a guitar player in Insomnium, hidden by the fact that he changed clothes between sets. I think they shared a drummer for the show as well.
Insomnium kicked all sorts of ass. They have this Amok-era Sentenced vibe about them (especially vocalist Niilo Sevänen), but throw in lots of clean parts and come across as a band who also loves the things that made pre-Whoracle In Flames great, or really like the intros to the first two Amorphis albums. Whatever it is, the band kicks all sorts of ass. I thought they were cool when I got their first album when it came out, I even did an interview with them at the time. This show confirmed their ultracoolness. The crowd (which had filled out, and there was a second floor balcony so I can't estimate what the crowd was) was either already very familiar with the band or was very quickly won over. This was good stuff, although I don't know how it would translate on a bigger stage because nobody moved around or anything. They just played great songs.
They were a little too obvious though. Not that I know one song from another, but when Sanna translated that they were announcing that they had just one more song to go, I knew the set seemed short so they were going to do a long one. I just knew it. Was right.
But they weren't really done.
I knew as soon as they hit the stage and started playing that there was going to be a cover song. I didn't read that anywhere (their domain name expired two days before the show so it's not like I could look up the setlist for their previous minitour dates... how's that for timing?), nobody told me, it's just something you can just sense by how a band carries itself. That it would be a Sentenced cover was almost a foregone conclusion, although I had hoped to be surprised. I dreaded that it might be Nepenthe, because it's the most overplayed, annoying, why-was-this-the-comp-track/single-anyway song Sentenced has that's not named Noose.
Guess what song they played?
Sanna, as the song began: "I know this song!"
Nepenthe. THey had some guy come from the crowd to play bass for the song while the Insomnium singer put on sunglasses and led the crowd through the song. Crowd ate it up like it was cake.
In Finland, in some dingy club, watching some little-know Finnish bands play to Finns, and I'm subjected to Nepenthe. Fucking hell.
Noumena was last but we were getting pretty tired and sick from the lingering cigarette smoke (it's amazing how live music encourages one to tolerate this when in any other situation we would leave a smoke-thick environment immediately) and the volume (Sanna forgot her earplugs, and mine weren't much helping my right ear whenever a vocalist went real deep... my choices were to let it hurt or shove the plug so far in that it was physically distressing in there), so we skipped them. But the rationalization we gave each other? Sanna: "It's late." (LAME!) Me: "Eh, they're on Spinefarm." (like Candlelight is a tr00 underground label, right?)
And the McDonald's in Vasa is open until five in the frickin morning on Friday and Saturday nights to catch the hungry bar crowd and has a cop or security guard on duty hanging out, presumably to handle any unruly drunks.
rar!
Start time was advertised as a brisk 10:30pm so we arrived at 9:30 to Club 25. This looked like a real rock/metal club, dammit! A real stage that wasn't six inches high, crappy floor and badly painted walls. I'd only previously seen metal shows (Sonata Arctica and Steel Attack/Celesty) at this place called Hullu-Pullo which has a dress code and gambling table and all sorts of stuff that's silly for a place with metal bands playing. Club 25 wasn't quite as shitty a space as the Somber Reptile or The Wreck Room that I was familiar with from Atlanta, but it had that grungy atmosphere anyway.
Entertainment of the night: Some drunk (I hope) guy walking on stage during two different performances trying to grab the mic and sing. One vocalist seemed amused and got rid of the guy, the other vocalist was about two seconds away from hitting the guy over the head with a bass guitar I think.
Enter My Silence was up first and, well, they were not so good. The vocalist was sick or something, as his voice was totally shot and the big guitarist moved around more than he did. It wasn't as horrible as it could have been since the vocals were all harsh anyway, but too many of their songs had extended screams that were just killing this guy. The guy was apologizing for sounding like shit. As Sanna translated for me, "If you want to know what we really sound like, check out our new CD we're selling in the back!") Musically they were OK I guess, but it had the wrong kind of groove to make me appreciate their style of melodic death metal. Crowd was very sparse for these guys, so they're either totally unknown or unliked.
Enter My Silence's bass player is a guitar player in Insomnium, hidden by the fact that he changed clothes between sets. I think they shared a drummer for the show as well.
Insomnium kicked all sorts of ass. They have this Amok-era Sentenced vibe about them (especially vocalist Niilo Sevänen), but throw in lots of clean parts and come across as a band who also loves the things that made pre-Whoracle In Flames great, or really like the intros to the first two Amorphis albums. Whatever it is, the band kicks all sorts of ass. I thought they were cool when I got their first album when it came out, I even did an interview with them at the time. This show confirmed their ultracoolness. The crowd (which had filled out, and there was a second floor balcony so I can't estimate what the crowd was) was either already very familiar with the band or was very quickly won over. This was good stuff, although I don't know how it would translate on a bigger stage because nobody moved around or anything. They just played great songs.
They were a little too obvious though. Not that I know one song from another, but when Sanna translated that they were announcing that they had just one more song to go, I knew the set seemed short so they were going to do a long one. I just knew it. Was right.
But they weren't really done.
I knew as soon as they hit the stage and started playing that there was going to be a cover song. I didn't read that anywhere (their domain name expired two days before the show so it's not like I could look up the setlist for their previous minitour dates... how's that for timing?), nobody told me, it's just something you can just sense by how a band carries itself. That it would be a Sentenced cover was almost a foregone conclusion, although I had hoped to be surprised. I dreaded that it might be Nepenthe, because it's the most overplayed, annoying, why-was-this-the-comp-track/single-anyway song Sentenced has that's not named Noose.
Guess what song they played?
Sanna, as the song began: "I know this song!"
Nepenthe. THey had some guy come from the crowd to play bass for the song while the Insomnium singer put on sunglasses and led the crowd through the song. Crowd ate it up like it was cake.
In Finland, in some dingy club, watching some little-know Finnish bands play to Finns, and I'm subjected to Nepenthe. Fucking hell.
Noumena was last but we were getting pretty tired and sick from the lingering cigarette smoke (it's amazing how live music encourages one to tolerate this when in any other situation we would leave a smoke-thick environment immediately) and the volume (Sanna forgot her earplugs, and mine weren't much helping my right ear whenever a vocalist went real deep... my choices were to let it hurt or shove the plug so far in that it was physically distressing in there), so we skipped them. But the rationalization we gave each other? Sanna: "It's late." (LAME!) Me: "Eh, they're on Spinefarm." (like Candlelight is a tr00 underground label, right?)
And the McDonald's in Vasa is open until five in the frickin morning on Friday and Saturday nights to catch the hungry bar crowd and has a cop or security guard on duty hanging out, presumably to handle any unruly drunks.
rar!
