WITHIN TEMPTATION – Cologne (08-04-2014)
Great show, not that great audience and a plain awful venue.
The first time I saw WITHIN TEMPTATION live was in 2007, when they were touring with DELAIN. On Tuesday, April 8th I had the pleasure to experience these two Dutch acts again on stage and see how much they have grown in the past years.
In the case of DELAIN the biggest change I noticed is in front woman Charlotte Wessels. She owns the stage now; her confidence makes her performance outstanding, in her own style. As for her band mates, the display of energy is impressive. The band warms up a very difficult audience: some two thousand people in an old factory building turned long concert hall, so that only the five or six hundred in the center front rows can see the whole band. But DELAIN manages to make the crowd applaud and even scream a little. For the short time a supporting act gets, they play a good set of new songs, e.g. ‘Stardust’ – when the lights make the hall seem starred – and hits like ‘The Gathering’, during which guitarist Timo Somers demonstrates his backing vocal abilities with only few mistakes.
By the time the main act hits the stage, the audience has rearranged in a manner, that I can only see Keyboarder Martijn Spierenburg and guitarist Stefan Helleblad enjoy their performance and energize the crowd. As usual for WITHIN TEMPTATION the LED wall in the background supports the show visually with images from their music videos. This is especially helpful for songs like ‘Paradise (What About Us?)’ where absent duet-partner TARJA makes an appearance through backing samplings, the same being true for the collaborations by Xzibit and Howard Jones.
The show flows nicely with a well-structured set list consisting of “Hydra” material alternating with older hits, like a slower version of ‘Faster’ and a wonderfully sung ‘The Cross’. As a fan of the older WT, I couldn’t help but notice a few mistakes in the lyrics of these songs, but having seen front lady Sharon den Adel sing the wrong words before, it only adds to her natural charisma (and who could blame her, it’s a lot of songs she has to keep in mind). All in all a great show, even though the crowd didn’t really connect and cheered poorly. And I personally blame the venue for that. I understand the band can now fill a stadium and needs locations with huge capacity, but if I had paid 42 euro for a ticket and seen Sharon directly just twice – man, I would’ve been very angry!
DELAIN-set list:
Go Away
Get The Devil Out Of Me
Army Of Dolls
Tell Me, Mechanist
Stardust
Electricity
Sleepwalkers Dream
The Gathering
We Are The Others
WITHIN TEMPTATION-set list:
Let Us Burn
Paradise (What About Us?)
Faster
Iron
Edge Of The World
Angels
In the Middle of the Night
Dangerous
And We Run
Tell me Why
See Who I Am
Stand My Ground
Our Solemn Hour
The Cross
Covered By Roses
Mother Earth
Memories
What Have You Done
Summertime Sadness (Lana del Rey cover)
Ice Queen