No, I have not completely faded away yet, it's just a deeper kind of slumber, and, by the way, it's been quite epidemic, since I am not the only one who has been infected. Anyway, useless bragging aside, I finally managed to get out of my home just in time to catch some of the local bands playing good old and empty Flying Machine. Yep, turnout was really bad, if you can talk of turnout at all when there are around 30 people in the club, and half of them are musicians themselves. I do not know what everybody else was so busy with, maybe watching Game 6 of World Series (Hails to D'Backs!), but it was pretty sad to see so few people showing up for a pretty good show (and it was cheap too!). OK, Antithesis kicked off the show, even though they were supposed to go second, but apparently Lost Soul had some trouble with their equipment or whatever, so they simply switched places. Maybe some of you remember that I did not like this band first time I saw them about a year ago, and the second coming did not impress me at all either. Alright, this time nobody was off key and sound was pretty good and powerful, but this is there all the good things come to a very abrupt ending. Metal Maniacs hailed this band as being a healthy crossover between old American Trash and traditional Heavy Metal. Well, I do not know about Trash, since I never found it too amusing (especially its American incarnation), but Antithesis definitely do not qualify as a good Power/Heavy Metal band. No hooks my friends, no memorable songs or at least moments, and technical efficiency alone never qualified too high on my priorities list, thus even if I am willing to admit that Antithesis are professional enough in handling their instruments, there is no way I can agree with a statement that they are able to write good songs. Actually, more than anything they reminded me of Nevermore - easy comparison since one of the guys was wearing Nevermore's longsleeve, so if you find yourself enjoying albums such as 'Dreaming Neon Black', maybe you should go for Antithesis, otherwise forget it. Lost Soul were next to impress us, however, even though Antithesis gave them a break by playing first, they still spent way too much time setting up. Anyway, after a long while they finally started to play and beginning of their show was just as lame as the beginning of their demo-CD 'Nocturnal Solace', which is not surprising since songs were played live
exactly in the same order they appear on the CD. So the first composition 'The Mind's Eye' was quite a mess with primitive keyboard overtones, guitar buried deep in the mix, and at times it even seemed that every member of the band was playing his own interpretation of the song rather than trying to act as a single unit. However, during second and third compositions cacophony of sounds subdued somewhat, with music making much more sense and keyboards, although still quite simple, taking much more appropriate place in the entire sonic picture. During this time they also played quite a strange song, something about pedophile (?!), I believe, which sounded quite different from the rest of the material, almost hardcorish, and reminded me of something like The Exploited (well, maybe it was, who knows?). The band closed its set with my absolute favorite of the evening 'Pain in my Heart', I think this is definitely the direction they should go to - melancholic atmosphere, vocals sitting somewhere between clean singing and spoken word and quite personal lyrics. This band sure has a lot of things to work on, for instance, 'clean' vocals are often off key, music is generally led forward by very simple keyboard lines where Underground Priest (haha) does not even play his instrument, but simply pushes buttons, one after another, creating something that could be good as a backdrop for their music, but not as a lead melody. I would also like to see their guitar player taking more initiative into his hands as well as the band using less societal lyrics, since they do not really sit well with a kind of music they play. HOWEVER, there are some positive things about this band as well, for example they do not really sound like anybody else, and the only band I can think of to compare them to is not too well-known Atlanta's Lilitu, because both bands utilize approximately the same idea of going back and forth between D, B and K led serene moments and outbursts of uncontrolled rage where
furious guitar finally kicks in. So let's hope they choose the right way and next time around present us something much more stunning, something in the vein of 'Pain...' and not in the vein of the 'pedophile' song :-) I am not going to talk too much about Somnus, since everybody already knows what I think about this very exciting band. If you need more
information, just refer to the older reviews - they have everything you ever wanted to know about Somnus and then some :-) This time I managed to talk to 3.5 :-) members of the band, which made me quite excited as you might guess! It seems that their plans changed somewhat, and instead of going for a MCD, they opted to release a full-length, which may be out on Root-of-all-Evil by the end of the year. Later on Scott (guitar/vocal)
informed us that they might actually end up with 2 CD's, not one, well, that would be great! As far as show is concerned, Somnus turned in a pretty good one, although sound problems plagued somewhat the beginning of the show (old news). I did not get a really good feel for a couple of new songs they played, mostly due to inadequate sound, but the second one(Gate of Wolves) sounded somewhat superior to the first one (Warlock's
Fist/Feast?). Anyway, no final judgement will be passed until I hear them
at least couple more times!