Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Kino Šiška / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 26.01.2011
Attendance: 850
Ticket price: 25,00€
The thirteenth studio album, “7 Sinners” (2010), has finally brought the Hamburg pumpkins to the Slovenian capital! Their second visit. Almost exactly five years later. Five years and four days, to be precise. Helloween first played Ljubljana on 23.01.2006, presenting the album “Keeper Of The Seven Keys pt. III: The Legacy”, officially released in 2005.
The “7 Sinners” tour is nowhere near as lavishly budgeted as its predecessor. Having Gamma Ray next to you tells a completely different story than having Stratovarius. On the “Gambing With The Devil” tour, Helloween served up a much richer stage set, a far beefier lighting rig, a bigger set list and, as a result, longer shows, at times downright spectacular. Every night during I Want Out, Kai Hansen (Gamma Ray) and Michael Weikath, former partners in Helloween’s golden eighties lineup, stood shoulder to shoulder on stage for the first time in a long 15 years.
But let’s get back to the present. Helloween’s new album “7 Sinners” (RockLine review HERE) is a cracker, so the thought of a tour to follow it automatically had me grinning and drooling. It’s great that Helloween brought along their old comrades Stratovarius. The latter played a hugely important role in reviving and repopularizing the melodic approach in metal in the mid-nineties, and with their popularity at the time they indirectly helped re-integrate the “lost and found again” Helloween back onto the scene, after the shipwreck of the “Pink Bubbles Go Ape” album (the eureka and triumph of 1994 was called the “Master Of The RIngs” album). So as not to wander too far and eat the sweetest part of the cake right away, let’s head back to the hall of Kino Šiška.
It’s long past eight o’clock. Avatar are sweating their hearts out on stage. They’re a Swedish band that started out as a melodic death metal act, and with their third, current studio album “Avatar” (2009) stretched their musical horizons “to more”. The new album offers a seriously interesting genre mash-up inside the songs themselves. Avatar are jokers, carefree young guys who are comfortable in their own skin. They indulge a tasty sense of humor, as the interview with the band done the day before in Zagreb confirmed. So they picked a fitting intro and opened their show with the theme from the action series “McGyver” by Lee David Zlotoff. The mouth automatically stretches into a smile. If Deeper Down is a mix of extreme branches of metal, personified above all by the melodic death metal starting point with a modern makeup of “breakdowns”, then Queen Of The Blades is an attempt to catch a whiff of rock n’ roll sin. Both songs rang out in Kino Šiška and pointed to the wide creative range the band has newly picked up. So it’s something that can appeal to fans of both new and old In Flames, as well as The Haunted, and even power metal lovers and fans of raw rock n’ roll sleaze might prick up their ears! Their extreme tightness, the relaxed banter from frontman Johannes and their approachable attitude fired up the curious in the hall, and the band got a thunderous send-off after finishing a set that ran a good half hour. One more thing. On the bigger stage of Kino Šiška, Avatar managed to hang their logo above the drums, its letters made of spotlight lamps, which the audience in Zagreb’s Boogaloo the day before didn’t get to see.
Today Stratovarius rank among the legends of Euro power metal, of the authentic Finnish kind! After Stratovarius, power metal bands such as Sonata Arctica appeared in the second half of the nineties (and later), and they’re more or less just similar spin-offs of Stratovarius. The same can be said even for Children Of Bodom (minus the growl vocals), and their influence even clings to part of the gothic power metal crowd of the Nightwish type. Stratovarius are of course without Timo Tolkki these days, which is a phenomenon in its own right. It’s quite unusual for the man who created a band to walk out of it. Usually the band dies with his departure. In the case of Stratovarius, as with, grotesquely enough, Thin Lizzy, that isn’t true.
Still, three important members remain in the band today. Besides German drummer Joerg Michael and Swedish keyboardist Jens Johansson, the first name is surely also the band’s first throat. Timo Kotipelto, whose voice embodies such a huge part of the Stratovarius sound that the band’s existence without Tolkki is still credible today. And if the seemingly irreplaceable Tolkki is replaced in the band by a wonder kid by the name of Matias Kupiainen, the matter is in fact sorted. He’s an exceptional virtuoso, classically trained, lightning fast, who splits the thinnest hair in two with a laser-sharp blade, with exceptional precision and control of the instrument. Two weeks before the Ljubljana visit the band released their new studio album (the second without Tolkki in the lineup), titled “Elysum”, and right before the tour they were joined again by a convalescent who had happily come through a tumor operation: the legendary German drummer Joerg Michael. With his cannon-like power and speed he once fought for the colors of bands like Rage, Grave Digger, Running Wild, Saxon,… The master of double bass drum pedal footwork played the best he can behind the kit! Soaking up the energy his barrage always unleashes was a special honor this time. In the far right corner, behind his standard keyboard rig, stood, as always, one of the best keyboardists in rock and metal in the world. The one and only Jens Johansson, a man who lent his musical talent to albums by Dio and Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force in his time. So Stratovarius remain a strong entity, even if their new studio releases no longer show any special freshness. The only problem is that they’ve lost the bulk of their fan base, and so their golden days, which closed with the album “Infinite” and the tour in 2000, are sadly (for now) a thing of the past. Today they can only fight their way onto stages as a support act.
Stratovarius are musical masters. The crossfire of solos between Johansson and Kupiainen remains a special treat of watching their show, and Kotipelto, just like the day before when we caught the band in Zagreb, skipped the highest registers of the songs, since he was singing with a sore throat. The guys put together songs that somehow define the best-known moments of their rich discography. Right away with the excellent Hunting High And Low, then the absolute classics of the iron repertoire Speed Of Light, and the sparkling Kiss Of Judas with its charismatic riff and melody. There was room for a taste of the album “Elysum” with Darkest Hours, and the lads lifted the mood in the closing stretch with a bundle of classic material that wound from Phoenix through the classic Forever to Black Diamond (the “must-play” queen of power metal speed). A pleasant warm-up for Helloween, and above all a pleasant warm-up for all the nostalgic hearts that have followed the band through two full decades of existence.
And Helloween? Helloween are so seasoned that they can pull the wool over the eyes of even the most naive audience. The guys hit the road with a smaller budget than two years ago. On stage stood a circular saw that carried seven different blades instead of teeth, modeled on the cover of the new album. That set wasn’t put up in Zagreb the day before. Helloween were greeted by a sold-out hall. In fact, all the lads and ladies had “packed” themselves into the hall already for Stratovarius, they just didn’t make much noise. But once Helloween scattered across the stage, the crowd started to go happily bonkers. Zagreb didn’t have a crowd this hot, a stage this big or a hall this packed. So Helloween did come across as a bit more approachable and a touch more “unhinged” than in Zagreb, where they showed nothing but bare routine. Ljubljana had routine plus a little more dynamism from the quintet on stage. The clowning around wasn’t left mostly to Andi Deris, either; Wikath, Grosskopf and Gerstner got up to plenty of “silliness” on stage too. Bumping into each other while playing harmonies in trios, pulling faces and other forms of mocking tomfoolery are part of the standard concert repertoire of a band like Helloween.
Deris confirmed that his voice still has a wide range, catching (with a slightly lower tuning!) even the tougher registers of the hard-to-hit spots (I’m Alive, Halloween, and Ride The Sky in the encore). The boldly put-together set list also featured three brand new songs. As expected, the show opened with the cheeky Are You Metal?, a typical Helloween prankster, and in the middle of the show it was joined by the excellent Where The Sinners Go, seasoned with the drama theater of a catchy chorus, followed by World Of Fantasy, which recently replaced the song You Stupid Mankind in the set list. Among the older classics, attention went mainly to the excellent “Better Than Raw” classic Handful Of Pain and the “Time Of The Oath” ballad about unrequited love, Forever And More, which Deris and Gerstner performed in an unplugged (acoustic) version. That move proved to be a highly effective way of varying the mood of the show.
It’s just how it is: the new era dictates trimmed-down concert offerings and rising ticket prices. The latter is really nothing to get worked up about. But the show left a bitter aftertaste when it came to the repertoire. An hour and three quarters is a nice slot for a headliner show, if you play and don’t talk, or only talk about what’s really necessary. This time, though, Helloween overdid the implantation of all the skits and tomfoolery, which is otherwise expected, welcome and even required Helloween content. But this time they overdid it. The mile-long chatting up of the crowd between songs, around Halloween, especially I Want Out, which completely lost its whole point of even being on the set list, and on top of that Dr. Stein in the encore, added up to saving energy and stealing time. Add to that a drum solo that offered nothing worth mentioning or that would stick in a concertgoer’s memory, and it’s clear Helloween could have played at least four more classics in that time. If nothing else, they could have scrapped the “three-song ladder” and played Halloween or Keeper Of The Seven Keys in full.
Kino Šiška showed its teeth again when it came to sound. Up front you could hear the guitars. Farther from the stage less so, or poorly, while the drums took more and more of the lead in the mix. I don’t know how it was at the mixing desk, but right by the entrance to the hall the guitars weren’t audible enough. Concertgoers could already have run into similar sonic shortcomings the day before in Zagreb.
The band says goodbye to the crowd with Dr. Stein, which will be remembered especially for two daredevils who dressed up as him and put smiles on the quintet’s faces. Helloween didn’t sit idle either and sent their own Dr. Stein on stage, who tossed a mountain of Helloween pumpkins (balloons) into the crowd. That wasn’t at the Zagreb show the day before either. Compared with Zagreb, the Ljubljana crowd came out of it much better this time, as far as atmosphere goes. The audience itself saved the show. With its playfulness and total switch-off, its die-hard fandom, in the fever of anticipation at every opening blast of every song in the repertoire, it successfully covered up the laziness of its thrifty, routine-minded heroes on stage. So hats off to an amazing crowd that breathed every fraction of a second without a break, even through Deris’s endless “tomfoolery” and speeches. At one point, even his bandmate Markus Grosskopf hinted at him, very politely, during Dr. Stein: “Yeah, we’ve heard that one last night!” (“Tega smo slišali že včeraj!”), but Andi wasn’t thrown off.
However you slice it. A good gig. A really good gig. With reservations. But well worth attending and consuming! Every true Helloween fan would be committing a great sin by ignorantly skipping the pumpkin crew’s relaxed visit to Slovenia this time. There was still energy aplenty, though, and in the middle of a stubborn winter, with a generous dose of power metal, the rest of us thoroughly warmed our frozen bones too. On the German leg of the tour, Helloween are joined by their countrymen Pink Cream 69, singer Andreas Deris’s original band. The nearest date and location to Slovenia are 11.02.2011 in Kaufbeuren, Germany. Anyone up for a road trip?
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
This report was produced in collaboration between RockLine and Rock Hard Slovenija.
Setlist
HELLOWEEN: 1. Intro(AC/DC – For Those About to Rock/Happy Happy Halloween/Who is Mr.Madman?) 2. Are You Metal? 3. Eagle Fly Free 4. March Of Time 5. Guitar intro (Sascha) 6. Where The Sinners Go 7. World Of Fantasy 8. Drum solo 9. I’m Alive 10. Forever And One 11. Handfull Of Pain 12. MEDLEY: – Keeper Of The Seven Keys – King Of A Thousand Years – Halloween 13. I Want Out —encore I.— 14. Ride The Sky 15. Future World —encore II.— 16. Dr. Stein STRATOVARIUS: 1.Hunting High and Low 2.Speed of Light 3.The Kiss of Judas 4.Winter Skies 5.Stratosphere 6.Phoenix 7.Forever 8.Darkest Hours 9.Paradise 10.Black Diamond AVATAR: 1. The Great Pretender 2. Roadkill 3. Shattered Wings 4. Reload 5. Deeper Down 6. Pigfucker 7. Queen of Blades
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