Friday, April 13, 2007

Show: The Haunted/Dark Tranquillity


Venue: The Slim's, San Francisco

This was the first metal show I went to since 2001 (the last one was Pantera's Reinventing the Steel tour, with Morbid Angel and Static-X as supporting acts)

To be honest, I'm not familiar with these 2 bands at all. I learned about them from my new bandmates and we're covering their songs.

Dark Tanquillity is one of the best representatives of the "Gothenburg sound", i.e., the melodic death metal from Scandinavia. Their music striked the right balance between power and complexity, which was showcased perfectly in this show. What interested me the most was the vocalist looked and sounded very polite, which I totally didn't expect listening to his vocal. He kept asking if the crowd would mind hearing songs from their new albums. Of course I didn't mind since the new songs were pretty good. Another interesting thing was he joked about whoever have listened to those songs prior to the show gotta be pirate. However, he didn't show strong objection at all. I guess it's because Sweden is one of the more liberal place as far as P2P is concerned. Also, the band makes most money from touring. P2P is more of a problem for the record company.

Finally, a few words about the headliner, The Haunted: I didn't have too high an expectation about them since some of their songs I listened before sound kinda pop-ish or "soft" (more clean vocal, more metalcore-like than melo. death) And they indeed played a few "soft" ones at the show. However, the rest are better than I expected. The vocalist, Peter Dolving, shared some of his strong feelings against right-wing Christian and wars during the show. Check out his blog.