GIG REVIEW: AMORPHIS & POEM Live At Capitol, Hannover

Amorphis started their “Under the Red Cloud” world tour on 4th March in Capitol, Hannover appropriate to their newest released album “Under the Red Clouds”. The concert wasn’t sold out but the people had a nice mood and were looking forward to see the Finnish progressive metal giants. The opening band POEM had no backdrop so no one in the venue was quite sure about the name of these guys. Hailing from Athens, these Greek monsters performed a groovy and likewise lovely mixture of grunge and progressive Metal with good amount of melancholy. Especially the powerful clean voice of the singer George Prokopiou impressed me personally very much. This was a very fine start of the evening with POEM.

The six guys of Amorphis played a 100 minute show of course with tracks of their newest record “Under the Red Cloud” and some older stuff of their long history. At first they fascinated with the new tracks ‘Under the Red Cloud’, ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘Bad Blood’ while the crowd sang together with frontman Tomi Joutsen, very impressive. The mixture of growls, synthesizers, wonderful melodies/singing and powerful guitar riffs captivated the people in the venue since the very first second of the performance. A live premiere was announced by Tomi, too: The Fists of the audience rise up and ‘Dark Path’ from “Under the Red Cloud” was played for the first time ever and the people liked it. Amorphis ended up with older stuff like ‘House of Sleep’ and well-known ‘Black Winter Days’ (oh boy, this song is already 22 years old!). After that, the concert ended, but after a while they did an encore of course playing one of the new songs ‘Death of a King’ and ‘The Smoke’ as the last song of the evening.

Amorphis played their set in high quality like it was played from the records itself with a brilliant mixed sound. They just did their stuff with sobriety and fun. I think everyone in the venue saw this and that could be the reason why the crowd had joy to participate to some track parts of Amorphis’ music. It’s a pity that the keyboards were a bit too quiet but that didn’t affect the concert experience overall. Catchy guitar riffs filled singing pauses, the lights on stage changed appropriate to growls and clean voice from ice-blue to fire-red and everyone in the crowd felt the fun that Amorphis had on stage playing in Hannover. The audience headbanged, clapped their hands and shouted lyrics of the songs.

In summary, it was an awesome experience to be at this concert and to see Amorphis in this great venue and I have the opinion that every single person in the venue had fun with the combination of the two bands POEM and Amorphis.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LIVE PICTURES