Lackluster Sonata Arctica Play to a Fired-Up Milan Crowd (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Palasharp / Milan / Italy
Concert date: 25.11.2009
Attendance: 4,500
Ticket price: €25.00

One of the biggest touring juggernauts sailing the power metal waters on European soil this fall is surely the tour by Finns Sonata Arctica. Rewind a few years and you can’t help marveling at how a band that started out looking like plain generic shuffling along the pioneering path of their countrymen Stratovarius managed to reach a level of success, and grow a fan base big enough, to run its own headline tours around the world today. These days Sonata Arctica can probably thank the fact that bands like the “real” Nightwish and the “real” Stratovarius have vanished from the horizon, or are still pushing on but in the shadow of their former greatness.

I remember how the still totally green lads shook on stage in Salzburg (Rockhouse, 25.04.2000) as one of the support acts (along with Italians Rhapsody, still without the “of Fire” suffix) for the then-“big” Stratovarius, presenting their debut “Ecliptica” (1999). Today, exactly ten years after that first album, they enjoy the status of genuine power metal stars.

The tour was in jeopardy between 17.11.2009 and 22.11.2009, because Sonata Arctica singer Tony Kakko caught a nasty throat infection, which got the band’s shows in Graz (18.11.2009), Vienna (19.11.2009) and Munich (20.11.2009) canceled. That left Milan as the last chance to catch the band. Milan, the tour’s only stop in Italy, served up quite a nice surprise. The PalaSharp hall, which holds 9,000, was beautifully full. Sonata Arctica are obviously hugely popular in Italy. Some 4,500 heads must have crammed into the hall to back their heroes of melodic “symphonic” metal.

At 20.00 sharp, Finns Winterborn step on stage. The band, who put out the album “Farewell to Saints” (2009) this year – RockLine review HERE – showed up as a tightly rehearsed sextet with a good dose of experience and plenty of road mileage. A young band, but made up of seasoned musicians. The band’s vocabulary is highly generic, and they delivered their power metal vision more than confidently through songs like The Land Of The Free, Black Rain, Wildheart and The Winter War. On top of that, the guys had decent sound, which is a very welcome factor for a relatively unknown band that needs as many chances to show itself as it can get. The one who impressed most in the sextet was the short, stocky singer Teemu Koskela, with an authoritative, polished, melodic voice that rounded out the credibility of otherwise predictable battle marches and infectious anthemic tunes. Even though the band isn’t reinventing the wheel, they could stir up real interest among those of you looking for “unspoiled” melody in metal, with keyboards playing an important role. At the end of the half-hour set, the band, who (interestingly) had no official merchandise (just like Delain), tossed a nice number of copies of the latest CD “Farewell to Saints” to the starving Italian youth, and left the stage.

The Dutch band Delain, whom you may well have heard of, since this spring they did a short headline tour of Europe with Slovenia’s Last Day Here as support. RockLine covered their April stop in Munich HERE. Delain are definitely the main breath of fresh air in gothic power metal, a genre where competition is incredibly dense and the differences separating the bands’ sound are often down to barely noticeable nuances. The Dutch surprised with their fresh release “April Rain” (2009) – RockLine review HERE – which confirms their quality and is a real step up from the debut “Lucidity” (2006). So the band hit the stage with some seriously strong aces up their sleeve when it comes to polish and melodic perfection in the songs. They opened the show a little unexpectedly with Invidia, which took the place of April Rain in that slot. All eyes were of course on Charlotte Wessels, who is outfitted for the stage to the absolute max. From the excellent singing to the polished performance to, of course, the provocative look. The big question mark on stage was the fresh face in the lineup, a pint-sized ball of energy, rowdy as the devil, with a curled lip: new guitarist Ewout Pieters. He joined the band right before the tour started. What was astonishing was how tight he was and how well he fit into the band from the very first note. Clearly the switch had been brewing for a while. Swapping a member at a point like the moment a band heads out on tour is a huge risk. But Ewout must have been rehearsing seriously beforehand. The change was in the air, and the band was just picking the right moment.

During the set the band hit a minor snag when the main stage sound died in the middle of Virtue And Vice. Interestingly, Charlotte didn’t even notice and kept singing the verses. Guitarist Ewout did notice that something was off, which showed on his confused face, but the band managed to keep their concentration and followed Charlotte on the strength of the stage amps alone. A few moments later the sound thankfully came back into the hall. Only in Control The Storm and Nothing Left could you feel a bit of a void, where the second vocal in the duet was missing. Well, a backing track on stage can’t always be captured perfectly. Still. Delain delivered a set after which all you could say was: “Damn that half hour! These guys deserve to play another hour.”

Armed with their sixth studio album “The Days Of Grays”, whose cover vaguely recalls the band’s 2001 effort “Silence”, the headliners finally showed up on stage at ten p.m. Most people had come for Sonata Arctica. You could feel the euphoria even before the set. Plenty of banners hung from the stands to prove it, as if this were an Iron Maiden show and not just some lesser “powermetal-lets”. Among them even a cheekily double-edged one: “Yes, we kakk!” (a play on the singer’s surname). But times change. And so does the generation following metal. And Sonata Arctica clearly know which levers to pull with the Italian crowd, who are especially nuts about epicness, bombast, kitsch and properly symphonic shaping of the lead melodies, with the “cancel” key always pressed down on any potential semitone sequences.

With the fast Flag In The Ground, Sonata Arctica get the hall on its feet and the partying begins. The way the crowd sang along with the band was unbelievable. All night long. The band mixed the new songs in with older material, but the most interesting thing was watching the eruptions in the hall at songs from the debut “Ecliptica” such as Full Moon, Replica (in a slowed-down version) and the surprise of the night, 8th Commandement, which Tony introduced by saying that it’s ten years this year since the band released their debut and that this was the right moment to mark the anniversary.

Of course Tony Kakko wasn’t at his best. The throat infection left its mark on his singing. He deftly dodged the harder (especially higher and highest) passages and often left them to the crowd in the choruses. For the “Silence” song Last Drop Falls, otherwise excellent, he even invited Delain singer Charlotte Wessels on stage, and she sang the entire ballad version of the song.  The band also ate up minutes with solos, and at the end the drawn-out encore left a bad taste: Queen’s We Will Rock You, the expected Vodka “binge”, and a staged repeat of the exit from the show with Everything Fades to Gray, where neither In Black and White nor Don’t Say a Word could wash away the bitter aftertaste.

In the end we got only an hour and twenty minutes of a band that is barely 13 years old in total. Even Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, four times older, manage to do more on stage these days, and that was a huge letdown that left a totally cold feeling. A feeling that the band had simply run through the show on autopilot, collected their paycheck, and didn’t squeeze out a single drop of sweat on stage, let alone blood.  Luckily Delain got a measly 30 minutes, otherwise the Dutch, in great form, would have washed Sonata Arctica right off the stage this time.

photos: Robi Lipej 

Setlist

DELAIN: 1. Invidia 2. Stay Forever 3. The Gathering 4. Go Away 5. Virtue And Vice 6. Shattered 7. Control The Storm 8. Nothing Left SONATA ARCTICA: 1. Everything Fades to Gray (Intro) 2. Flag in the Ground 3. Paid in Full 4. Caleb 5. The Last Amazing Grays 6. As If the World Wasn’t Ending 7. Full Moon 8. Last Drop Falls 9. Juliet 10. Keyboard-Solo / Guitar-Solo 11. Replica 12. 8th Commandment —encore— 13. We Will Rock You (Queen cover) 14. In Black and White 15. Don’t Say a Word 16. Vodka 17. Everything Fades To Gray (Outro)

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