tuesday night, i attended a concert by the chilenian progressive doom metal band mar de grises, the islandic viking metal band sólstafir, and the finnish death doom metal band swallow the sun, held in the matrix in bochum. i went to this for two reasons: first, to see swallow the sun another time; last time i saw them was last year before christmas in leipzig. the second reason is mar de grises. i was really glad to finally have a chance to see them.
i arrived slightly late, due to bad weather, which was no problem since the concert was opened by two local bands i didn’t really wanted to see. the first one seemed to be a doom band, and i didn’t really like the second band’s music style. they both were ok, but i would have rather not seen them and heard mar de grises playing longer ;-) both opening bands were pretty much ok though, compared to many other openers i’ve seen so far…
while the openers were playing, i checked out the merchandizing booth. there was nothing new of interest in the swallow the sun section, so i inspected the mar de grises section. they had a special edition of draining the waterheart (including a 16 minute bonus track called unconscious passenger), the new album, some t-shirts, and two albums from other chilenian bands, one of them a funeral doom band called lethargy of death, a project of one of the band members. i bought the digipack, the new album, the lethargy of death album as well as the last available unconscious passenger t-shirt. some money invested well, i hoped. (and so far, i’m right about this :-) )
after the two openers, mar de grises started playing for 45 minutes. i was in the front row, which was no problem since the location wasn’t exactly stuffed, and nobody tried to be at the very front. in fact, i was like two meters away from the stage. unfortunately, the audio quality was really bad. i don’t know whose fault this was, if it was the mixing, the location, or whatever, but it was just bad. i was happy that i knew many of the songs they played, so i knew what it was supposed to sound like, so it was more a problem for sólstafir, since i heard them the first time…
well. despite the poor sound quality, mar de grises‘ performance was great. i really like this band. following mar de grises, sólstafir entered the stage. at that point, i wasn’t feeling very well, thanks to all the fucking bastards smoking inside the location. you can’t really enjoy a concert with itching eyes and having a headache. i really miss the nonsmoker protection laws i experienced in canada and other parts of europe…
i didn’t like sólstafir‘s performance too much, but i’m not sure whether this is just related to the horrible air and the awful sound quality, or if it’s their music. some time ago i listened to a couple of songs of them, and i don’t remember being disappointed back then. so maybe i have to give them another try…
finally, swallow the sun started playing. they played songs from all over their albums, which was really nice. some of my favorites, such as the giant, were played as well!
unfortunately, it seemed that the crowd got thinner and thinner. when they went off the stage before the encore, luckily enough people were still there to make some noise. they came back pretty fast, before the people started making noise and launching an awkward silence. they played descending winters, and after that the concert was over.
well. if the sound and air quality would have been better, this concert would have been really great. but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case… (but that’s not the bands’ fault…)

in my post on wikipedia, i was complaining that the article about the chilenian doom metal band mar de grises has been deleted because it the band is “irrelevant”. hence, i thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about them. when writing the post on wikipedia, i re-started listening to them more intensely, and in fact have been listening to their two albums the tatterdemalion express and draining the waterheart pretty intensively over the last weeks.
their music is a beautiful mixture of dark, gloomy metal, intense doom, beautiful melancholic melodies. progressive elements, sometimes experimental elements, often slow, always dark. it is complex, never boring.
mar de grises is one of the bands you should keep an eye on, as they are rising and they are good.