Fogland

Took me a while to really get to the bottom of this show, mind-wise, but I think I’m ready to review it about now. Which show? The Sisters, obviously, in Brussels this time: AB April 22nd.

First row experience again, got me a spot right smack in the middle in front of Our Glorious Leader this time. Great view, though the security bar was in quite a painful position for me, which made me move a row back (still had a great view from there).

Though this show was completely different from the Paris one, it was a very enjoyable gig once again. Smaller venue, great crowd and truckloads of smoke. The smoke made I hardly ever had the chance to spot Ben Christo, just about could see Chris Catalyst, but had an ever so good view of what Von was doing.

I really like the control Eldritch gained over his voice in this tour, much better than the yelps we were getting used to, Ben and Chris’ backings are much better than Adam’s as well, I just never saw how he fitted in voice-wise.

The two boys are really doing a very good job on guitars too, by the way. It is really amazing how fast they got to know all the Sisters songs and even manage to do all the hard bits like Temple of Love and First and Last and Always (we didn’t get to hear that one this time though). Of course the set list doesn’t vary that much over all the gigs – one can hardly expect so when they’re doing 57 dates – but still: Great!

Perhaps there’s one thing that really bothers me: After the show, I was more or less reviewing the show together with some other people as someone noted one of the great things about a Sisters show is it can totally disappoint you one day just to be blown away totally at the next one. On this tour however, the quality is nearly constant, which obviously gets us some great shows but at the same time make you feel like you’re lacking the total euphoria. It’s not like you come out of a show in a haze of astonishment, you can more or less remember the whole show – up to you to decide if that’s a good or a bad thing though!

Also some of the solos in the ‘new’ songs lacked the energy Adam put in to them, making them sound a bit weak and like learnt by heart but not played with the heart. Nevertheless it’s great to see Chris play games with the audience and Ben is one hell of an appearance on stage!

Anyway, I’ll be there on May 11th, that I’m sure of! And kudos to Speedy Dave, for doing his 150th gig. Hope you enjoyed the cake!

May 11th

Sorry for this, but just another Sisters related post:

Final tour dates will be officially announced soonish, but tickets for another Brussels gig (at the AB) are on sale :-D

May 11th 2006 - AB - Brussels/2

EDIT:

Well bloody hell, seems this tour'll be going all the way to Rio. Sisters Bite the Silver bullet - Vegas to Rio. Nnnice.

Added today are:

2006 May 10 England Bristol Academy
2006 May 11 Belgium Brussels Ancienne Belgique (additional Brussels date)
2006 May 13 Spain Barcelona Razzmatazz (FREE FOR APRIL 08 TICKET HOLDERS !)
2006 May 14 Spain Bilbao Santana 27
2006 May 19 Brazil São Paulo Via Funchal
2006 May 20 Brazil Rio de Janeiro Circo Voador

Three dates as a grand total for me, I'm not complaining. At all...

Good Friday in the Land of the Flood

Paris was the first Sisters gig I went to see this year, and once again it was top notch stuff. The first ever gig in the Land of the Flood (The Floodland sleeve was meant to depict Europe that had France covered with water) and it seemed the local crowd really appreciated it, they really shouldn’t have waited this long to perform in France. The regular fan crowd was crazed out as well, and the band really seemed to enjoy it too.

The set list however didn’t bring us any surprises, just a comprehensive songs covering all Sisters eras quite well, the show wasn’t too long, but what energy! Both Ben and Chris seemed in top condition, and Andrew did very well too. Sometimes you could really hear the rawness in his voice, man it must have hurt but he was trying his utmost best not to let it show. Obviously he had to throw in a bit more voice control, but that only turned out to be a good thing. Myself I’m not too much of a fan of the howling he did previously, trying to sing high tones he actually wasn’t able to reach, but now Von perfectly knew what his voice could take and in order not to harm it any more, he didn’t went any further. Perfect!

Sure, there’ll probably have been some complaints about the enormous amounts of dry ice they threw in, but after the first couple of songs they clearly turned the smoke machine down, and I could even see Eldritch while I was standing right in front of Ben. But generally, the crowd was in top condition, everyone was just shouting along, clapping, whistling, and even all the way up at the back of the seats people were stomping their feet, demanding even more encores.

My top moments were probably the two slow songs – Something Fast and I Was Wrong – of which one was oddly put smack in the middle of the set list (which worked quite well!), Alice and Temple of Love, but you just had to love the fur coat Von wore when he did the first encores. Absolutely brilliant!

If you can get a chance to see the girls this year, do it, they’re at their best once again!

Building Up a Nation

As I’m some sort of Euro-Nationalist – I don’t care much for nations or states as we know them, but I do care a great deal for the European Union and see that as my country rather than Belgium (which is where I live) or the Netherlands (which is where I was born) – I’m coming across loads of interesting reads lately.

Obviously back when the French and the Dutch killed off the Constitution the Union had a great setback. All the critics got louder all of a sudden, and what most people see as Brussels’ dictatorship was even more to blame for everything going wrong than ever before. But then, we had seen that evolution going on for many, many years before and thus such a thing was quite likely to happen.

After this great defeat for the Union, most ‘leaders’ sat back and relaxed, but quite recently new dynamics took off. People are thinking about going forward again together instead of with their own little countries.

Not only our very own Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt is taking part in this (actually I feel he’s quite in the lead of this all), but also philosophers do and today the newspapers reported ex-US representative to the European Union Rockwell Schnabel reckons Europe’s future is big, as long as it’s not just anti but reaches out to the world instead – America’s influence should not be neglected either though, they could block the entire process. After all, the US currently invests more in e.g. the Netherlands than China.

Europe, according to Schnabel, is gaining much soft power whereas America is losing its own soft power. Soft power matters a great deal for your own industry as this is how Europe imposed its GSM standards on Asia, rather than that they adapted American mobile phone standards. Consequence being many Third World countries won’t grow modified crops, fearing they wouldn’t be able to export to the EU anymore.

Nevertheless, Europe shouldn’t be blind for its weaknesses. There is still a huge brain drain going on, many graduated Europeans move to the USA to try their luck, whereas you need those yourself as a state when you want to move on. Some industries should be liberalised, without taking the social standards down. Nationalistic protectionism is endangering European economies too, as you need to think global nowadays in order to grow.

I think Schnabel very much proves to focus on the right things here. We shouldn’t be blind, we shouldn’t stand still, though sadly that’s what way too many conservative politicians want. We shouldn’t use Europe to keep a status quo in our own nations, we should use it to get further as a whole, and to a certain extent, to get the whole world to live on higher standards. Nor should we want to copy Americas – sometimes rather cruel – Anglo-Saxon system. We’ve been showing our system works over decades, and I’m sure we are able to keep it running for many more ages if rightly tweaked.

Every system needs to be adapted to current reality every now and then, we shouldn’t be blind for that either. The world changes constantly and our systems equally need to be changed regularly. As a town in which nothing is rebuilt, built, … is a dead town, so is a system which is never adapted to current reality. Current reality is that everything is going global, and in this world Europe is a great partner in most trades, but this is something that took ages to built up but can be tore down in a matter of months. Together we are stronger and we can keep Europe as big as it always was, and so we need to do.