Acts: Victor Smolski’s Almanac / Lordi
Venue: San Dona Di Piave / Revolver Club / Italy
Date: Saturday, 29 October 2022
Lordi need no lengthy introduction. During the pandemic, they pulled off a remarkable feat — releasing no fewer than seven albums simultaneously. Seven genre-distinct albums, packaged into a massive box of new music called “Lordiversity”. After a long wait, the band’s new tour finally gave fans the chance to experience this release — special in many ways, not just for the band itself but for the current pulse of what we’d call glam metal as a whole.
In recent years, Lordi have significantly scaled back their stage theater. In its lavish excess, it used to cross the line of good taste on more than one occasion — though of course that depends entirely on where your threshold sits. Anyone who attended the band’s iconic show in Cerknica on 13 March 2009 will know exactly what we’re talking about. All that pageantry — the zombie-costumed extras, the buckets of fake blood, the creatively misused surgical equipment — has been reduced to mere traces in recent years, and compared to someone like GWAR, Lordi have become downright tame in the fake-blood department. That said, the band still commands a loyal following of dedicated regulars. Their extensive tour dates brought them back to San Dona Di Piave near Treviso — barely 100 km from Slovenia’s western border, as it happens. Fans of musical pomp, kitsch, glitter and shock theater — and especially anyone with a soft spot for the old Kiss playbook — had no excuse to miss this Saturday night out with Lordi.
All the more so given that the tour’s opening act was Victor Smolski with his Almanac. Neoclassically rooted power metal, three studio albums deep, fronted by a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and above all guitar virtuoso — even without Lordi on the bill, that alone would have been reason enough to make the trip to Revolver Club. Victor Smolski is a Belarusian musical genius. He’s best known for making Hamburg heavy metallers Rage considerably more interesting during his tenure than they had been before or have been since he left. His time with Rage earned him a solid enough reputation, even if he remains to this day an unjustly overlooked virtuoso. For this tour he hit the road with Almanac bassist Tim Rashid and former Mind Odyssey bandmate and drummer Volker Schulze. Victor rotated vocalists throughout the tour — Almanac were performing as a quartet. For the San Dona Di Piave show, the trio was joined by Portuguese vocalist Leonel Silva, for whom this was the second-to-last of his seven appearances on the tour.
As expected, Victor drew mostly from the material he wrote for Rage. The opening section was instrumental, with the trio working through portions of the Lingua Mortis suite. The crowd was fairly reserved — understandably, since everyone was really there for Lordi, and Italians have never paid much attention to German power metal bands (Helloween being the obvious exception). Things picked up after the instrumental Self Blinded Eyes, once vocalist Leonel Silva stepped onto the stage and the band launched into the Rage classic Soundchaser. Staying on the Rage theme, they didn’t skip the single Down either, wrapping up the just-over-half-hour set with No More Shadows, taken from the Almanac album “Tsar”. Notably, the band didn’t play a single track from the third and still-current Almanac album “Rush Of Hell” (2020, RockLine review). No matter. Victor’s playing is a spectacle unto itself. A sensation. An act of its own. A show of world-class guitar acrobatics. Thirty minutes delivered with total commitment and full force — gone in the blink of an eye. The sound wasn’t optimal, but if you positioned yourself toward the middle and back, it all came together well enough. Smolski, who radiated warmth and accessibility throughout (and personally handled merch sales after the show), announced that his new studio album would be out in early February 2023. A hellish detonation for an opener, one that well and truly warmed up the crowd by the end.
Lordi took the stage with a new backdrop and no fewer than two brand-new faces in the lineup — bassist Hiisi and guitarist Kone. The band was returning to Revolver Club for the first time since 24 November 2018 and the Sextourcism tour. Mr. Lordi, a devoted Kiss fan — something the Lordi catalog makes no secret of — kept a Kiss classic in the warm-up slot: God Of Thunder (hard to think of a more fitting opener), as the lights went down in the packed venue of around 350 people (with a fair number of license plates from Slovenia and Croatia spotted outside). Lordi devoted a solid chunk of the set to the seven-album “Lordiversity” box, but they hadn’t forgotten the classics from “Get Heavy”, “The Monsterical Dream” and “The Arockalypse”. From what was once an extensive stage-excess theater, they retained the confetti shower (during Blood Red Sandman), a brief splashing of red juice on the front rows (a warning notice was posted at the front of the stage for those up close), the brandishing of a chainsaw during Abracadaver, Mr. Lordi’s enormous wings spreading at the close of the show (before Devil Is A Loser), and a volley of massive fog blasts during Who’s Your Daddy?.
Believe it or not, the show never drags for a second. You can tell Mr. Lordi struggles a little to hit the highest notes these days — the chorus of Would You Love A Monster Man? made that clear fairly early on. He also needs more breaks during the show to cool down under all that heavy rubber (the band fills these moments with solo spots), but the costumes and stage set alone are such a powerful draw that they effectively hijack your attention throughout the performance. The vocalist and figurehead of the group also paces himself with theatrical, extended between-song addresses — packed with gallows humor — that don’t kill the show’s “zombilation” factor in the slightest. If anything, they add to the fun. New guitarist Kone proved to be technically far more polished than his predecessor, original Lordi guitarist Amen-Ra.
The band knows exactly what kind of ferocious energy you get when you combine a tight stage show with all the theatrical extras on top! The crowd went wild for every gesture, every move — not just from the boss Mr. Lordi, but from every member of the quintet. The sound? Excellent. All night long — though it paid to stand near the mixing desk. Through a run of new tracks — among which the perfectly AOR-tuned Borderline and the parodic disco march Believe Me stood out in particular — the band kept the atmosphere at a high, before steering the show to its peak with the classics, as you’d expect. No prizes for guessing. The ‘trio fantasticus’: Devil Is A Loser, Who’s Your Daddy?, and of course the feverishly anticipated 2006 Eurovision winner in Athens, the ‘notorious’ Hard Rock Hallelujah!
Bottom line: Lordi shows remain ridiculously good fun. Great therapy for a total switch-off, especially on a weekend when you need to push the daily grind aside. If you’re already a fan, or a devotee of glam metal shock-rock theatrics, you already know all this. But even as a general rule — if you’re a seasoned enough gig-goer, especially one not wedded to any particular genre, a Lordi concert is something you should experience live at least once in your life.
Authors: Aleš Podbrežnik & Edita Klemen
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik & Edita Klemen
Lordi setlist:
1. God of Thunder (orig. KISS) – pre-recorded intro
2. SCG Minus 2: Horricone – pre-recorded intro
3. Devilium
4. Would You Love a Monsterman?
5. Victims of the Romance
6. Demon Supreme
7. drum solo (Mana)
8. Blood Red Sandman
9. Carnivore
10. bass guitar solo (Hiisi)
11. Abracadaver
12. Borderline
13. It Snows in Hell
14. Magistra Nocte (Hella)
15. Down With the Devil
16. Believe Me
17. guitar solo (Kone)
18. Devil Is a Loser
—encore—
19. Who’s Your Daddy?
20. Hard Rock Hallelujah
