Location: Woergl / Komma / Austria
Concert date: 02.12.2011
Attendance: 200
Ticket price: €25.00 (advance) / €29.00 (day of show)
Two of us hitting the road for Austrian Tyrol! A few of us maniacs are still alive and kicking! Two metal souls, to be exact! The mission: catching the German heavy rock outfit Sinner, still led to this day by the tireless German metal guru Mat Sinner (Sinner, Primal Fear, Voodoo Circle, etc…). Mat Sinner is an old hand on the metal scene, best known as the bass player of Primal Fear, which is also where his main focus lies. So albums from his original band Sinner usually come out when Primal Fear are “on pause”, and that’s typically followed by a short Sinner European tour with dates that are hellishly far from Slovenia. After the September tour was cancelled because Mat Sinner got hurt in a motorbike crash, our originally planned assault on Augsburg in Germany, where the band had one of its confirmed shows, went down the drain. But when the second batch of dates for the rescheduled tour was confirmed, we ended up saving ourselves about 200 km of driving (each way), because the band’s new batch of dates included a show in Woergl, Austria, at the local club Komma. And on the perfect day, too. A Saturday.
Supporting Sinner on the tour is another bunch of Germans, called Voodoo Circle. The lineup is made up of top-notch musicians. First off, there’s Pink Cream 69 vocalist David Readman, the bass is played by none other than the esteemed Mat Sinner himself (meaning he was on stage twice every night), the boss of the whole thing is a true Malmsteen-style “guitarrero”, Alex Beyrodt (also a member of Sinner and Primal Fear, and the only one who, just like Mat, collected two paychecks per gig night), then there’s keyboardist Jimmy Kresic, while Markus Kullmann terrorizes the drums. This year the band released its second studio album, “Broken Heart Syndrome”. Stylistically, Voodoo Circle stay true to the hard rock tradition, drawing inspiration from the look and work of seventies bands, first and foremost Rainbow and Deep Purple. No wonder, since Beyrodt, the main driving engine and creative mastermind of Voodoo Circle, plays guitar like a carved-out combination of Malmsteen and his Blackmore obsession.
Voodoo Circle are fantastic on stage. Dennis is explosive on vocals in every register he climbs to (or drops to), and over the years his voice clearly isn’t wearing out. Instead, his incredibly beautiful, clean, melodic vocal is maturing like good old wine. The band is tight and untamed. In the style of their role models, Voodoo Circle also weave in a bunch of short jam bits, where Beyrodt and Kresic trade a few extra bursts of soloing, which masterfully fires up the crowd below the stage, and of course that kind of ego-challenging pushes the musicians toward an even more inspired approach to the material. As expected, the band put together a set drawn from both studio albums, with an emphasis on the latest, “Broken Heart Syndrome”.
A short break follows while the stage is set up for the night’s headliners, Sinner. Sinner, who dedicated this tour primarily to promoting this year’s new studio album “One Bullet Left” (2011), have returned to a hard rock sound and their eighties roots with their last three albums. Between 1996 and 2003, Sinner put out a number of venomously revamped, metal-snarling albums that reach the level of noisy magnitude of their “brothers” Primal Fear’s records. Sadly, though, the songs that fans of heavy metal always knew and valued the band for most haven’t been played live for several years now.
Sinner have recently refreshed their lineup. They now field no fewer than three guitarists: Alex Beyrodt, Christof Leim and Alex Scholpp. On drums, Mat Sinner has one of the best German drummers on the planet right now, Andre Hilgers (Rage, ex-Axxis, Silent Force). We mustn’t overlook the rock-solid front man, boss and leader Mat SInner, on vocals and bass. So, a quintet. There used to be a fifth Sinner member, keyboardist Frank Roeseler, but now there are no keyboards, just a devilish triple-guitar stamping. Hilgers and Beyrodt already played together in Silent Force. So the bonds between the band members are well established, and the friendships have been solid for years.
A little after nine in the evening, Sinner step on stage through an intro, and then comes the eruption into the hard-hitting Suicide Mission. The sound on stage is excellent. A real feast for the eyes was the sight of three “sharp-toothed” guitarists going wild on stage, bursting with surplus adrenaline as they cut their guitar riffs with vehemence. The Sinner wagon is running in fifth gear as the band continues its satanic march with the catchy Comin’ Out Fighting from the album of the same name from 1986, and the sound only gets more massive and crushing. Mat’s recognizable, mid-to-low-pitched “macho” vocal is melodic enough, while delivering the most power in its own registers! His bass lines are simple, but the sound of him digging into the bass is rattlingly thick. Since the band no longer has keyboardist Roesler, who used to handle backing vocals too, Mat entrusted those to his Voodoo Circle colleague David Readman. Readman stayed put behind a bar set up on stage and sang his vocal harmony lines from behind it, all while mixing Jack Daniel’s-based cocktails. What’s more, Readman made sure the throats of the Sinner guys didn’t stay dry either. So he poured plenty of shots of the devil’s liquor, and the band members kept coming over to the bar to knock them back, during the less demanding parts of the songs where their contribution isn’t essential. The band seemed truly relaxed and visibly enjoyed playing. Of the quintet, the biggest letdown was Mat Sinner himself, who as a frontman didn’t keep much eye contact with the crowd and so came across as rather cold and “distant” on stage. They played five songs from the new album! Totally justified, since the album is more than worth the full attention of any true Sinner fan. The band kept up the crushing tempo. There was very little talking between songs, if any. Next came a drum solo spot, where Hilgers showed he’s cut from the kind of cloth that only a handful of European metal drummers can match.
Sinner served up quite a few treats from the eighties era, playing Bad Girl and Danger Zone. With the latter, the guys closed out the show. What to say after 14 songs? Did the show fly by too quickly? From a band of Sinner’s caliber, with a hefty discography of albums, I’d have expected a few more songs. There was nothing from the band’s “metal” period or from albums like “End Of Sanctuary”, “Nature Of Evil” and “Judgement Day”. So after the show I was left with a bitter feeling that the band is playing this tour with some deliberately added brakes on and a bit of penny-pinching.
After the show we chatted with Sinner guitarist Chris. A polished and incredibly nice musician, he said they had consciously decided to put shorter, punchier songs in the set. The band is superbly tight on stage, the sound was working optimally, and you could hear every note played by every musician in the quintet. The songs sound even fuller and more pronounced live than on the studio originals. Despite the shorter running time, catching a Sinner show is a must for all true fans of hard/heavy sound, since the band is a stylistic oddity of heavy rock on the European map. Simple as that. German reliability, fully justified by the embodiment of the proverbial phrase: “Germany rocks!” “Roxxx heavy as fuck!”.
photos and text: Jani Mihevc Cah
text edited by: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
SINNER: 1.Suicide Mission 2.Coming’ Out Fighting 3.Bad Girl 4.The One You Left Behind 5.Back on Trail 6.Born to Rock 7.Knife In My Heart 8.10 2 Death 9. solo bobni (Andre Hilgers) 10.Crash and Burn 11.Haunted 12.Germany Rocks 13.Rebel Yell (orig. Billy Idol) —dodatek— 14.Danger Zone
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