Turisas at rock city September 16, 2007
Posted by Sharny in : Life, Music , trackbackWent to see Turisas at rock city last night. They are one of my favourite bands and I mentioned them when they released their second album.
We (me and 2 mates) had been attracted into town early (4:30, with the show starting at 7) due to promises of alcohol from one a friend of one of my friends. As it happened she was drunk and had given the last of her alcohol to a friendly homeless guy. So much for that.
We kinda wandered about for a while killing time until finally joining the queue outside rock city at around 6:20pm behind a group of people who all had their faces painted in Turisas red and black stripes. It wasn’t long before some friends of my mate showed up and got their faces painted by the people in front who actually had the paint on hand. Just before 7 the queue moved forward a bit making us think that we were about to be let in. Apparently not though and it was actually another tiring 40 minutes of waiting outside before they finally rounded us up and got us inside.
Once in, I was surprised to see that rock city is quite different for gigs than for under 18s nights and we had a bit of a look around. The support band came on and they were just awful. The drums were too loud, to the point where the bass and guitar (which actually looked moderately complex) was just reduced to a noise where no riff was actually audible unless you left the room. We found out that there would be a 30mins wait from the point that the support band left to Turisas coming on so prepared to wait.
I decided to try and go to the toilet before they started but kinda took too long deciding that so I came back and the intro was about half way through. They started with the intro from the first album which isn’t a proper song but goes straight into As Torches Rise, it works well on the CD and works even better live. We headed into the middle to join in with the headbanging and moshing n shit.
I won’t try to recount some kind of set list but I was really pleased to see everyone’s reaction to some of my favourite songs such as In The Court Of Jarisleif which are mostly based around some great violining. The violinist was a really popular element of the band, which I thought was great because I personally love that part of Turisas. In fact, the rock band staple of a guitar solo was replaced with a distorted violin solo which was pretty awesome really.
Another of the great things about Turisas has been some of the joint male voice sections which sing tunes and it was great to join in with a whole crowd singing stuff like that which you would just never do in any other situation. Joint to that was that Turisas held the attention of the crowd and we were on their side, to the point that the lead signer split the floor in half in order to do a sort of tune based sing off which then transformed into a song and performance of their cover of Rasputin, which if you didn’t know the original you would have no idea they could possibly be the same song.
Overall the crowd were really receptive and there were clearly some pretty devout fans there given the amount of fur, face paint and fake plastic weapons (axes and swords mainly). One great part of the gig was after someone chucked an inflatable hammer onto the stage and the lead signer picked it up and started waving it around before chucking it back into the audience.
After performing Battle Metal again at the end they left the stage but of course chants of Tur-i-sas brought them back on to play another one of my favourite songs - Sahti-Waari - to which the crowd went pretty wild. It’s another upbeat violin driven song and worked brilliantly as an encore. To finish things off they played the last song on their latest album, which makes a lot of sense as a final song since the album is a concept album. I joined in with a few random guys next to me in some hardcore headbanging to finish off the night and Turisas left the stage with (what I feel) was a very happy crowd behind them.
After that, me and one of my friends bought T shirts. I went for a Turisas UK Tour 2007 one and my friend got a Varangian Way (the latest album) T-Shirt. I would severely urge anyone to listen to this band if you like any form of rock, the one mate who came with me who didn’t know the band at all came out feeling like they could be his favourite band and actually we all felt that way. On top of that, both mine and my friend’s mums like the band, which I think just goes to show how accessible a band they are despite being not that well known.
Given all that, Turisas have to get a 10/10 for that performance. It had everything I could want and more and was totally worth the money.
Inlight of such a successful trip I’m planning to go see another of my favourite bands - Porcupine Tree - in December. As they play quite a different style of music to Turisas it should be a different sort of feel but if what I’ve heard on their live album then it should be really great anyway. I can’t wait really.
Tagged as: Life, Metal, Music, Seen Live
Comments»
“It wasn’t long before some friends of my mate showed up and got their faces painted by the people in front who actually had the paint on hand.”
hehe, thats the first reference to me on this site
I know it’s a slightly egotistical thing to comment on but I found it rather amusing to see that that instance had made it onto your account of events 
*chuffed*