I was very interested in seeing Lauren Harris in Albuquerque last Sunday. I knew she'd been opening for Maiden for quite some time, but I had never bothered to find and listen to her music. Here's my critique...
1. While the songs (as LC noted) aren't even close to Maiden's style, they're still reasonably good. Not great, but better than average. It reminded me a bit of old Lita Ford songs, and I thought the only thing she's doing wrong is playing this music 20 years too late.
2. Her band was OK. Just passable, nothing spectacular. They play more to the crowd than Iron Maiden does - by which I mean, they make eye contact with and react to individuals in the audience. They play arenas like they're playing a bar. They haven't yet developed Maiden's thousand-yard stare, where Maiden usually does their show for the whole crowd and doesn't react to individuals. For me, this makes up for the averageness of their musical skill. Remember that I'm a bar band guy, so when I see other bar band guys make it to a bigger stage it makes me happy.
3. However, her bassist just looks goofy. Hair like Paul Stanley, and copies a bunch of Stanley's stage moves too. And he plays with a pick, which I despise.
I wouldn't say that the crowd was "brutal" to her, but most weren't very appreciative. After two or three songs, you could see many people leaving their seats to get another beer (or whatever it is they were doing away from the stage). I'll even confess that I did the same - I left for a smoke break during her set, although I stayed where I could still see her act. So for most of her set, she was playing to about one-fifth of the audience that Maiden had. I only heard one guy actively booing her. Most people simply weren't interested.
But as to Lauren herself - she seems to have her stage act down. She knows how to remain active and entertaining during guitar solos, and she's pretty good at talking to the crowd between songs. And I do think her songs are good enough to connect with an audience somewhere - just not Maiden's audience. She's well positioned for bigger things, but she ought to break out of her father's shadow to get there.
Only one thing really struck me as being a horrible decision. She opened her show with her cover of UFO's "Natural Thing". A great song, and she does a good cover ... but an artist trying to make their own name shouldn't open the show with a cover.
At least I think it should be a band in the vein of classic heavy metal (or older thrash, like Anthrax). Prefer that to metalcore (like A7X who are Lauren's "co-openers").