Yesterday I have been to the Opeth 20th Anniversary show in Essen and it was a really cool show, the band played an awesome set (including the full Blackwater park album, which is my fave Opeth album), but something was just not right... They played in a nice venue, a fully seated theatre, but in my opinion this is the wrong place for a death metal concert. The atmosphere is just not the same if everybody is sitting down, there is not half as much energy as in a "normal" show. I guess they also had to cut down the volume in the first half of the show (the Blackwater park set) which kinda reminded me a bit of the premieres of our DVD, which also took place in cinemas back then, at least it felt a bit like watching a dvd. However, this changed with the second half of the set and from that point on it felt more like a concert. As I said I really enjoyed the show, it was a killer 3 hours set, but next time I will watch them in a normal venue for sure.
Aside from this I checked out the Musikmesse in Frankfurt, I didn't go there in quite some years and I have to say it got much smaller compared to earlier years, many big companies were missing this time, due to the crisis I guess. But at least all the ones that I wanted to visit have been there and I could check out the latest Gibsons, Mesa Boogies and whatever else I was interested in. One thing that improved big time this year was the noise, normally you were bombed by hundreds of people, playing Smoke on the water, Highway to hell, Stairway to heaven and enter sandman, all at the same time, with amps cranked up to the maximum, but today, with modeling amps and noise isolating headphones this is history :) The only thing missing now is a similar system for drummers...
