Venue: Planet Music / Vienna / Austria
Concert date: 08.03.2007
Attendance: 400
Ticket price: €29.00
A UFO show with Brazilian melodic perfectionists Angra warming up the stage is pretty much the definition of a guilty pleasure for any true rocker, and there was no way our crew was going to let it slip by. The legendary UFO released their new studio album “The Monkey Puzzle” (SPV, 2006) last September and in March 2007 they were promoting it with real zeal on the European leg of “The Monkey Puzzle Tour”. Worth noting: right before the band hit the road, drummer Andy Parker hurt his ankle, and the doctors ordered him to stay off it completely. Stepping in for him was the seasoned Simon Wright, drummer of Dio, whose playing you can also hear on the AC/DC album “Fly On The Wall”.
After a fortifying kebab and a beer “just like back home”, we’re standing at the counter at Planet Music, where the guy, visibly fed up with everything, just shrugs and cynically tells us that everyone’s already waiting for us “down there”, that they all know us anyway, and that we don’t even need to introduce ourselves, because he already knows everything. Fine. Next time I get to Planet Music, I’ll just walk straight down the stairs to the “backstage” or the band’s soundcheck without asking anything and say that upstairs they told me everyone downstairs knows me!
It was a little past six in the afternoon, we had an interview lined up, which is why we were so early! Finally we were received by Andree, Angra’s hospitable tour manager, in the style of a temperamental Castilian! He was anything but stingy with the warmth and the laughter, which knocked down every barrier in a heartbeat. The man let us choose for ourselves which of the five Angra members we wanted to interview. After our “draft”, he asked us to wait a while, because the band was supposed to take a bit of time for a short meeting first.
But during all that waiting our beards grew almost down to the floor, and the interview only happened during the set of the local Austrian support act Nasty Habits. Austro rock. With a Carniolan Janez hat on his head and a toothpick being chewed and drooled over in his mouth, he’d have been better off renamed from Janez to a Tyrolean Anton (Anton aus Tirol); all that was missing was some glazed cheese strudel, plus cabbage and sausage, and the bingo card would’ve been full. Austrian glam, no two ways about it. Why did we even have to go through this? Luckily, at 8:10 PM we could finally slip off to do the interview. After a 20-minute grilling of Angra’s excellent guitarist Kiko Loureiro, Nasty Habits were just tormenting the hall with their last song, and then Angra’s roadies finally flooded the stage and started setting up all the logistics needed for the show by the progressive metal champions from Brazil.
When it comes to catching Angra live, I personally have no luck at all. I always run into them as a support act (Dream Theater concert , Padua 2005), or I see them as part of some marathon festival (Gods Of Metal 2006). This time I naively hoped it’d be a co-headlining show with UFO, but I was wrong. Angra got just 50 minutes and, once again, the support slot.
ANGRA: 21.05 – 21.55
At 9:05 PM Angra came rolling out onto the stage through the fog to Schubert’s Unfinished Allegro and hit straight into Carry On, a song they normally always save for the end of their sets. Then again, the Angra tour was slowly winding down; after the Vienna show, only Ingolstadt (Germany) and then Moscow (Russia) were left. Since the Angra name just won’t catch on in German-speaking countries, unlike the enthusiasm and euphoria that reign around Angra in, say, Japan and the Mediterranean countries of Europe (Spain, Italy), Angra made a great move and arranged with rock veterans UFO to play as the support act on UFO’s current March tour. So some 400 curious souls really did turn up to greet the band, and the hall wasn’t empty. The first 4 rows were especially rowdy, as the band was cheered on by a motley crew of younger metalheads who, as far as we could tell, came from the area of the former Czechoslovakia. They kicked up a loud, encouraging racket that helped keep the band going on stage!
At least I finally got to see them indoors, hallelujah. Angra are a band you absolutely must see in a hall. This time they were superbly prepared for the fight with the hall’s acoustics. The sound was excellent. The band was well aware that a hellish rush awaited them within 50 minutes. So they didn’t beat around the bush and served up nine songs including the intro, half of it material from the nineties records, like the beloved anthems of happy metal crowds: Carry On, Wings Of Reality and Nothing to Say; woven into those was material born from the minds and hands of the renewed, current lineup, as they ran Carry On straight, without a break, into the punchy power metal anthem Nova Era (“Rebirth”, 2001). They didn’t forget the current studio album “Aurora Consurgens” (2006) either, giving it some attention with Ego Painted Gray and The Curse Of Nature.
The highlights were definitely Wings Of Reality (“Fireworks”, 1999) and the brand-new Ego Painted Gray (“Aurora Consurgens”, 2006), with a great opening backdrop built on the bass guitar, led by Felipe Andreoli, accompanying Falaschi’s vocals. Felipe is a guy who looks like a real mountain man, which is totally atypical for the average Brazilian build, whose owners look at the ground from closer up than the genetic code of, say, Western Europeans usually allows. He plays a six-string Yamaha bass, which in his hands is a real toy. Can you picture John Myung (Dream Theater) with a guitar of similar specs, looking barely any bigger than the instrument? Angra also spiced up their intense but short set with Waiting Silence (“Temple Of Shadows“, 2004), and with the gorgeous, punchy ballad Rebirth they could catch their breath and recharge the batteries before picking up the tempo again.
Angra are perfectionists. Damn fast, precise and strictly melodic. Pure classicism. Helloween speed raised to the power of 10! Live, too, that is. A squad of five highly accomplished musicians, a top-notch melodic vocalist with explosiveness and solid expression in every register, a superbly tight guitar duo in Louriero/Bittencourt who take your breath away with the dizzying passages of their intricate triad harmonies, a progressively exploratory rhythm section that handles the unpredictably broken rhythms, all fused into real perfection, woven into a fluid and easily accessible musical form and combined with scorching metal voltage. Just the right balance! Most of the solos were kneaded out by Loureiro, who is far stronger than Bittencourt at that. The front rows were taken by real fans who couldn’t wait to buy their Angra T-shirts!
There were only some 40 of these hot-headed young men and women, but still enough to give the band loud, decent encouragement. As said! Excellent performance, but a short set! With all the weight of the sequences, Eduardo did buckle a bit in the closing repetitions of the really heavy chorus of Nothing To Say, but given the otherwise perfect delivery, the great way he led the band through the set and his warm rapport with the crowd, we can easily forgive this very charismatic singer.
The band left an excellent impression in Vienna, even though the reactions from the cold, mostly older Austrian audience, who had come mainly for UFO, didn’t confirm it. So here’s hoping we catch them and “snatch” them somewhere in Italy, at one of their headline shows. About time, too, because Angra remain, both in the studio and on stage, the very definition of top form.
Before gigs by giants of rock like this, who hit their peak somewhere back in the distant seventies, doubts usually start to haunt me about the point of carrying on with careers that, all too often, turn out to have run dry long ago. With UFO, though, the situation is a little different; if you don’t believe it, Mother Mary will convince you, a granny who walks hand in hand with the devil teaching disobedient brats the basics of rock & roll. And rock & roll it is!! Moore agrees, too; like the rest of the “space” family, he seems very relaxed from the get-go, which creates a feeling of homeliness as well as a close bond between crowd and band. The warmed-up crowd happily grabs on to the next one, When Daylight Goes To Town, which, at an inviting rocking tempo, entertains Mogg too in all his funny rubbery moves. The old boy is truly worn out, which he explains to us politely, almost apologetically, with typical wicked English humor between constant sips from a little bottle of beer. But let’s drop this pointless waste of time, it’s time for good old Let It Roll, where the gentlemen press the gas a bit harder again. After all these years the song still sounds incredibly fresh, which can be credited to the energetic performance of our grandpas, who bounce around the stage like bloodthirsty teenagers who’d never admit that for most men their age it’s considered more normal to tend the lawn in front of their weekend cottage somewhere outside London. Probably because Hard Being Me would leave very little of that lawn. It’s a new song from the current album Monkey Puzzle which, despite a strong departure from traditional UFO arrangements, thoroughly shakes up the crowd. Somewhere in between come This Kids and Fighting Man, where Way reminds all the uninitiated headbangers just how much Steve Harris learned from him.
One of the highlights of the night arrives with the long-awaited Only You Can Rock Me, which melts gorgeously into the emotional Baby Blue. Moore’s powerful acoustic interpretation, beautifully accompanied by soft keyboard arrangements, leads to yet another explosion of emotion with Love To Love, where the melancholy is cut off at the end by Moore’s raging. Perfect!! Too Hot To Handle, with its “sing along” chorus, winds the UFO engine up to the max again and slowly heralds the transition to the closing stretch of the night, where Light’s Out is impatiently waiting for its moment. The thrilling rise in temperature hits its boiling point with a properly stretched-out version of Rock Bottom and Moore’s “exhibitionist” finger workout, which wins over even the most skeptical fans of Schenker’s work. His charisma, which gives off a sense of effortless ease and above all homeliness, quickly wins the hearts of everyone present, so at the end of the song “the people” reward him with a long chant. When a visibly moved Moore announces the legendary Doctor Doctor with its well-known melancholy intro, the audience is hit one last time that night by a real tsunami of emotion, heavily mixed with nostalgia, and after Shoot Shoot the gentlemen wrap up the evening for good. Plain, simple, old-school rock & roll that showed us once again that, years be damned, these old-timers are still more than capable of delivering a real rocker’s kick in the pants.
Authors of this piece: Aleš Podbrežnik (intro & Angra), Daniel Pavlica (UFO)
Setlist
ANGRA: 1. Unfinished Allegro (intro) 2. Carry On 3. Nova Era 4. Waiting Silence 5. Wings Of Reality 6. Ego Painted Gray 7. Rebirth 8. Nothing To Say 9. The Curse Of Nature UFO: 1. Intro 2. Mother Mary 3. When Daylight Goes To Town 4. Let It Roll 5. I’m A Loser 6. Hard Being Me 7. This Kids 8. Fighting Man 9. Only You Can Rock Me 10. Baby Blue 11. Love To Love 12. Too Hot To Handle 13. Lights Out 14. Rock Bottom —encore— 15. Doctor Doctor 16. Shoot Shoot
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