Location: San Dona Di Piave / Revolver Club / Italy
Date: Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Kiko Loureiro is considered one of the finest guitarists in the metal universe. No wonder he stepped into the big league of thrash metal titans Megadeth in 2015, where only the very best get in under Mustaine’s unbreakable dictatorship. Before that, Kiko spent a full twenty years (1994-2014) in one of the best prog metal bands in the galaxy, Brazil’s Angra, and put out eight studio albums with them. A classically trained master of shred and lightning-fast arpeggios, who in his time drew inspiration from the work of two great Brazilian classics, Pedro Bueno and Mozart Mello, he also has four solo studio albums in his pocket: “No Gravity” (2005), “Universo Inverso” (2006), “Fullblast” (2010) and “Sounds Of Innocence” (2012). Those of you drawn to instrumental guitar rock, or let’s just call it guitar art rock, and who know the aces well, such as Marty Freedman, Tony MacAlpine, Gus. G., Chris Impellitteri, Paul Gilbert, Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen and others, probably caught his visits to Ljubljana’s Orto bar, in 2007, when he gave a guitar clinic, and in 2010, when he played alongside the phenomenal Guthrie Govan (Steven Wilson) at the Kitarijada of the day.
So, when the man shows up on a solo tour and on top of that is “saddled” with a backing crew of two current Angra members, bassist Felipe Andreoli and drummer Bruno Valverde, it’s clear you don’t skip a show by a trio like that, let alone sleep through it. Andreoli has been in Angra since the album Rebirth, while Valverde has a shorter tenure. Kiko mostly played his own material at the show. The whole thing was instrumental.
An hour and a half of pure poetry, a fusion of neoclassical music with Latin melos, or bossa nova. Soon after eight, when the doors of the Revolver club opened (it sits in the industrial zone of the Italian town of San Dona Di Piave, near Treviso), the most eager guitar “professors” dutifully took the front row, leaning on the edge of the stage and waiting there for more than a full hour before Kiko stepped out. As you know, things start later and later with our western neighbors. This time too, nothing much happened before half past nine. People are used to it, so they trickle in slowly. The club is roomy, and could squeeze in maybe five hundred heads. Well, a good hundred or so showed up this time, which is no negligible number. Kiko didn’t talk much, he just played. A few polite gestures of thanks, with which he won over the keen crowd, were enough. What took your breath away was his instinct and feel, the fusion of Brazilian temperament, let’s even say salsa, with elements of neoclassical music. And that hellish shredding, which never let up for a second in its firing off of sonically fast runs of scales, along with the core character of his phrasing, the dynamic upheavals in the quiet passages, and just how strong the trio is on stage. In everything. How the core fills all the available space. Broken rhythms of a thoroughly progressive character, different melodies that Andreoli and Loureiro play at the same time and that lock together so perfectly within a given composition. Yes. There’s no way to overlook Kiko’s two partners in crime. Simply put, they shone. Even Valverde, who had a drum solo, didn’t bore for a second with it. An explosion of unbridled virtuosity.
Kiko mostly played tracks from his solo studio debut “No Gravity” and his latest album “Sounds Of Innocence”. He also threw in two numbers from “Universo Inverso”, while the album “Fullblast” dropped out of the set entirely. He fired up the crowd especially in the last third of the show, which he opened with the Megadeth instrumental Conquer Or Die! (“Dystopia”, 2016), followed by a shred tornado of an adapted Angra classic, Angels And Demons (“Temple Of Shadows”, 2004). A spectacle bursting with temperament, feel, instinct and passion, but also great focus among the trio, which made sure nobody got “carried” too far away from this incredible musical body of exceptional technical mastery and complexity. A performance infused with a hypersensitive feel for implanting melody and musicality. With the promised and much-wanted theater of unbridled virtuosic outbursts. Everything in one. Gathered in the same place. At the same time. Utterly captivating, unique, unforgettable and unrepeatable. Kiko said goodbye with the song Enfermo from his solo debut “No Graviity”. But since the crowd wasn’t about to let him leave the stage that easily, he came back for one more. He announced it briefly: “Now we’re going to play something from Angra”. It was the first track from the debut studio album “Angels Cry”. The devastating prog metal storm Carry On, with one of the most recognizable lead guitar phrases of Angra’s entire career. Kiko vividly adapted the vocal lines of the original and reworked them for guitar, and in his improvisational antics and imagination he held nothing back, working in a heap of variations and extra embellishments throughout. It’s insane how he handles shaping tones with the tremolo. In short, Carry On really warmed up the hearts of every Angra fan, which is to say, frankly, the whole crowd at this magnificent show and performance by the extraordinary Kiko Loureiro and his two companions, which simply put went by too fast.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Pau-De-Arara
2. Reflective
3. Escaping
4. Grey Stone Gateway
5. No Gravity
6. El Guajiro
7, Feijao De Corda
8. Camino A Casa
9. Drum solo
10. The Hmyn
11. Samba Da Elisa
12. Conquer Or Die
13. Angels And Demons
14. Ray Of Life
15. Dilemma
16. Enfermo
—encore—
17. Carry On
