 |
 |
 |
› Nightwish with Pain - 4/4/08 - Manchester Apollo
There has been a lot of speculation about Nightwish since 2005. Even when this tour was booked it was supposed to be in the much smaller Academy 2 but since the run away success of ‘Dark Passion Play’ it has had to be upgraded twice. First it was moved to the Academy 1 and then to the 3,000 plus capacity Apollo for the last date on the UK leg of the tour. Nightwish haven’t just been a sell-out in Manchester, they also had to increase the scale and number of shows for most of the UK tour and it is nice to finally see them performing in a space similar to their status in Europe.
First on was Peter Tatran’s band Pain. Peter Tattgren is also the singer of the death metal band Hypocrisy, Pain is his industrial/metal side project. They’re not too bad; in fact they’re better than I thought they’d be. It’s surprising how poppy they sound with bursts of cheesy techno beats during some of the songs. I’m surprised that people weren’t getting glow sticks out (they saved them for Nightwish). Pain even played the classic Beatles song ‘Eleanor Rigby’, adding their own slant on it. I wasn’t driven to seek the bar and they did get a small mosh pit going but I don’t think that I’ll be going out to buy any of their albums. 4/10
With almost all the theatricality we’ve come to expect of them, Nightwish emerged one by one onto the dimly lit stage with a swelling orchestral recording bursting into ‘Bye Bye Beautiful’ with the appearance of new singer Annette. ‘Bye Bye Beautiful’ is a song that’s obviously about what happened with the split from previous singer Tarja Turunen in 2005 and opening the show with it felt like a definite statement of intent.
One disappointment was that the sound was quite muddy and bass heavy and sadly there was no real stage show, other than basic lights. I had hoped that a tour that had grown to this magnitude would have included a larger stage set and maybe pyros. That, however is only a minor problem and didn’t detract from the music. Nightwish seemed to fill this stage better than their previous UK appearances; obviously they are used to performing in venues this size or larger. As usual, Marco did most of the talking and when Annette wasn’t singing or backstage she was running around headbanging and throwing the horns at the appreciative crowd.
The set was mainly based around the new album ‘Dark Passion Play’ with a few choice songs from the back catalogue thrown in. Annette and Marco dueted well on ‘Wish I had an Angel’. One standout song was ‘Planet Hell’. It was almost as if it were made for Annette. Sadly Annette didn’t fair too well with the high notes of ‘Nemo’ and some of the new arrangements of older songs have lost a little of the Nightwish magic for me. Maybe as they gather more songs for Annette they’ll drop some of the older ones as new songs such as ‘Amaranth’ were already being greeted as firm favourites by the audience.
The highlight of the set was when they brought on pipe player Troy Donocly to play two of my favourite songs from the new album, ‘The Islander’ and ‘Last of the Wilds’. This was awesome and it felt like it was truly unique to hear the songs played live with one of the guest musicians who had performed on the album, especially as he had not appeared at all venues. It was also interesting to hear a song written by Marco getting such special treatment and a really good reaction from the crowd. I hope this leads to lead writer and keyboard player Tuomas sharing more of the writing duties with the rest of the band in the future.
The encore included ‘Wishmaster’ which was previously one of my favourite live Nightwish songs. Sadly I didn’t enjoy this at all. Without the operatic vocals much of it’s charm was lost. However, it was nice that they included another highlight from the new album, ‘Seven Days to The Wolves’ in the encore. This showed real confidence in the new songs and line up.
The next test will be to see if Nightwish can maintain and build on the success of ‘Dark Passion Play’. For now despite the sound problems it was a great gig and a really enjoyable evening. They were clearly enjoying performing live and it is now up to older fans to decide whether they follow Tuoma’s force of a reinvigorated and musically changed band to the next album. I hope they don’t leave it as long until they tour again! Welcome back Nightwish!
8/10
Simon
|
|
|