The Psyke Project

support Vira
author PP date 05/09/08 venue Templet, Lyngby, DEN

The Psyke Project's much anticipated tour de Denmark was slated to start at Templet, Lyngby, a good two weeks before the rest of the tour would kick off - a warm up date, if you will, and a treat to all us Nordsjaellanders who live slightly further away from the Copenhagen venues these guys usually play at. For those without great understanding of Danish geography, Lyngby lies about 15 minute drive north of Copenhagen, and it houses one of the largest shopping centers in Denmark, the Lyngby Storcenter. Templet, the venue itself, is surprisingly small, my rough estimates placing it somewhere around eighty people in maximum capacity, effectively rating it as one of the smallest and most intimate venue's I've ever been to a show at. There are a couple of tables on the right side, further limiting the mosh space, and incredibly annoying architectural feature in the form of a pillar right in front of the center stage, which blocks, depending on what side of the venue you are standing, at least one band member from your sight, if not more. Nonetheless, there's no barrier at a small place like this, and an audience of somewhere around 60 people guarantees for an intimate experience. Those of you who've seen The Psyke Project before, know exactly what that means: a show you should definitely not miss.

Vira

Danish hardcore/metal hybrid Vira was set to open the night on the extremely small stage, which caused some problems for both bands. It's kind of hard to constantly be active on stage when you can barely fit all your band members on it in the first place, and as such, some friendly collisions occurred in Vira's set tonight. Maybe that's why members from the band were so happy to jump off stage with their instruments and play them in the mosh pits, although I must say the first time one of the guys went actually outside of the room with his guitar to play at the merch table did catch me by surprise. Or the time when the guitarist came all the way down to the bar by the back of the venue to play a few riffs for the bartender tonight. Soundwise, Vira reminded me extremely much of Misery Signals, even though on their only EP so far they don't really sound like them at all. I guess they were playing some new songs tonight, then, and these songs showed some great potential. Finally, I must say here that their set could've been a lot more energetic than it was. Only occasionally did all of the band members move together in some sort of coordination, but when they did, their set was excellent. Maybe it was the size of the stage, but too much of their set was spent standing still, looking like it's just another day in the office.

The Psyke Project

It didn't take long until The Psyke Project launched into their menacing first song, exploding at least half of the venue into a furious mosh pit where ribs and bones weren't spared. Vocalist Martin's coarse scream still manages to catch me by surprise every time when heard live, because it's simply even more thick and voluminous than on their studio records, something that few bands are able to deliver live as well as The Psyke Project does. Here I must give kudos to the sound dude, who incidentally also happened to be the father of someone in the band (though I'm not sure if that was metaphorically speaking): I've never seen the sound dude travel so much outside of his desk during the show to make sure the sound is alright in all corners of the venue. Huge props, as this is probably why the sound was crystal clear (yet still heavy) tonight for both bands.

As many of you know, The Psyke Project have a new guitarist: Christian "Bono" Bonnesen. This was his debut show for the band, and as you might expect, the rest of the band spent lots of time making him feel both embarrassed and welcomed to the band. For instance, at one point the entire venue was singing the famous Danish drinking song, urging Bono to down his drink, and at another Martin had the entire crowd chanting "Bo-no, Bo-no, Bo-no" for a short time. Although Bono was positioned on the side of the stage throughout the whole show, he still did a decent job of going crazy on stage, considering the little space he had to move around in. No mistakes (that I heard of) on the old songs, and one of the new, atmospheric songs sounded amazing.

Raging across the stage in their usual manner, the band (once again) made sure that their set is a spectacle to watch, as there's always something going on, whether it's one of the guitarists swinging the guitar around or Martin himself delivering his screams in as desperate manner as possible while kneeling towards the floor - the punk-ish "I Get Paralyzed" being one of the highlights of the set. But much like Vira, space was extremely limited for the band, and as such they weren't as active as the last few times I've been able to catch them live. There were lots of collisions as well, and especially the second last song saw a chaotic group collapse in its ending, where the entire band ended up lying on the ground, still playing their instruments, in what would've been the best possible finish for their chaos-hardcore/metal set. The band played one more new song though to finish things off, and by the sounds of it, we should be feeling pretty excited for their upcoming new album.

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