DOG FASHION DISCO

@ the Ascot room @ the Quest
Minneapolis December 1st 2003

live review by Matthew "Matt" Haumschild -

INTRO

AESMA DAEVA

DOG FASHION DISCO

LACUNA COIL

INTRO

I personally think that there isn’t a better venue in which to see Lacuna Coil than in the Ascot Room @ the Quest. I’ve personally have seen LC four times besides this one and besides the first time I ever saw them, this was the best LC show I had ever seen.Let me explain, The Ascot Room is very small. It could fit maybe 200 or so people. It had fake vines running up and down the pillars and in the back it sported a fountain with water in it, of which people could sit and hang out at. Not to mention there were black lights everywhere. There’s an intimate feeling in this room that I suppose all the bands like this club to some extent. For a band like Lacuna Coil, you really could not have picked a better venue.

AESMA DAEVA

The show opened up with a band called “Aesma Daeva”. At the beginning of the show, the singer taught everyone how to pronounce the name of the band. I’m still scratching my head at it though. The very first thing I noticed was there wasn’t a bass player. Which in my book a band with out a bass player is like a car with out seat belts, you just don’t have a band with out a bass player just like you wouldn’t buy a car with it’s best safety feature! Regardless, Singer sang as if she was an Opera singer. Not bad either, she just needed a different microphone other than a Shure SM-58. I guess she took that vocal ability to the hilt and kind of over did it. The only singer I have to compare to is Tarja from Nightwish. The rest of the band seemed kind of cheesy to me. One of the guitar players had a custom made Jackson which looked cool. The music was executed nicely but it tended to drag on though. I guess I need another listen before the jury comes back on a decision on rather or not I like the band or not. So far, not really.

2.5/5.

DOG FASHION DISCO

Dog Fashion Disco. Another band name that’s a bit questionable, but I won’t go into that. Admittedly I have heard a song or two of theirs but I can’t say it actually grabbed my attention but the show is quite different. The band was plagued by technical difficulties at the beginning of the show, which I found quite humorous from an engineers point of view. About ten minutes after they figured out the problem the band finally started to play. They were actually halfway entertaining. The guitar work was nothing to write about. All the drummer was wearing was swimming trunks, which was disgusting considering he was a rather large guy and seeing him sweat almost made me demand half my money back. The singer was a typical sing/screamer, again nothing to write about. However the keyboard player, he was doing stuff that the typical keyboard player does not even consider composing! Whenever I think of keyboard players I think of players from Dream Theater, Stratovarious, and Nightwish. This guy was not playing like any of them! In the midst of songs he would go into musical styles that you might hear from a Circus or maybe something from the Middle East! His playing basically made the band. He wasn’t as technical as other players but he has great ideas of what to put into songs that won’t make you think about what kind of beer to get at the bar! I give this band 3.5 of 5. The songs themselves didn’t really grab me from the throat but the band wasn’t too bad. I’ve seen worse.

LACUNA COIL

Ladies and Gentlemen. For the fifth time this year…Lacuna Coil!I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I saw LC two or three months previous to this show when they opened up for Type O Negative. But at least this time, I could measure how large their fan base had grown since I saw them with Moonspell in December of 2001, I could tell the crowd then, were mainly there for LC. Their fan base grew exponentially! The band never sounded better. I wished the stage was a bit larger but that’s it. Christina and Andrea were talking with the crowd and everything. I could tell everyone was having a blast! They played a few extra songs they hadn’t the last three times I had seen them. I was really quite surprised when the Mozzati (drummer), Cotizelati (bass), and Andrea left the stage and the remaining members played “Cold Heritage”. It was just Christina and the guitar player playing with the “Cold Heritage” sample in the background. Everyone was singing along. The only downer part of the show is they still hadn’t played a song from “In a Reverie”. I was really hoping for something from that album or even from their first album. Another song they played this time around that they didn’t was “Half Life”. Sonically, LC played extremely well. No troubles there. The vocals sounded just right, the Guitars were a bit on the loud side and there could have been more bass in the mix. The samples were about right, the drums sounded as good as ever. The band did have the same stage theatrics as they had from the previous shows, banging their heads in synchronization and jumping on cue. Basic stage theatrics really. Christina, getting on her knees to sing certain parts of a song stuff like that. If this were my first time, I would have gone nuts to see all this. I guess my only advise to the band would be to change it up a bit stage wise. Other than that, the band was flawless. Simply put, you could not ask to see a better band at a better venue. Nearly a perfect show and only God knows there aren’t very many acts that could pull even this off!

4.5-5

Matthew Haumschild

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