“Into Darkness” (2012)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Nina Grad

Location: Vienna / Arena / Austria
Concert date: 11/16/2012
Attendance: 1000
Ticket price: €35.90

»Into Darkness« – a tour with a bundle of five bands is one of those typical, modern, tactical concert packages that circle our globe every year. Joining forces between bands that share a target audience of a specific taste is almost a given these days. If there are genre differences in such a phalanx of bands, that’s fine, but they can’t be too big. They can be noticeable, but they have to be sustainable, tolerable, so that the target credibility of every such tour, under the banner of a »mini traveling festival«, stays intact. A concertgoer will still scrape together the money for a ticket, so that in the company of four or five bands he gets to see the one band he first and foremost shelled out his thirty or forty (no more) »little bills« for.

So the »Into Darkness« tour brought together Swedish melodic metal industrialists Pain, passionate Portuguese experimental black metal greats Moonspell, increasingly prominent Finnish doom death metallers Swallow The Sun, Swedish doom metal comebackers Lake Of Tears and a fresh doom metal prospect, Greece’s Scar Of The Sun.

SCAR OF THE SUN:
At a quarter to seven in the late afternoon, the spectacle kicks off! On stage: Greece’s Scar Of The Sun. The big hall of Vienna’s Arena (for anyone who hasn’t been there yet, the Arena is kind of a »supersized« version of Ljubljana’s Metelkova) is almost completely empty, a few observers far in the back kill time with beers in hand at a cautious distance from the stage, while the rest would still rather grind down the bar counters right nearby. In half an hour, Scar Of The Sun presented their studio debut »A Series Of Unfortunate Concurrencies«, which came out at the end of May last year. With no particular pomp and a lot of generic guitar phrases and melodies, Scar of the Sun ran through songs like Disposable, Gravity and Burn The Memory, among others, and wrapped up the set with I Lost. You can barely feel the gothic element, or it comes across as hugely unconvincing, against a backdrop of melodies that are sometimes even propped up by a »power metal riff«. It’s still »doom« metal, but with a less successful take on the »ominous«, and the poor sound took its toll too, with a muddy mix of heavily downtuned guitars that couldn’t hide its lack of clarity.

LAKE OF TEARS:
The first real spark of interest came with Lake Of Tears. This is a band that has something to say, having been around since the early nineties. The album »Illwill«, released last year, continues the confessional trend of its predecessor »Moons And Mushrooms« (2007) and delivers, for the band’s new era, a markedly wound-up, gloomy doom metal album that even contains elements of death metal. So you could say Lake of Tears are in a way closing their development circle here, having moved closer to the starting points of the album »Greater Art« (1994). At the same time, the new album shows a convincing degree of artistic maturity, with both progressive and psychedelic elements on top of the aforementioned dose of »doom/gothic« and »death metal«. It’s no longer big news that Lake Of Tears are a band that has developed the point of the metal tradition in various hybrid forms across their albums, and »Illwill« keeps that trademark alive for new times, and very convincingly. The band »attacked« the Arena and hit fast with two classically built but new Lake Of Tears numbers, Taste Of Hell and Illwill.

Sound-wise, Lake Of Ters came across as more tangible than their predecessors Scar Of The Sun, even though the guitars of singer Daniel-a Brennare-a and second guitarist Fredrik-a Jordanius-a weren’t delivering their optimal output. The set included monumental Lake Of Tears classics Raven Land, Demon You / Lilly Anne, The Greyman and, in the middle of the show, Boogie Bubble, which sent the band’s less numerous, full-blooded devotees at the gig into seventh heaven. The second-to-last song, House Of The Setting Sun from the current album »Illwill« in particular, delivered one of the most interesting moments of the concert, an excellent mix of prog and psychedelic hypnosis that put the »dot on the i« on a very successful Lake Of Tears performance, which still had a few brakes on the way to its optimal realization.

Brennare came off as pathetic when, after the show, he picked guitar picks off the monitor, even bent down to grab the last one that had fallen on the floor during the gig, and quickly stuffed them in his pocket. Next time he should tell the tech not to waste precious time and not to stick them on the mic stand, and Brenanre can melt them down into, say, a polyvinyl bag and make use of their usefulness. It won’t irritate Brennare, let alone the audience, who was hoping for some nice souvenir from the gig. There’s evidently no money in Lake Of Tears for an extra keyboardist to handle the keys during the show – they simply made do with backing tracks.

SWALLOW THE SUN:
From one performance to the next, the mood among the first three bands went steeply uphill. Swallow the Sun, the first pure-blooded doom and death metal hybrid of the night, from Finland, were the first band to fully win people over with their show. They’re a sextet, but luckily they don’t need much room on stage, since they’re very static by nature. And what matters most, they don’t need backing tracks. They have their own keyboardist, Alexi Munter, and he too sounded excellently wedged in between the massive, slowly rolling guitar riffs of Juha Raivio and Markus Jämsen. The sound served up an ominously rapacious, infectious momentum that proved the crew’s remarkable tightness over 40 minutes. They’ve been together for twelve years in a practically unchanged lineup (the exception being former Wintersun drummer Kai Hahto, who joined in 2009), so the band’s outstanding stage conviction is no surprise.

Singer Mikko Kotamäki wears a shirt with a print of Grigori Rasputin on this autumn tour too (Rasputin isn’t just a Boney M song, but also that »historically negatively tinged« mysterious figure of the former Russian Empire). It’s nothing other than a Type O Negative tour shirt from 2008, when the legendary and sadly departed band was promoting their last studio album »Dead Again« (2007). Mikko stands motionless on stage and pretty much grimaces his way through the whole show, which sustains the band’s gloomy, eternally-in-mourning expressive nature. In his delivery he uses two types of growling. A lower, death metal one, as well as a more rasping one. And where the mood calls for it, he switches to clean singing too. The band took the chance to put their fifth studio album, »Emerald Forest and the Blackbird«, which came out this year, front and center, giving it three songs.

Swallow The Sun’s set is a nicely done mix of confident, well-oiled playing, where psychedelia, gothic sentiment and, above all, doom stubbornness hand the baton back and forth in a highly infectious way. All of this effectively generates a rapacious atmosphere that sucks you far away, into a special world of boundless melancholy. The intimate club setting brought the band even closer to the listeners than we saw at their show at this year’s Metal Camp in Tolmin. This event in many ways recalled Swallow The Sun’s very successful club show at Ljubljana’s Gala Hala in 2010, when the band was presenting their then-current album »Fool Moon« (2009).

MOONSPELL:
»Alpha Noir« is another excellent manifesto from this esteemed Portuguese band, who over their career have pinned no end of genre trimmings onto the basic starting points of black metal. Through all their stylistic detours, Moonspell have always held on to their credibility, so there’s no studio album that hinted at a possible artistic »miss«, even though those detours lean decidedly provocative toward gothic metal, dark metal and even industrial (The Butterfly Effect). The new album is a step up from its excellent predecessor »Night Eternal« (2009). Anyone who’s seen Moonspell knows full well that this band is not to be messed with. Just ask the tour’s headliners Cradle Of Filth, who experienced it firsthand on a joint tour with Moonspell in 2009 and, compared to the relentless Moonspell hurricane of full-blooded performance perfection, came off as downright outmatched, frankly childishly immature, when they took the stage after Moonspell every night, in Zagreb and Ljubljana alike. This time Pain dodged that extremely thankless danger, which could have wrecked the stage confidence of Tägtgren and company, thanks to the pronounced genre distance between the two bands.

The stage opened up for Moonspell. The band got extra space, since the small drum kit of the first three opening acts was moved out of the way. The Portuguese got a full hour to play and in that hour they embodied the true core of their musical mission, which turned the Arena to dust and ashes. The passion boiling in the veins of this magnificent quintet, crossed with the extreme aggression of a full-blooded mix of evil and doom, effortlessly brought to life on stage the character traits of a howling werewolf that stops at nothing except a precisely measured grain of silver ammunition. In that regard, Fernando Ribeiro is a true stage beast. A charismatic commander, »short of stature« by Portuguese standards yet a real giant, he marched onto the stage in military fashion, roaring the first verses of the opening number Axis Mundi from the tenth studio album »Alpha Noir / Omega White«. On his head he wore a helmet that evoked images of Roman gladiators, Greek hoplites, even the Greek god of war Ares. The well-packed hall reacted with zeal to every gesture of the devilish frontman.

Visitors from Portugal took up the right side of the crowd. Yes. In the middle of Vienna. This »extra spice« generated an extremely intense chemistry between the crowd and the band on stage, and the hot temperament of the tireless young Portuguese lads in the front rows, with their loud Portuguese ovations, even set off some downright sobbing tears. In their set, Moonspell put their new standalone studio release front and center, and »tacked on« a bundle of established, quietly expected classics from older albums, such as Opium, Awake, Wolfshade, Vampiria, Alma Mater and Full Moon Madness.

The band put a spell on the room with a polished stage show, real commitment in hammering out every guitar riff, excellent use of the rolling thunder of the drums and the overall dynamics between the rhythm section of drums and bass, and as for who the main guitar soloists were that night, I won’t even waste words. The guitar duo of Ricardo Amorim and Pedro Paixão (the latter also handles keyboards) communicated like a fine blade that can cut sheets of lead to micron precision. Uncompromising. And of course, without the bestial Fernando Ribeiro, Moonspell wouldn’t have earned the label of full-blooded worshippers of the »werewolf« cult. Ribeiro delivered an outstanding vocal performance. His »growl« is murderous, and it’s a big shame the band didn’t have more than one hour. This singer is hugely convincing in clean singing too, creating a low, manly vocal combined with the spell of a whisper – ideal for dealing with the gothic element. And that element is anything but hidden on the excellent bonus studio album »Omega White«, which you can get in the limited edition of the album »Alpha Noir«. At the end of the Moonspell show we can draw the final line: Moonspell should absolutely be seen as the night’s headliner. The hour was too short, and the ecstatic crowd was left pretty starved.

PAIN:
From a personal, carefree hobby of musical gardening to a success story! That’s more or less how you could sum up in one breath the point of Pain, which was started as a project in 1996 by the head of Hypocrisy and one of the key pillars who contributed a whole mountain range to cementing metal music on the international scene – mostly through the services of Abyss studio too – the hyperactive and unyielding musician and producer Peter Tägtgren.

Pain are a well-recognized musical name today. In the studio, Pain is just one man. Peter Tägtgren, head and beard. On tour, though, the Pain project grows into a quartet, rounded out beside Peter on guitar/vocals by the stocky, curly-haired guitarist Michael Bohlin, the »Native American-looking« bassist Johan Husgavfel and drummer David Wallin, who has been helping Tägtgren since 2003.

Pain, who cemented their name worldwide especially thanks to two tours with Nightwish in 2008 and this year too (North America), hit right away with the punchy hit Same Old Song, which the crowd joined in on instantly. Let me mention that after Moonspell’s set the audience had been thoroughly mixed up and cleaned out in the front rows. In the Arena, which was very nicely filled, though not so much that you couldn’t breathe, people were jumping in unison to pretty much every Pain song. Of course, it’s all underpinned by an industrial rhythm that David Wallin’s drumming only reinforces, while the songs also contain additional sub-rhythm patterns. All programmed and added to the accompaniment as backing tracks. All the techno patterns, as well as the keyboards (synthesizers), which don’t hide the urges of electronic dance pop sounds from the old days at the turn of the eighties into the nineties, through assorted primitive Atari PC sounds, even Game Boy sounds, are the foundation of the sonic backdrop that Pain build on one side, while the other half of it of course belongs to the realm of massively overdistorted guitar riffs hovering above the techno bed of industrial esotericism. In that respect it wouldn’t be silly, in terms of genre compatibility, to swap Moonspell for Fear Factory on the current »Into Darkness« bill, though in all likelihood Pain would then be opening for Fear Factory.

The melodies are fully defined in such an environment and the atmospheric payoff fully capitalized. The same goes for the sound. It was excellent in the Arena during the show. That means Pain delivered a truly excellent concert that night, which the crowd’s extraordinary involvement confirmed. The great performance was also helped by Peter Tägtgren’s very good mood, as his voice served him well throughout the set, and the charismatic frontman with the forever sleep-deprived eyes showed his cheerful mood with frequent smiles and solid banter with the crowd between songs. This time too, the lanky Tägtgren, dressed in a straitjacket, looked like an »offended spaghetti«, and the guy himself could be slotted into the animated film »Monsters, Inc.« Eternal and true to the heritage of Pain’s music, then.

Could anyone even doubt the success when you string together hit after hit, tuck in a few novelties, headed by the latest hit Dirty Woman, and close the show, as expected, with the demanded On And On and the ultra-beloved Shut Your Mouth? A real paradise for all true Pain fans in the Arena came to life! Pure incarnation!

We can say this concert marathon turned out extremely well, mainly thanks to Pain’s compact and polished stage machinery, while at the same time it’s ironic, yet entirely fair, to note that the phenomenal Moonspell, with another hour of material, could have completely filled Pain’s headliner slot, and the »Into Darkness« tour would have been just as credible in every way. The question is whether it would have worked out financially, too. That’s why teaming up with Pain was necessary, since they brought the bulk of the target audience to the show, and probably to the tour itself. No two ways about it! An outing worth all the sins!