Sunday night at Kyttaro club and Greek metal’s heart is beating hard with Diviner’s first ever performance in front of the Athenian crowd in a show that includes Erase and Sorrowful Angels as well.
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Erase get on stage with a small delay from the scheduled time at 20:30 and get down to business warming up the crowd with their honest classic metal. The band was in great shape with a lot of energy and action on stage with frontman George Stavropoulos finally making the crowd to raise its fist and clap along Erase’s galloping anthems. On guitars Nektarios Markantonis, winning the Most-impressive-guitar-of-the-night-award if there ever was one, and Lefteris Kontos were giving a course in dual axe attack, unleashing their riffs, splitting the solos while going up and down with ease and swagger. “We Are The Winners” and “Easy Riders” were their 45-minute show’s highlights.
Up next were Sorrowful Angels with another three quarters of an hour in their disposal. Obviously, this was the “different” band of the night, as their sound, philosophy and origin was quite far from the other two. Even, as far as moving around the stage they were definitely more static than Erase, as well as Diviner who were next. They opened their set with some new songs from their recent “Remedie” album, while they included older material from their other two studio albums “Omens” and “Ship In Your Trip”, closing with their most popular one, “Denial”. Despite their diversity they appealed to the audience, the majority of which didn’t seem to me that had the same musical preferences as Sorrowful Angels, and that actually responded very well especially towards the end and gave them a generous applause.
Witchunt, Shatterbox, Immaculate Disguise, Leap Of Faith, Ghosts Of Concrete, Dream In Black, Suicidal Manners, Right Of Way, Shores Of Capture, Denial
With the clock almost striking eleven the headliners, Diviner, started their full on attack when the lights went off. Although the band members are well seasoned veterans in the Greek scene, this was their premiere and they surely wanted to gram the bull by the horns right from the beginning. Actually, they didn’t let go for the following 60 minutes and eleven songs. With only one album released, “Fallen Empires”, they played it beginning to end with the exact order of the album’s tracklist adding a cover somewhere in the middle, Halford and Dickinson collaboration, “The One You Love To Hate”.
So, “Fallen Empires” was performed in its entirety with a big part of the audience, that has raised its capacity to 300, singing the lyrics note for note. Especially on the self-titled song, as well as the most epic track on the album “The Legend Goes On” the response was powerful and intense. The band’s on stage performance was pretty good being pretty close to the album. Maroulis-Bouziotis duo on guitar and bass respectively were all over the place headbanging, while on the other side of the stage the other guitarist, Thimios Krikos, was more “behaved”. Fragiskos Samoilis on drums was doing a pretty good job, while Yiannis Papanikolaou on vocals and fronting Diviner was at his usual high level with lots of passion, energy, good command of the crowd, that truth be told didn’t need too much to get going.
Surely, we are not used to watch a band playing only 60 minutes, but personally I respect the fact that Diviner didn’t chose to play another half an hour of covers, something that must have been very easy for them, and decided that one was enough. Bands with vision and ambition have to do this, play their own material, whether they are “the band next door”, or play on the bigger leagues like Diviner and Sorrowful Angels. Erase might not be there quite yet but playing as good and as solid as they did they are getting there soon. Of course every band that played had a very important ally, which was the venue’s very good sound that allowed everything to be heard loud and clear as they should offering a great treat to the audience.
Fallen Empires, Kingdom Come, Evilizer, Riders From The East, The Legend Goes On, The One You Love To Hate, Come Into My Glory, Seven Gates, The Shadow And The Dark, Sacred War, Out In The Abyss
Yiannis Dolas
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