Metal Reviews

They played on the 20th in Vienna in a club as headliners. Openers were 2 Austrian bands: Excitone and Ecliptica. Th first band was an instrumental one, with very young players. They played something similar to LTE but they ruled. All of them were extremly talented, but a special mention goes to the guitar-player who played absolutely fantastic. And they had the best sound of the evening. So until now I was very satisfied. The came Ecliptica: generic powermetal with bad, bad sound (bass and drums drowned everything else), a bad female vocalist, and a pretty good male vocalist, who besides his gay stage act was the only redeeming quality of this band.
After half an hour, SymX stormed the stage with the first song from Paradise Lost :Set the world on fire. Sir Russel Allen was in top shape with his vocal, and man did he wail... wow he was perfect. He also has lost a little weight and put some muscle on, because the female audience made a lot of horny comments about him. But sadly the soundproblems of the previous band carried on ... The guitar was loud enough, but had no "clarity" in its sound, and the same has to be sad about the bass. Jason Rullo's drums were perfectly mixed. Pinella was almost nonaudible when playing with the band, and sadly also Russel Allen was too low in the mix (they changed his mic later, but iti didn't do much good). But he made up for that by singing godly. Performance-wise everybody was excellent and the atmosphere in the band was fantastic. Russel "washed" MR face with water, they hugged with MLP,they behaved like brothers. The set list revolved around their last album. I'll try and write it down, but I can't remember the order exactly:
Intro
Set The World On Fire
Domination
Serpent's Kiss
Paradise Lost
Walls Of Babylon
Inferno
Evolution
Smoke And Mirrors
Bass/Guitar Solo (short and sweat)
Sea Of Lies
Of Sins And Shadows
....
The Odyssey

All in all it was an excellent night and for 26 EUR pretty cheap (well I had to drive 1100 km to and back, but hey that's it). If you got any chance to catch them, go see them!

I saw them 2 weeks ago, but they were opening for Dream Theater and only had about 45 minutes playing time.

I saw them two years ago when The Odyssey was released. They played with Devin Townsend, man that was one of the best shows I have ever been too.

So you went to see DT? How were they? Looking forward to checking out Symphony X as well.