Amon Amarth // Review
Venue: Academy, Manchester, UK Supporting: Dimmu Borgir, along with Engel Date: 30 September 2007 |
I always seem to forget that gigs at the Academy start and finish earlier on a Sunday than any other day of the week which meant that unfortunately opening band Engel, last minute replacements for Hatesphere on this tour had already played by the time I got to the venue.
I have to admit that I found it more than a little strange that Amon Amarth have gone back to being a support band so soon after playing their first UK headlining gigs as the venues they were selling out on that headline tour weren’t that much smaller than the ones they would be playing as support to Dimmu Borgir and in fact judging on crowd response and talking to people there at least half the crowd were there solely to see Amon Amarth. Of course this meant that the band didn’t have any of the usual troubles that support bands may face and a large part of the audience knew all the songs and were on their side from the off. The setlist didn’t have any surprises, being the same highlights from With Oden On Our Side with Death in Fire, Victorious March and Pursuit of Vikings thrown in too that they’ve been playing since the release of With Oden... albeit in a slightly different order tonight. Amon Amarth are such a strong live band though with their sledgehammer riffs and marching rhythms being perfectly suited to the live arena and Johan working the audience as well as I’ve ever seen him that they still manage to impress on this my tenth time of seeing the band in five years, even using a temporary bass player in the absence of regular bass player Ted Lundström doesn’t de-rail them from putting on their usual energetic performance. One major disappointment though was finding out that the band were forced to drop Fate Of Norns from their set due to the ridiculous 10.30pm Sunday curfew, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen bands have to chop their set at the Academy venues due to this and I’m sure it won’t be the last – it is no less annoying though!
Dimmu Borgir are a different beast to Amon Amarth entirely with their heavily symphonic, bombastic sound working fantastically well in their recorded work but, in my experience anyway, never fully coming across properly live... Largely due to poor sound rendering the guitars inaudible below a hailstorm of drumming which makes it a bit disconcerting that after the overlong intro finally finishes the band’s mix is once again well and truly dominated by the drums and it’s clear all is not well when during the first song bassist Vortex storms off stage clearly unhappy about something – though gladly he returns not long after. Those sound problems never truly clear up and whilst the guitars make fleeting appearances throughout the set the keyboard lines remain oddly detached for the majority of the set and unless you’re very familiar with the band’s material and so can ‘fill in’ those gaps yourself you do find yourself listening to what is essentially an extended drum solo by session drummer Tony Laureano with vocal accompaniment.
Of course at a Dimmu Borgir gig there’s more than ‘just’ the music going on and they endeavour to put on a show with a large projection screen backdrop, an impressive lightshow, onstage fiery ‘torches’ which turn out not to be real and merely shaped pieces of fabric blown upwards by a wind machine and lit with orange lights and, perhaps most oddly, during the first song a couple of men dressed all in black standing at either side of the stage with masks that are made to look somewhat like stone idols in the vein of the famous Easter Island statues.. that actually just make them look more like The Man With The Stick from Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out and it’s all a bit Spinal Tap really.
Oddly though it’s things like this that make Dimmu’s set tonight more enjoyable than it might have been with the slight air of daftness around the band with the silly stage props, guitarist Galder’s gurning and the realisation that Vortex is quite possibly the only man in (pseudo) black metal who can out-pose Immortal’s Abbath making them a lot of fun to watch – it would’ve just been nice if we could’ve heard the guitars and keyboards a tad more often.
Review by Neil Woodfin
Set List
Not available
Photos From the Show
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Academy, Manchester // 19 April 2007
Rio's, Bradford // 22 November 2006