Okay. My thoughts from The April 10th Vancouver show. I know it's late coming, but that's life.
First of all, I struggle with anxiety. I'm very introverted, and fairly shy. I don't scream at concerts, and I'm not head banging during a show. So it was a little rough to have seats next to a man, who would not stop telling me I'm not rocking out hard enough, and that I'm a disappointment to metal. It didn't help either that the people in front of me were smoking pot throughtout the show. But that's life and there's not much you can do about it. Everyone around me seemed nice enough. No one was being a jerk intentionally.
It was kind of funny actually, the guy smoking pot in front of me recored the whole show holding the phone the wrong way. And then spend the entire show watching through his phone.
As for the show. I was a little worried about sound going into the show because I was close to the stage, but off to the side. When I arrived at the concert. I saw that the second rack of speakers were pointed directly at me. Relief.
Raven Age took the stage, and boy were they loud. Louder than Maiden. And the sound was pretty clear. Their music isn't bad, just completely uninteresting. The main take away was that the sound for Maiden would be okay.
Maiden took the stage and the sound was terrible. They figured it out a bit by Children of the Damned but got worse again around The Trooper. The Red and the Black dragged forever because I couldn't hear the guitar solos. Guitar solos throughout the whole show was incredibly quiet. They were easy to miss altogether if you weren't really listening for them.
The drums were way too loud. The base way too low. The guitars loud, except for the solos.
They couldn't seem to figure out Bruce either. It went back and forth from being barely able to hear him, to it sounding blown out causeing ear piercing pain.
A huge disappointment overall. I mean the boys played well. There energy was amazing. They looked like they were having a lot of fun. I'm glad I sat close enough to really see and experience that. However the sound really put a damper on the whole evening.
YouTube clips seem fine. So were the reviews for that night. So maybe I just had a bad spot. I just don't get it though, because a giant rack of speakers were pointed right at me and Raven Age sounded fine.
I know I'm sounding really negative. It's just I was really excited. It was still a good t ime. If I turend around at the show I had a good view into those box rooms or whatever they're called. One of them was filled with a bunch of classy people in their 30's sitting uniterested. Except for this one lady who stayed standing the entire time in a sleeveless black dress sipping wine from an actual wine glass. She seemed pretty into it, so that's cool.
