Well, as promised here the brief reviews of two gigs my dearest husband and me have been to last week. First there were The Miserable Rich at the cafe Steinbruch in Duisburg and it started out quite good, as we got in a traffic jam when we had about 10 minutes to go according to the satnav - and it looked like it would actually take us half an hour longer, so we decided to get off the A40 - and then when we were almost there we were told to turn a quite adventurous bend, but hey those two country bumpkins did manage ;). After this venturesome prologue expectations and spirits were high. Being greeted with "Hallöchen" by the waiter made me feel not only welcome but quite at home from the start, the Ruhrgebiet mentality is very open and hospitable indeed. And yes, the presentiment did not belie us, we were treated to a wonderful intimate event adequately featuring ghost stories, as James de Malplaquet announced, or even more precisely as he would go on to explain about sex. What more should I say the music was marvellous, the musicians very motivated and interacting with each other and the audience, the dubbing was great and not too loud - something I cannot stand is if the bass is too persistent -, the audience was attentive ("polite"), the drinks were good, they had a go at "Pisshead" ("You're doing this deliberately!") though the orchestration was not right, but it did not show too obviously and at the end we even got a lullaby to safeguard us back home. Thus wholeheartedly an event I wouldn't have liked to miss for the world ;)
On Saturday there followed dEUS supported by Intergalactic Lovers at the Theater in Heerlen. The journey was not that adventurous and indeed also the gig would not turn out to be as imaginative or thrilling. First there came Intergalactic Lovers, who were alright, but compared to Genk in March they seemed less motivated and also had regretfully less time on stage and since the audience, which outnumbered the one in Duisburg by more than a thousand, did not know or care for their performance, a lot was really wasted. What a pity! Still "Dank U well!"
When after a break of more than half an hour dEUS eventually entered the stage, my expectations were high, but got firstly crushed a little by the bad dubbing this time. The show and stage design were really breathtaking with coherent projections, wonderful. Also did they play an extented set, played five songs as encore, played older stuff and most of the new album, all quite well and I did not feel that I could complain. BUT and this is a big one, there was no chemistry between the audience and the peformers, not a word of greeting. Only musicians got introduced. The oddest thing to me yet: though they were in Limburg in the Netherlands Tom Barman as the lead singer seemed not to be able to speak more than one sentence in his native language, Flemish, before falling back into some English jargon. So consequently I was left with the feeling of having witnessed a sort of autistic stage performance that oddly included the fourth wall, impenetrable - to still keep up the Miserable Rich's line of thinking ;) - a lost opportunity - spijtig!
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