The Devin Townsend Project

support Fear Factory + Dunderbeist
author AZ date 11/11/12 venue Amager Bio, Copenhagen, DEN

Copenhagen on a warm Sunday night – the perfect circumstances for a great evening. It depends, of course, on what one would consider as perfect, seeing as something extremely crazy was heading my way. Yup, Mr. Heavy Devy was about to hit me right in the kisser with his slightly disturbing and yet intriguing hysterical comical acts on and off the stage. With a little tear in the eye I admit that my initial attraction to this extraordinary musician came from the nowadays historical band Strapping Young Lad. Nevertheless Devin Townsend Project still creates solid and stout compositions wherever he lays his hand. Thus paying a visit on behalf of Rockfreaks is obligatory.

Dunderbeist

This evening's three step transcendence starts with norwegian-native Dunderbeist. My first contact with the band lead me to believe that I am an Avenged Sevenfold show. Visuals are somewhat similar to me, although I haven't seen A7X live. Music is cool -nothing that may amaze or disappoint the average metalhead. The band plays with passion and they use the short stage time they have rather well. As you may have noticed with opening acts, there always exists a feeling of a lack of seriousness. Amager Bio is scarcely filled; metal heads are walking around talking. The sound is not loud enough (despite being crisp and clear). To be honest, I think that with all these factors present it was hard to get a good estimate of what Dunderbeist are capable of. A question can also be posed on how they tied in with the other band that were about to play.

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Fear Factory

The extreme part of the concert had come! After a quick stage transformation and a soundcheck, Fear Factory hit the stage like non other. The industrial metal pioneers didn't need any special preparation to start methodically chopping people's heads off. Tight, fast and merciless – the band showed everyone, who was present, what years of performing around the world lead to. And the result was visible – precise and concise to the point, Fear Factory played effortlessly, bringing the house down one step at a time. As for the crowd - if at Dunderbeist people were slightly moving their head and shaking their fist, now the metalheads in Amager Bio were jumping, headbanging hard, singing alongside Burton and reaching out to give Dino Cazares a hand shake.

What made a very good impression on me was the band's accessibility. Dino let people from the crowd touch his guitar and Burton used every possibility to thank the audience about their support. A mix of the old school stuff such as songs from “Soul of a New Machine” and new mechanical creations as their release “The Industrialist”, to which the show was a support, was presented to the audience. Noone was left unhappy even when the time to part ways with the mechanical surgeons came.

Devin Townsend Project

Peculiar, funny, odd, bizarre. Call it what you want, the Devin Townsend Project was about to take over their responsibility as headliners of the evening. You could easily see that people around were in a somewhat different mood that at most metal concerts. An explanation would help here. During the soundcheck the wall behind the drummer showed the craziest videos one could expect to see - supplied with the corresponding audio, of course. The main character in all of them – you may be guessing already – was none other that Devin Townsend himself.

The waiting was over and the party started. People were dancing, jumping, jazz-hand-shaking (a request made by Devin himself) – doing whatever they could do to respond to the creative mixture of metal, rock, pop and jazz. The grand-master navigator was enjoying this because he found his usual abnormal self making fun of himself and the other guys on the tour for being old and non-party oriented at this point. Then he spent some of the time he had between the songs to discuss his life as a rockstar and etc. The guitars around Devin's shoulder were constantly switching but his skills on any of them didn't seem to differ.

The musicians part of this looney project were also top class, as Mr. Townsend himself. Extremely professional and cool, the guys standing beside Devin showed their abilities numerous times during the night and I must tell you – they rocked hard. After more than an hour of ludicrous behavior, great music and visuals, the show came to its end, leaving all the people in the audience with a strange but fulfilling sensation. Until next time Ziltoid!

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Photos courtesy of Peter Troest

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