November, 5th – Karlsruhe, Substage – Amorphis, Before The Dawn, Amoral

Today there was need to be at the venue in time. I was teaming up with the guys from Cyclone Empire (my distribution partner and also the label of BEFORE THE DAWN) for some exchange of goods and to just have a beer.

You might now the opener AMORAL from their first albums playing progressive sounding death metal. Well – no death metal anymore – they recently have changed the singer who now concentrates on classic heavy metal vocals. So a totally different sound from the same band. Funny thing was the floor fan for the singer which made his hair float during the whole show. The music itself was nice though but nothing more and not as special as before. Music-wise it did not fit into the billing to be honest.

Of course we were looking forward to the show of BEFORE THE DAWN from Finland. In a fully crowded location with approx. 600 people they fulfilled our expectations. Good show with a lot of energy and you could see that these guys have fun sharing stage with each others. Anyway the sound was not good in all positions of the room. So I could only enjoy the last part of the show after finding the right place with good sound. A good combination between clean vocals, melodies and more heavy parts with growls was for sure a good warm up for a band like AMORPHIS.

I guess everyone already knows what you can expect from AMORPHIS after they have changed the singer. The new singer Tomi Joutsen has an awesome vocal range including the deepest growls and the best clean vocals you could expect from a live show. Main focus was the new album “Skyforger” but also other new albums like “Eclipse” were given a lot of attention. “Stone Woman” and the sorts of course could convince with great vocals. Like I use to say – Tomi is one of the best live singers of our time. Although the whole band seemed to be a bit tired from touring (this show was at the end of the tour), not a single note is wrong, perfect time – this is almost inhuman. And AMORPHIS actually live from their front man these days. After more than an hour the band closed the evening with an encore which of course included “Tales from the thousand lakes”. After all this time this song is still really, really big.

An all over all very nice evening with nice bands including a short interruption for a web cam foto of me and Hage (Cyclone Empire) at the Ettlinger Tor (the web cam is mounted at one building that surrounds this place and only shoots a picture every 70 minutes – so timing was very important and my colleague saved the picture at home). The AMORPHIS show was not as surprising as the first shows with the new singer anymore but very solid and still very powerful. BEFORE THE DAWN did a good job and AMORAL was nice to see but not a must-have…

AMORPHIS – MySpace – Merchandise
BEFORE THE DAWN – MySpace – Merchandise
AMORAL – MySpace – Merchandise

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