ARTS & CULTURE
10 Obiter Dicta
Don’t be Afraid in the Dark and Cold
Concert Review: Blind Gaurdian plays The Danforth
ê Photo credit: Blind Guardian.com
shannon corregan › staff writer
T
her e a r e a lways dangers in revisiting
your old favourites. I hadn’t seen Blind
Guardian in almost a decade, not since their
2006 A Twist in the Myth album tour. The
German power metal group was my favourite band
during my formative years, but I was a different
person now, living in a different city with different
friends, different tastes and—crucially—different
hair. I also hadn’t enjoyed their most recent album,
Beyond the Red Mirror, as much as I’d anticipated.
Was the album blander, or was the magic gone? A part
of me was worried that it just wouldn’t be the same.
I don’t know why I ever doubted them.
When we stepped into the Danforth, the crowd
was near to bursting with tension. It wasn’t the
collective craziness of an anonymous arena concert—
the Danforth is small, almost intimate, and the crowd
was older and largely sober. They certainly hadn’t
been fired up by the eminently skippable opening act.
This was not a crowd that was there for any old metal
show. They knew who they were waiting for. The
energy and the tension was familial, not frenzied—
we weren’t waiting to lose ourselves, but to find
something.
When lead vocalist Hansi Kürsch’s voice broke out
over the crowd, the answering roar was one of relief
as much as excitement. We were finally there.
Blind Guardian opened with their Red Mirror
orchestral powerhouse, “The Ninth Wave,” pared
down from the complexity of the album version into
a more manageable stage iteration—then they quickly
slid back into the harsh pounding of a much simpler,
much older song, “Banish from Sanctuary,” all the
way back from 1989’s Follow the Blind. It tells you
something about this band that their fans still know
all the words. Then they switched gears yet again into
the (comparatively) sedate “Nightfall,” the iconic
track from the concept album that is invariably every
fan’s favourite, Nightfall in Middle-Earth.
By the time they jumped into “Nightfall,” they’d
given the crowd a perfect encapsulation of what
this show was going to be. When your discography
stretches back to the early eighties, setlists are
always contentious. This show was a marriage of
their rougher, pre-Nightfall classics and the highlyproduced blockbusters of their two most recent
albums, with a good sampling of Nightfall itself to
even out the gaps. The extreme stylistic differences
between the albums evaporated onstage, as the
almost fussy “bigness” of Beyond the Red Mirror and
At the Edge of Time was made raw again. Hansi’s voice
was left strong and tough, with only André Olbrich
for backup, rather than a chorus or overlapping vocal
tracks. Most importantly, though, by taking us back
in time to Follow the Blind so early in the show, they
foreshadowed what was to come.
Missing from this concert was A Twist in the Myth
(with the exception of the single, “Fly”),perhaps
reflecting the fact that while it’s a solid album (and
honestly one of my favourites, because that tour
solidified my love for the band) it is, in hindsight, a
stylistic dead end. Beyond the Red Mirror and At
the Edge of Time both returned to the overproduced
bombast that the band had experimented with in
2002’s A Night at the Opera, fine-tuned it, and
borrowed only sparingly from Twist.
After “Fly,” it was return to form with the currentera heavy-hitters “Tanelorn” and “Prophecies.”
While I was sad that A Night at the Opera’s fourteenminute operatic had been scuttled, the band’s
confident decision to follow with three songs
from 1990’s Tales from the Twilight World was a
comforting return to the simple rhythms of their
earlier work.
The technical prowess of the band is amazing.
While guitarists André Olbrich and Marcu s Siepen
are not nearly as showy as members of bands like
Dragonforce or Hammerfall, they do complex
and often subtle work that sets Blind Guardian
above other power metal bands. Blind Guardian’s
compositions feature shifts and idiosyncrasies
that make their sound unique, and incorporate
progressions far more interesting than the usual “the
same again but louder” approach to raising the energy
in a room.
In concert, their competency and maturity shows.
Sometimes it seems that metal is a young man’s
game, but Hansi, André and Marcus are forty-nine,
forty-eight, and forty-seven, respectively, and what
young blood they have resides in drummer Frederick
Ehmke, thirty-seven. Often the trappings of metal—
the spikes, the makeup, et cetera—combine to make
the whole thing feel like bad theatre, but not so
with Blind Guardian. Perhaps realizing that it was
thinning, Hansi cut his hair—the staple of a metal
rocker’s look—and cropping it hasn’t affected his
ability to command the energy of a room. All four
men are fathers, and wore regular clothes on stage
(Ehmke’s shirtlessness excepted), leaving you with
the sense that they’re committed to their craft, not
their look. I’ve grown up in the decade since last
we’ve met, but so have they.
It’s also worth noting the good grace of a man who
looked out at a crowd that was a mere fraction of what
the band usually plays to in Germany and growled
with a sly smile, “You’re not working hard enough,
Toronto!” This was a crowd that was working hard—
Blind Guardian is sung to, not listened to, and the
audience is as much a part of the music as the band.
The band’s transition into a progressive power
metal band heavily focused on layered vocals and
orchestration wasn’t an easy one—it cost them
drummer Thomas Stauch in 2005—but the band’s
raison d’ être has always been the lyrics. While they
have experimented stylistically over the years, the
narrative core of their work bridges the gaps between
albums. The clever narrative is where Blind Guardian
sets themselves apart, and nowhere is it more obvious
than in concert.
» see danforth, page 14