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Old 06-02-2019, 04:05 AM   #223
Sebastian
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Some thoughts on the Stockholm show after two days...

  • The venue was mindblowing. Just look at this:

  • There were more people than I had anticipated.
  • The crowd was very much into the show. At times the crowd participation was almost obnoxious. Some kids (literally, they were surely not even born when the band split in 2000) started a gigantic mosh pit just in front of me. They didn't even stop for the slow songs like Disarm.
  • The band was clearly well-rehearsed and in a great mood. The show was actually fun to watch. To be honest, I didn't expect to enjoy myself as much as I did. At one point during the beginning of the show I felt pretty happy. I go to many shows these days (30-50 per year) and getting this feeling from one after so many years of being a fan is special to me.
  • The show sounded just wonderful. The band's FOH engineer did a wonderful job. The sound was very powerful and it felt great getting my inner organs massaged by Jimmy's kick drum.
  • The show started 5 minutes early, so I had my hopes up they'd do this to cram all their songs into the allotted time slot. This hope was almost immediately destroyed when I realized they just cut Soma from the beginning of the set, a song that I was probably looking forward to the most, together with TAFH.
  • When the band went off stage after 90 minutes I still had hopes for at least another 30 minutes of encores, but they came back just playing Siva. This was a bit disappointing.
  • If there is one thing I was disappointed of it's the setlist. This was a headlining show, but they obviously played their festival set. Not getting Soma and TAFH was a big disappointment to me personally. I couldn't care less about Tiberius and GLOW and would rather have heard songs that mean so much more to me. Especially given how well TAFH worked as the final song of the 1997 Euro summer festival setlists, this song would have been a perfect choice even for their festival set.
  • I was positively surprised about Knights of Malta, a song that I literally hate on the album due to its awful production. The live version lacks the wooo-woooo-wooo part and it has some fine dynamics which made it quite enjoyable. The same can be said about Solara, but to a lesser extend. Jimmy's drumming in that song was superb.
  • I loved the covers! I thought I'd hate Wish You Were Here, but the segue from To Sheila to this song was really nice. My favorite was the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man. This was awesome, with Billy and James sharing vocal duties.
  • James is on fire, both musically and banter-wise.
  • I got to talk to Billy briefly about the band's taping policy (a topic I have a personal interest in). He seemed very approachable and friendly. Unfortunately, the current policy seems to be pretty useless for anything but phone recording.

 
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