Sonata Arctica Concert Review from last night!

Local band Addnerim opened with 3-4 fairly decent shredding/straight heavy metal songs. All musicians were above average and tight....vocals so-so

Another local band Urizen was great. Their show and sound was a Devo-
ish
blackened keyboard-y and very heavy metal hybrid. I really don't know
how to describe them but they were fun. Everyone but the drummer were
wearing white jumpsuits with what looked like red duct tape for
belts?!? At the end they brought out a spectacularly cheesy robot with
a Battlestar Galactica red-eye head and an air-conditioner based body
with stereo-
typical two pronged robot "grabber" arms....hilarious!

The Agonist is on tour with SA....CMR member Agonius had this to say the other day "the
agonist is a metalcore band from quebec with a HOT singer. but it's
still metalCORE". Spot on! I didn't make it through the first song. It
was just not my thing. All musicians were clearly in good form and
tight, but the music and the vocals just fell flat for me. The fans who
did like this band seemed very pleased with the performance. I rested
from the Cigarette smoke in the lobby area....


Sonata Arctica played an almost even mix from all of their studio albums.

My first impression was that vocalist Tony Kakko pulls off his vocals live
very well. He didn't sound strained or like his studio stuff has been too processed. Great vocals!!

New guitarist Elias Vilijanen completely owned his Ibenez and the songs
they
had on their set list. Amazing and - it seemed - effortless
performance. Just playing at light-speed calmly looking around at the
crowd....amazing

Henrik Klingenberg played his awesomely cheesy keyboard-guitar. Very 80's but pretty cool as well.

**
The Unia songs played very well live! I didn't know how this would play
out. I continue to be in the "Unia is different...but good to great"
camp...

Everyone was tight. This was (I believe) their first
stop in North America on this tour. For reasons I can't understand
there were only about 300 of us -and this was in the many millions of
people Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex area. I felt bad for SA....but they
didn't seem to care and put on a great show!