Well, I was there, it went off! What an AMAZING night! If anyone else out there is seeing this tour in a town near to them, get ready for a fricking good night. Seriously, there was so much jizz-worthy gear on that stage! I counted two of Misha's latest custom guitars, an Engl Powerball, a Daemoness Cimmerian, quite a lot of nice Ibanez's, a Steve Carpenter 8 string LTD and 3....count them.,..THREE Fractal Audio AxeFX units. And those were only the ones I could see from my position, I wouldn't have been surprised if there were more knocking around!
Tesseract were, as expected, mind-blowing. Seriously, they were absolutely spot-on the entire set, Dan's vocals were amazingly perfect, Jay's drumming was the stuff of legend, and all three stringsmen just owned the crowd.
Periphery...well where do I start? The album does not do their vocalist's voice justice. He is amazing. I wasn't keen on him before, as I thought his sound on the album was thin, over-produced and a bit too strained. Live? Feck...he ripped up my initial thoughts and scattered them to the unforgiving wind. He was perfect all the way through, his cleans were amazing and powerful, his growls and screams were too. I was truly taken aback, and I just had to smile the whole way through their set...kind of like Misha, hah! I bet Misha "Bulb" Mansoor just does not know how to be unhappy, the guy is made of rays of sunshine! He emanates cheerfulness and friendliness, and I managed to get a photo with him after the gig. Now onto his tone....OMFG. The guy writes AxeFX patches like Mozart wrote piano concertos. He came on stage for the first song with the Daemoness guitar and struck a few notes to get his sound in (so we all heard it untainted by other noise) and bloody hell, what meat! What flavour! It was pure audible sex and I'd be lying if I said that sound didn't turn me on just a little bit. I may have pissed myself it was that good, but I just wouldn't have cared.
What a mindblowing night... :O
I also met Nolly and Dylan (the man behind Daemoness Guitars). Somehow managed to lose Nolly, turned around and he was gone, but hello anyway dude, heh! Dylan's a lovely chap and I will DEFO be ordering a custom from him when I can save the money. Seeing it in action got my juices well and truly flowing and he can get hold of Korina easily too, which is half the battle over already, hah!
