Metal Rules The City Pt.1: The Gathering, Earth Crisis, The Misfits

Hi! Remember I told you about some high-profile show that would probably take a place in my humble city? Well, one of them did take place last Saturday at Flying Machine (Lorain, OH), which is a remote club just outside a Cleveland area. First of all I must state that in order to get all the folks who attended the show I had to do quite a lot of driving, including cruising through the couple of thunderstorms and night trip around the city. Yet another time we had a different show lineup which consisted of your humble servant, Shurik (who thanks you for calling him cutie and asks for your phone number :-)))) and Vica, who is our mutual friend. We made it to the club just on time to get one of the last tables available, so we did not have to spend 3-4 hours on our feet. The place that we took had one big advantage (it was located near the women's restroom, so we could easily check all the girls in the club), but also one huge disadvantage, that is being the hottest spot in the house. This last detail contributed a lot to us sweating like pigs during the whole show. But fuck this shit and let's get back to the music! Band #1 was some hardcore lot which name we were unable to find out, but they played pretty good anger-charged hardcore and even had several personal fans, who helped them out to sing some of their songs. Nothing spectacular or new here, but it was a pretty solid live set. Due up next was yet another unknown band with 3 female members and a male drummer. I do not even remember what they played, because all of The Gathering Taken from www.gathering.nl their songs were very forgettable. IMHO, their vocalist maybe was a little bit reminiscent of L7, but I am not sure. The only good thing about their part of the show was that some

The Misfits (who was headlining that day) fan was constantly imitating the bitch's voice and telling them that they sucked, which was very funny. And now... now it was time for THE GATHERING to play! After some pretty long plug-in, they finally hit the stage. The first thing that disappointed me a little bit was that they looked like some fucking hippies or alternative music lovers and not like metalheads!!! :-) Well, actually they are NOT metalheads, so it was a joke. The second disappointment was that Anneke cut her hair, ARRGGHHH!!! And she is pretty small girl too, which was something totally unexpected. I did not see her face in all details, but Shurik told me she was cute and nice and I totally trust him here. Unfortunately they were not headlining that day, so their set was limited to only 6-7 songs, but they still managed to put up a very good show, and certainly personal favorite "Strange Machines" was also played. Another unfortunate thing for them was that they played in front of mostly very arrogant or even hostile crowd, majority of which consisted of hardcore kids or Misfits freaks, who is certainly pretty far away from the brand of music our Dutchmen play. But fuck them, we enjoyed our music, and we don't care what they think! Oh yeah, one more thing, our friends still failed to convince me that I should buy their new album, sorry! EARTH CRISIS sucked - plain and simple. Some people claim they are one of the best hardcore bands around, but I say fuck their noisy shit! I can tell you that hardcore band that opened the bill that day was much better than those suckers. By the way, their vocalist is a total sell-out, who was asking people to buy their "limited-edition" merchandise in the nearby booth. I mean everyone tries to sell their stuff, that's natural, but the way he did that simply disgusted all of us. THE MISFITS? Well, we did not have enough energy to sit throughout the whole set, but what we saw did not really impress us. I mean they looked funny and people started to be pretty active, but they did not have this something special in them, something that would make us to stay, and thus around 1.00 we left the show to come back home and get some rest, which was much needed, because Sunday was still ahead of us! Stay tuned for the part 2 of my story! Regards, Andy.