Perşembe 20 Oca 2011, 19:30

tek-one, the devil wears prada, architects, bring me the horizon @ arena vienna

before last week i've never been to vienna, and initially i didn't plan to go out this time either, even though i quite love tdwp and bmth and a few songs by architects too. however, a few of my friends were totally crazy about going to this show, so in the end i decided to join them.

getting there was quite easy as we found a bus that stops only one block away from the venue, which is in an industrial district with close to no interesting sights to see besides a number of huge smoking chimneys. the arena itself is and old slaughterhouse (or so i was told) now converted into a concert venue decorated with vivid-colored graffitis inside and outside, providing a nice contrast to the mood of the surrounding buildings. going inside, there's a large outdoors stage with a small pub on its right side and the main concert hall (also boasting a tall chimney) on its left. by the time the doors opened at 7pm quite a lot of people gathered outside, including a surprisingly high number of hungarians and other foreigners, but it only took a few minutes to get in so we had plenty of time to explore the place thoroughly. opposite the stage there is a large grandstand with protruding balconies on each side, there's a bar downstairs and another one upstairs, the latter opening into a large balcony, which serves as the smoking area, looking onto the outdoors stage. structurally, it's really a great venue. the prices were quite high for a hungarian wallet (t-shirts 25EUR, sweatshirts 45, draft beer 3.30) which i could complain about, but as far as i've seen the city during the night, basically everything costs twice as much as here, so i guess it was no big deal for the locals. a little more problematic is the fact that apart from a table football, there were no pastime oportunities, but actually we didn't even have any time to kill because right after the shows had ended, the place closed and security kindly sent everyone home. kindly as in if you weren't standing in line for the cloakroom and couldn't understand what guards were saying, they kindly grasped you and put you in the line. we thought this method could use a little bit of refining, but whatever. let's just get onto the shows at last.

Tek-One took the stage around 19:45 with the line-up of a DJ, a drummer and a black MC with long dreadlocks, and started blasting… dubstep, which genre really isn't my cup of tea, so i can't really tell anything else about them other than their two songs i could recognize, one of which obviously being their remix of BMTH's Sleep With One Eye Open (Tek-One). the other one was Dire Straits' Money For Nothing, which actually got me pumped for a few seconds, but after the famous intro riff it turned back into wubwubwub, so still no good times for me. in all honesty, i couldn't figure out neither how did they end up this tour at all (apart from having remixed BMTH), nor why were they playing at the very first slot. i mean, they would've been okay if they performed last, as an outro to the show or something, but this opening gig with the principle of "hey guys, we only got half an hour, so let's play 2 minutes from each song and then jump quickly into the next one" just didn't seem to make any sense.

and if i were strict, i could say the same conclusion about The Devil Wears Prada's set, because they basically sounded as if they were playing with the mixing set up for Tek-One still intact, that is, vocals, drums and synths sound great, with no guitars to be found anywhere. i mean, literally nowhere. up until i could faintly point out Assistant to the Regional Manager's guitar intro in a youtube video two days after, i totally thought that they had played it without that part. and while Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over's riff might have sounded quite good first, that also didn't last any longer than the moment when drums came in on top of it. really a shame, because the guys themselves seemed to be in top form, Mike joked around with us and even spoke a few heartfelt words (in addition to screaming his lungs out, of course), Jeremy nailed all of his clean vocal parts, and even the setlist was really good (i would have totally gone insane on Escape, had i been able to make anything out of its riffs), but with such a bad sound, this show didn't work for me at all.

Danger: Wildman
Escape
Dez Moines
Hey John, What's Your Name Again?
Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over
Outnumbered
Assistant to the Regional Manager

strangely, all of the sound issues were gone when Architects started playing, so after a few rounds of table football, i decided to head out to the stands and take a look at what's happening. Sam Carter & co. put on a great show with a high level of energy, epic singalongs during the clean parts, and a whole sea of lighters during Hollow Crown. i've heard some complaints about their setlist which consisted only of numbers from Hollow Crown and the upcoming The Here And Now, but seeing as how those two are their only records i am somewhat familiar with, i had no problem with the song choices. my main expectation was to hear Early Grave anyway, and there was no way they were not gonna play that, so basically everything else was just icing on the cake.

Follow the Water
Day In Day Out
Learn to Live
In Elegance
Dethroned
Delete, Rewind
Hollow Crown
Early Grave

then came the time when i decided to make my way deep into the sold out crowd, as Bring Me The Horizon was about to start playing. they took the stage a few minutes after 10pm and struck down on us with It Never Ends (forecasted by its intro as heard on their new album) immediately followed by Chelsea Smile. epic singalong commenced right with the first words, along with moshing, but that didn't reach the epic level until Pray For Plagues, when Oli called for a wall of death towards the end of the song (which he repeated about three more times during the show). it must be noted that while the musicians played every song really precisely, Oli's voice was quite weak, so he often passed his vocal parts over to the audience or the guitarist Jona, who also delivered the clean vocals in Fuck. The Sadness Will Never End saw Architects' Sam Carter grabbing a mic to sing his own parts, then it was the audience's turn to give their voices to Lights' lines in Crucify Me. during Football Season Is Over the guys brought out Tek-One's MC to "party till he passes out" and "dance till he can't feel his legs"… and to present some epic headbanging with his long dreadlocks . then came Blessed With A Curse, easily the highlight of the show for me, a truly epic song from start to finish (yeah, i know, i use the word 'epic' too often. i'm sorry and all), and they even announced that they are going to film a video for it, fuck yeah! after they finished the song, Oli simply started chanting the well-known lines starting with "We will never sleep", which triggered another epic singalong followed by some epic moshing, an epic wall of death, and then the epic dissappointment of realizing the show is over when the outro music started playing right at the moment they finished the song, eliminating any chances of an encore. what the fuck. okay, i know that Oli's voice needs some rest and he cannot scream for as long as he normally can. the problem is, even on a "normal" night they never play for longer than an hour, 11-12 song at the absolute most, and i find even that amount to be too little for a headlining show (unless you're Machine Head or something with lots of 8 minute songs, but BMTH is not that kind of band.) but i must admit, as long as i have to use the word 'epic' in such large amounts when describing a 45 minute show, i don't really have much to complain about. so i'm just gonna state it one more time: despite its length, this show was epicness at its most concise.

It Never Ends
Chelsea Smile
Pray for Plagues
Fuck
The Sadness Will Never End
Crucify Me
Football Season Is Over
Blessed With A Curse
Diamonds Aren't Forever

as i already mentioned, the venue closed shortly after and we were ejected into the night, which we then spent mostly with sightseeing (read: desperate and long-unsuccessful search of food and beer). we saw some epic avenues, an epic cathedral, an epic soviet memorial, and topped it all off with an epic sleep on the bus on our way home. EPIC.