Performing: Vanden Plas, Neverdream, conXious
Location: Vienna (Wien) / Szene / Austria
Date: Friday, March 25, 2011
Vanden Plas are German prog metallers who helped shape and cement the genre in the mid-nineties. The main culprits behind all of it are, of course, Dream Theater, who kicked off a proper revolution, and before long new bands were popping up on the scene, stretching the reach and message of prog metal and how it shows up musically. Vanden Plas are, for instance, the real German answer. Like Enchant, Symphony X, Shadow Gallery (all three from the USA), or Angra (from Brazil), each going in their own direction. But these bands do have something in common. Unlike Dream Theater, all their songs hold onto a compactness that always comes first. So for all the dizzying layering that comes from the unbridled urge to explore and experiment in progressive music, these bands made sure, in their creativity, that the ultra-melodic lead lines stayed front and center. That way every song keeps a common thread and a sensible balance between being easy on the ear (the “accessible melodies” attribute) and “escaping” toward undiscovered musical adventures, as dictated by the exploratory attitude of artistic freedom that comes with the word “progressive”, in tune with the level of creative maturity.
Catching Vanden Plas anywhere south of Frankfurt am Main (Germany) has been a pure pipe dream for a few years now. But the ice was finally broken. Specifically last year, when the band put out a gorgeous new studio album in early June, “The Seraphic Clockwork” “(2010, Frontiers Records) – RockLine review HERE and “booked” a gig in the middle of the Bavarian capital at the end of May. But the timing for RockLine to swoop in on the band’s show wasn’t right. Still, the wait paid off. Vienna 2011 and a confirmed show at the club Szene. A mini prog metal festival, rounded out by conXious, Vienna locals, and Italy’s Neverdream, who joined Vanden Plas for just three shows on this tour. Their second show brought them to the Austrian capital. But let’s dwell on conXious first. The brothers Alexander (guitar) and Michael Ghezzo (drums), newcomer on bass Ernst C. Zach and vocalist Michael G. Reiter make up the quartet that started warming up a terribly poorly attended club. Only a handful of people watched the locals in the hall, maybe 30 heads and no more. ConXious, whose latest studio album (their second) came out in 2005 (Never Before/Never Again), are really a peculiar musical hybrid that’s still evolving. Their approach is anything but the approach described in the first paragraph of this report. Not only is the music completely fragmented, the way motifs get combined is also wildly eccentric and unusual, so you need a whole lot of time to come to terms with this kind of music, if you ever do. I managed to catch the band live for the second time in my life. And they didn’t win me over the second time either. ConXious remain an enigmatic, seriously hard-to-digest musical unit in that respect. Bridging what the ear finds incompatible just isn’t working out too well for them. Just as a motif gets going, another one cuts it off, and what follows often doesn’t just “catch you off guard” with a string of unpredictable mood swings, it simply “whacks” your ear, not to say hurts. From mixing country, reggae and some other similar musical exotica into metal. It just doesn’t take off, and doesn’t take off.
Neverdream are Italians. Cut from a totally different cloth. You can feel the experience of seasoned, high-browed guys, which shows they’re not new to the music business. They know what they’re doing, what they’re chasing and what they want. We can talk about prog metal that’s hugely branching, flexible and open to absorbing all kinds of musical ideas, boldly woven into the band’s core sound. The lineup has no fewer than two keyboard players, programming tricks are thrown in, plus saxophone solos! The lineup, virtually unchanged since 2004 (Giorgio Massimi on vocals, Giuseppe Marinelli on guitar, Mauro Neri on keyboards, Andrea Terzulli on bass, Fabrizio Dottori on keyboards, saxophone and programming, Gabriele Palmieri on drums), put out its third studio album, “Said”, last year. On it the guys cemented their sound and style, which they can keep developing so boldly and breezily while staying instantly recognizable. The riffs of course belong to metal, while the guys often head into elaborately shaped song development with that prized, sought-after theater vibe, which we like to call the unpredictability of constantly swirling moods. Unlike their predecessors conXious, Neverdream do this with far more skill and a polished vision all their own. The rich, multilayered sonic structure is of course rooted in the heritage of Italy’s old-school prog rock bands, who left a lasting mark on the world music scene and in fact carved out a separate branch of rock music as early as the early seventies. The vocals don’t necessarily resort to “shooting” off with power-packed vocal cords and lungs either, but stay palpably adaptable and sophisticated in the subtler parts. Even in their use of English, Neverdream, originally from Rome, come across convincingly enough, and their prog metal orientation presented a mature band that evening, hugely interesting to discover for all fans of the genre. Those fans who enjoy a concise dash of Italian-cuisine spiciness. No “fishing through” an endless sea of musical scales. Instead we get to enjoy a tasty sequence of interesting developments in a melodic collection of lead motifs. The sound was very well done, as was the convincing interplay between the members, which confirmed they’re excellent musicians and individualists who can very effectively win even a lay visitor over to their side.
Vanden Plas need no special introduction. The band from the German city of Karlsruhe released its first studio album back in 1994 (“Colour Temple”), which was considered one of the best debuts of that distant year. Even the debut announced that a new band was on the horizon, bringing a whole new musical character to the scene. The lineup, unchanged since the debut (Andy Kuntz on vocals, Stephan Lill on guitar, Stephan’s brother Andreas on drums, the exceptional keyboardist Günter Werno and bassist Torsten Reicheer), is considered today one of the most experienced prog metal crews in the world. Sadly, also one of the most overlooked. Vanden Plas remain at once a symbol of perfection and constant musical development and progress. Their latest studio album “The Seraphic Clockwork” is an upgrade on everything the band has done in the studio so far, and with it Vanden Plas reached a new level of development, heralding even greater mastery in combining complexity and multilayered structure with infectious melodicism. It’s also the most demanding album of Vanden Plas’s career, while at the same time offering a whole bag full of grandeur through the exceptional bombast of its chorus melodies.
Back to the stage and the heart of the action. Even though Vanden Plas dragged their feet and only took the stage at a quarter to eleven at night, they were greeted by a half-empty hall at Szene, where you could barely count a bit under 100 heads.
Vanden Plas didn’t pay much attention to the situation. They came at it full throttle. You could tell the band hadn’t played together in a long while, or hasn’t had many gigs behind it in recent years. But from the start and through the whole show you could feel that youthful playfulness, mischief, curiosity, drive and heart that you rarely get from experienced bands with many years on the clock.
The guys seasoned the setlist very pleasingly. They instantly kicked things into high gear with the excellent openers I Can See and Into the Sun, picked from the most recognizable songs that embody the album “Far Off Grace” (1999). Andy left some of the initiative to the crowd in the choruses at first, but once he’d warmed up his vocal cords, he sang with everything he had. It was breathtaking to realize how the guy has kept his vocal power untouched after all these years. All registers, including the highest, he nailed with exceptional confidence. Andy is also known as an excellent interpreter and stage actor who has the whole audience under his control in no time. Same this time. Absolutely every listener, sadly not many of them, started joining in the instant Andy asked for it, even with a modest gesture, or simply asked: “Vienna! Are you still with us?”
This time the highlights of the show were actually the new songs. That only proves how exceptional the new album is, and that after all these years Vanden Plas have far from dulled their teeth. They stay fresh and creatively inspired. The guys had an immense amount of fun on stage, trading cheeky smiles with each other as they worked through the repertoire, and the drum wizard Andreas Lill showed off his musical bravura already with the daredevil opening drum transition between Into The Sun and the new Holes In The Sky.
The band’s performance lived up to all the high expectations. From the first second to the last, the quintet’s exceptional telepathic connection on stage, especially Stephan Lill’s breathtakingly precise and crystal-clear smooth soloing, the brilliant touches from keyboardist Günter Werno, the stretched-out outros of individual songs, or the beefed-up instrumental middle sections, especially in older songs (Cold Wind, Iodic Rain), which only ripen with the years and gain value in Vanden Plas’s live arsenal.
Besides the quintet’s telepathic connection on stage, it’s also striking how the guys basically play with their eyes closed. Without a single glance at the guitar neck or the bass neck. Simple as that. Autopilot, total ease, the kind you only get with serious mileage, the kind that fills you with absolute relaxation and lets you play in a way that convinces through a mix of technical polish and primal feeling. Flawless.
A new song like Rush Of Silence was a first real peak all by itself, since it’s more complexly built and its atmosphere keeps surging through unexpected crashing waves that carry the listener through many moods. For the end of the regular set, Vanden Plas saved two exceptional aces up their sleeve. The new dramatic prog metal beauty Scar Of An Angel and the harder-hitting “Christ 0.” classic Postcard To God. The encore brought to the stage the fantastic title track of the previous record “Chirst .0,” which turned out to be one of the nicest surprises of the setlist, and, as expected, the show ended with the wound-up Rainmaker (“The God Thing”, 1997). Soul Survives from the debut “Colour Temple” and the new Quicksilver were also on the repertoire, but the band scrapped them from the show. There are two possible answers. Either the turnout was too small, or the band simply decides on the fly which two songs to cut from the fixed setlist before every show, so not even two setlists on the tour are exactly the same. Sadly, we were deprived of any song from the excellent debut “Colour Temple”, which is the only complaint about this round of enjoying Vanden Plas’s music. The other reproach goes to the very immature and musically unenlightened Austrian audience, which can’t manage to lure even a full 100 heads to a show by greats like Vanden Plas. We’re talking about Vienna, the Austrian capital with 1.7 million inhabitants. Even on a Friday night, like this one.
Anyway. The years-long wait for Vanden Plas to come close enough to Slovenia that a one-day trip to their show is physically doable within normal limits for two lost heads among their fans from Slovenia was repaid with every single second of stage brilliance from these German musical perfectionists with a unique musical self, especially given that at the end of the show all the band members came out to mingle, so you could exchange a few words with each of them, take a commemorative photo together, get a precious autograph. In short, anyone who loves their mechanoreceptors and cares that their body and soul take in musical refinement, yet let themselves skip Vanden Plas on this tour, can be aware they made an unforgivable mistake. In closing I can only add: “Vanden Plas in every village!”
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. I Can See
2. Into The Sun
3. Holes In The Sky
4. Silently
5. Iodic Rain
6. Rush Of Silence
7. Far Off Grace
8. Cold Wind
9. Frequency
10. Scar Of An Angel
11. Postcard To God
—encore—
12. Christ 0.
13. Rainmaker
