Author: Sebastijan Videc
Photos: Sebastijan Videc
Video: Sebastijan Videc
Venue: Dom Sportova, Zagreb, Croatia
Concert date: March 13, 2017
Attendance: 2,500
As anyone who follows Sabaton knows, every new album means a massive world tour, and if they don’t play in Slovenia, they’ll definitely hit nearby Zagreb. Considering the band has been one of Europe’s most popular metal acts for a few years now, especially live, every one of their shows is a one-of-a-kind experience. And the fact that they brought German metal veterans Accept along on the tour guaranteed an excellent night. The crowd outside the Dom Sportova halls, plus a few buses from a well-known Slovenian concert transport company, also promised an audience that would get involved, which you simply can’t do without.
The evening ran strictly to the published schedule, so at exactly 7 p.m. Swedish power metallers Twilight Force took the stage. The guys come, just like Sabaton, from Falun, so it’s no surprise their older townsmen took them out on tour, and Joakim even guested as a vocalist on their latest album. The band formed five years ago and has two albums under its belt. If you’re looking for the most clichéd power metal band around, look no further. The members look like some expedition out of Tolkien’s stories (knights, elves, wizards…), the stage backdrop is decked out with castles and dragons, and the music is a mix of influences from bands like Hammerfall, Rhapsody and Dragonforce. Even their TF logo looks strikingly like Hammerfall’s HF logo. The show itself, sadly, wasn’t convincing. In front of a mostly empty hall, which slowly filled up toward the end of their half-hour set, they got badly shortchanged by poor sound, which may have been partly down to all that empty space. The instruments were muddy and you could barely hear the bass. Twilight Force did manage to build an interactive rapport with the small crowd, and the set was spiced up by the contrast between singer Chrileon’s clean vocal lines and keyboardist Blackwald, who jumped in with rougher vocals and also acted as the storyteller linking things together. Unfortunately, toward the end the singer’s voice started to lose precision, which left an extra bitter aftertaste. Better luck next time!
After that limp set, there was no doubt we were in for an hour of real heavy metal schooling, the kind both the opener and the headliner could stand to learn from. Accept have been going, with a few breaks, for a good forty years, and the band’s roots stretch back even to the sixties of the last century. The real rebirth came in 2009, when guitarist Wolf Hoffmann and bassist Peter Baltes, both members since 1976, met singer Mark Tornillo and in 2010 put out ‘Blood of the Nations’ with him, which smashed all their previous records. The following albums were just as successful, and a new one is expected this summer. An hour is far too short for legends like this, but the rock-solid Germans squeezed every last second out of it. An ideal mix of eighties hits and the successes of the last few years kept the packed hall on its feet from start to finish. The seasoned, hardened musicians pulled the show off at a high level and with as much energy as anyone, years be damned. During the many guitar solos (and there were plenty), Tornillo had fun playing »air guitar«, while Wolf, with incredible grimaces on his face, bent the strings like a madman. As is typical for them, the amps were cranked to maximum volume, and this time that was slightly too much for this hall: there was a bit of echo, the bass got lost somewhere in the crowd, and the guitars occasionally whistled right through our aching ears. But heavy metal isn’t music you listen to quietly, right?
This year marks ten years since I first saw Sabaton, mostly toward the end of their set, as the first opener at the Therion and Grave Digger show in Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna. The next time they played here was two years later at Maribor’s Štuk, supporting the famed Swedish power metallers HammerFall, and they completely overshadowed them and proved beyond doubt that their time had come. Every new album charts higher, and hundreds of packed shows between releases only confirm their popularity. And because you have to secure your financial future, they’ve cashed in on that popularity fair and square: besides the already classic merch, every year they run their own festival, a Baltic Sea cruise, special one-off shows, and now they’re getting into the world of mobile apps too. Strike while the iron is hot, as the old saying goes, and they’re sticking to it to the letter. The current tour is called »The Last Tour«, not because they’re saying goodbye, but simply because of their latest album »The Last Stand«. At half past nine in the evening the lights went out and two slightly confused soldiers marched onto the stage, the first with a metal detector, the second with an »Achtung, Minen!« sign on his shoulder, to the sound of Sabaton’s cover of the Status Quo hit »In The Army Now«. After a hefty fellow in a Soviet officer’s uniform scolded them, they cleared off the stage, and on top of the drum tank appeared Daniel Sjögren, otherwise the drummer of opener Twilight Force. Sabaton drummer Hannes van Dahl has taken paternity leave, since he and Floor Jansen, Nightwish’s singer, are expecting a baby these days. The band then, as per usual, exploded into the opening Ghost Division. For this tour Sabaton got themselves a huge video wall hanging behind the drum tank, adding a visual dimension to the audio experience. And then, already with the next song, Sparta, came a surprise. Spartan warriors in helmets, armed with spears and shields, marched onto the stage, and singer Joakim strode out dressed as King Leonidas. The scene naturally raised expectations that similar scenes would play out in the following songs, but sadly, apart from Joakim in a Swedish army cloak during Carolus Rex, it didn’t happen. Shame! The Last Tour is also the first tour for new rhythm guitarist Tommy Johansson. Of course he got ribbed by the band, especially the singer, who dubbed him »the dork«, which the crowd chanted back several times during the show. But Tommy proved his added value a little later too. Stagehands rolled keyboards onto the stage, and Joakim played the opening bars of the Van Halen classic Jump on them. Then he quickly apologized that his skills weren’t up to it and handed them over to Tommy. Tommy hit back and played the solo from the aforementioned Jump on the piano, to the hall’s great delight. An acoustic version of Final Solution followed, with Chris joining the piano on acoustic guitar, Pär on bass and Daniel on a small drum. The sound, unlike for the previous bands, was excellent this time, and the setlist leaned on the last two albums as expected, but it still didn’t go without a few older classics. An extremely nice gesture from the band was the closing credits sequence at the end of the show, in which they thanked the whole crew supporting the Sabaton machine on this tour by name. After 18 years and more than 1,000 shows in over 50 countries around the world, on Monday night they proved once again that they’re a force you don’t mess with and that their moment is far from over.
Setlist
Twilight Force
1. Battle of Arcane Might
2. To the Stars
3. Riders of the Dawn
4. Flight of the Sapphire Dragon
5. Gates of Glory
6. The Power of the Ancient Force
Accept
1. Stampede
2. Stalingrad
3. London Leatherboys
4. Final Journey
5. Princess of the Dawn
6. Fast As a Shark
7. Metal Heart
8. Teutonic Terror
9. Balls to the Wall
Sabaton
In the Army Now (intro)
The March to War (intro)
1. Ghost Division
2. Sparta
3. Blood of Bannockburn
4. Swedish Pagans
5. The Last Stand
6. Carolus Rex
7. Union (Slopes of St. Benedict)
8. The Lost Battalion
9. Far From the Fame
10. The Lion From the North
11. Final Solution (acoustic)
12. Resist And Bite
13. Night Witches
14. Winged Hussars
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15. Primo Victoria
16. Shiroyama
17. To Hell And Back
Photo Gallery
