Which therapy is the best against Seasonal Affective Disorder? No doubt, holidays on sunny beaches are! But what are you to do when you lack the loose cash? Visit a decent Power Metal-concert!
Lucky enough this took shape in an EDGUY-gig and when we noticed that DRAGONFORCE did the support, there was nothing to stop us anymore!

The sky was hazy and the temperatures around zero when we went to Osnabrück. The Halle Gartlage seemed to be an excellent location for an event like this: a big parking lot right next to the medium-sized concert-hall with stands and a large "foyer" for merchandizing-stands and beer- and sausage-booths.
We took seats quite high in the stands to save our energy for the main act. But later on we proved to be too lazy to dive into the crowd in front of the stage and remained in our seats.

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Just in time the first support SABATON started the show with the title-track of their first long player Primo Victoria. SABATON is a Swedish band of six musicians who play epic Power Metal with some progressive influence. They were especially able to convince us with powerful, quite deep vocals and excellent guitars, though the other instrumentalists were really good, either. A whole crowd of fans rocked with the band while they got introduced to some songs from the upcoming album. From the record mentioned above SABATON played Wolfpack, Into The Fire and Metal Machine. After a short but convincing performance they cleared the stage.

After installing an additional podium DRAGONFORCE ran over us like a storm. How they enjoyed playing! Unbelievable! And their musical abilities - unbelievable, too! It was pure joy to watch these musicians romp and frolic on stage. They bumped into each other, tried to play the others instruments while running by, they were joking. They did all this while playing ultra-fast, light-hearted, easy-to-sing-along Metal. Sometimes it was hard to follow Herman "Shred" Li's fingers with the eyes. He was just playing too fast. And when he played from above with his left hand here and there in his solos you could not believe your eyes, because you were not able to hear him switching. Sam Todman still played in humane pace, but followed Herman quite easily most of the time. Again and again both were standing on the podium and played their super-fast leads and solos parallel. Then they turned around and with the music jumped down from the podium. Often they were pushed away from the vocalist ZP Theard, whose voice was mixed too low and too sharp. Nevertheless his communication with the audience and his presence on stage was excellent. Again we could hardly believe our eyes when keyboarder Vadim Pruzhanov came to the front of the stage with a keyboard that was carried like a guitar. First he held it with his left hand and played with the right one, as usual. But then he supported it with his knee and played with both hands. I can not imagine how one can be able to play in such a position; anyway, here it looked like a walk in the park. The bass-player and the drummer did a very good job as well, of course and they participated in the jokes. A very beautiful effect had the wind machine in front of the podium: it blew into the very long hair of the musicians and underlined the vital impression of the band. This firework of music and show was over far too soon!
Setlist: My Spirit Will Go On / Fury Of The Storm / Dawn Over A New World / Through The Fire And Flames / Valley Of The Damned

Finally the black curtain, that had made the stage much too small especially for DRAGONFORCE, came down and the stage was ready for EDGUY. From the speakers boomed "Fiesta Mexicana" by Rex Gildo, because it was carnival-time. Tobi really is a wag - and he has got black humour indeed, thinking of the fact that Rex Gildo also committed suicide because of this very song.
With the "intro" of the album Hellfire Club: "Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the FREAKSHOW!", EDGUY entered the elaborately decorated stage and opened up a stylish show with the quite simple Catch Of The Century from the latest release Rocket Ride. Tobias Sammet wore an awful zebra-striped coat. But – god thanks – he already got rid of it for the very rocking Sacrifice. This was absolutely necessary, because Tobi, a very restless character, always sprinted across the stage, so we were actually wondering about his source of energy. His voice in top-condition, but over all mixed too low, he sang almost half of the songs from the new album. We were sad to hear only some of the true pearls of the past records. The fans were enthusiastic and eagerly followed Tobi's animations and jokes. Playing a part of Iron Maiden's The Trooper was quite unnecessary and normally should not be mentioned in the setlist. But a nice thing was that Tobi found an old setlist of Hammerfall taped to the stage (must have been from their gig last November), which inspired him to try a song of them. That really was a spontaneous and nice story! We really had fun with EDGUY's show and they were convincing musically, but nevertheless we could not get rid of the impression that everything had been planned into detail from the beginning, like the performance of Tobi's guitar-playing-abilities and his repeated astride jumps from the drum-podium, his D-tour through the audience (he went very close to where we were sitting ;) ) or even the quite impressing drum-solo, which ended as usual with the Imperial March. We would have liked a little more flexibility regarding the setlist and the anecdotes, but many bands have a fixed program and this is probably demanded by the labels. Perhaps this impression was triggered by the unlucky fact that EDGUY had to perform after the vigorous gig of DRAGONFORCE. EDGUY just can not be prepared with the latter regarding virtuosity and enjoy playing and in addition they were not able to show their predominance in song writing with their setlist, because it consisted mainly of new, quite thoughtful songs and therefore was not representative for the opus of EDGUY.
Setlist: Catch Of The Century / Sacrifice / Babylon / The Trooper (Cover) / Lavatory Love Machine / Trinidad / Tears Of A Mandrake / How Many Miles / Superheroes / Save Me / Mysteria / Vain Glory Opera / Avantasia / King Of Fools

All in all this was a very entertaining evening, although it was tiring even with seats. Three bands are simply too much, even though each one was convincing.
We are glad for EDGUY that they are so big by now, but we hope that their briskness and light heartedness will not be replaced by boring routine due to the pressure to perform, as we can see it with many other bands.
What we learned from this evening in the first place was that we crave to visit a DRAGONFORCE-headline-show!

story & pics © Reverend & Moonchild