Tarot / Charon
Friday, March 5, 2004
Tavastia Club, Helsinki Finland
Review and live pictures by
Arto Lehtinen
Putting
two leading Finnish metal names, namely Tarot and Charon, on the same
line-up guaranteed a good crowd for the local rock club Tavastia. It was
kind of interesting, as well as fun, to pay attention to the audience as
70% of the attendance consisted of females more or less. To be honest, it
isn't an unexpected surprise because Charon, and above all the character
of the band's frontman, appears to attract to women. Whereas Tarot has
less of this this character factor, instead they rely on their metallic
approach.
Anyway,
before Charon was allowed to get on the stage the good old Finnish
legendary heavy metal combo Tarot kicked the night off by delivering a
lesson in traditional old school heavy metal. They conquered the whole
place and the floor was entirely packed.
After the opening intro, the five piece went on by doing "I
Rule" from their Suffer OUR Pleasure album, followed by previous album material "Undead
Son". "Undead Son" especially sounded damn great with sharp
playing and sound.
Even though the set list had mainly been based on the material off from
the albums released during the 90's, the older material had been added
including the classic and everlasting all time favourite "Wings Of
Darkness", causing a ballistic reaction in the audience.
But
on the other hand, besides these mandatory songs, the set list definitely
included a few surprises as the keyboard (or whatever programmer) player
took over the mic and after a few absolutely nonsense words went on by
doing the old Blue Oyster Cult cover "Veteran Of The Psychic
Wars" and the cover tunes followed with "Kill The King" and
"Stand Up And Shout" cut the air. Actually picking up so many
cover tunes was, from my point of view, kind of a waste since the band
itself has a large catalog of own classic material which could have been
added to the set list. For example, the video tune "Pyre Of
Gods" had been dismissed, but the audience appeared to be spellbound
by those cover songs after all.
Criticizing the band's stage performance is pointless in this case as
the keyboard/program instruments took up a big part of the stage. As well,
vocalist, Marko Hietala, hardly moves that far from the microphone whereas
his brother Zachary Hietala is demanded to focus on the guitar
playing...and the drummer, well he actually deserves the extra mention
about the damn hard and tight playing style, it is amazing how his drums
won't get destroyed by his powerful slamming. Although the band's stage
performance isn't their strongest factor, the stuff still crushes…
If the frontline and floor seemed totally packed for Tarot, well when
Charon hit the stage, the atmosphere in the front turned more damn tight
and hotter than hell. Trying to reach to the front line in hopes of taking
reasonable pics could be forgotten entirely.
As
for Charon, well despite my personal skeptical prejudice towards Charon, I
didn't have any expectations in advance. I was just curious to find out
how this once highly hyped band, in the wake of the immense success of
HIM, would be able to match Tarot's outstanding performance. Charon has
always been linked to the same category of romantic/love/gothic/ whatever
metal it is now or can be named here. But those associations and comparisons
were definitely gone as the band rocked hard on the stage and the front
man definitely enjoyed having such an enthusiastic audience raging through
the whole set! The rest of the band, for obvious reasons, stayed more in
the background. The known tunes such as "Little Angel",
"Bitter Joy" and others got a warm reception from the mostly
female oriented audience.
Both bands at this gig were extremely strong during this night and it
is quite impossible to name which of them was superior. In general, it was
an enjoyable night to witness two of the leading names on the Finnish
metal map!
