Concert Review: Devin Townsend Project, Periphery and Shining NOR at Backstage, Munich by Alexandra

Contributed by Alexandra

Backstage – Werk, Munich, March 10, 2015

First up, it was an amazing, fun and entertaining evening with three awesome acts and never one minute of boredom. The venue was almost sold out, so the room was packed.

The Norwegian Band Shining started the set a little earlier than announced at about 7.45 pm. As singer Jorgen Munkeby stated, they started out in 1999 as a Jazz combo and now it’s ‘Jazz-Metal’. Jorgen himself plays guitar and saxophone and boy can he play that one. He’s getting all that noises out of his instrument. It’s stunning. If you’re a fan of the experimental kind of music, you’ll sure like them. I did! Their latest album ‘One One One’ was released 2013. Make sure to check them out.

Second act of the evening was ‘Periphery’. They were well known by a good part of the audience and I’m pretty sure they drew many people there that night. Being a quite popular act in the US already, considering the audiences reactions, they could be the next big thing here too. They mostly played songs of their recent album ‘Juggernaut’ which has two parts that couldn’t be named any better than they are, which is ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’. With three guitars they have a very rich sound.

At the end of the set, during their last song, singer Spencer Sotelo took a little run-up and jumped over the photo-pit into the first rows of people. I think that everyone was really surprised, because no one saw it coming. Luckily the people there didn’t step back, though I couldn’t see the ‘impact’ from my viewpoint. He got up and sang on, so I take that as a good sign.

After another break Devin Townsend finally got on stage….after a short alien introduction via two big screens on either side of the stage. All the monitors in the front of the stage were gone, just pedal-boards for all the ‘string-instruments’ players left. The two screens showed images throughout the whole set. Devin Townsend himself was greeted with a big applause and he took his time before the set and afterwards to thank everybody for coming out. Starting the set with the song ‘Truth’ from the 2006 album ‘Infinity’. He played a mix of old and new songs. After all he has lots of awesome songs to choose from. At about two thirds down the set he asked everyone for their ‘Jazz hands’ to help him out with the song ‘Lucky Animals’. With his sweeping nature he really had the whole crowd with arms up in the air and shaking them, every time he nodded. The song itself is really catchy, but with that ‘Jazz hands’ added, it was even more fun to watch the performance with everyone ‘performing’ along. He played a fifteen song set, announcing at the thirteenth song that they’ll have a short break soon. So after the song ‘Christine’ he told everyone that this would usually be the time, when they would go off stage and the crowd would cheer for the encore and that there surely will be an encore, because that’s what the bands are there for, to perform for the audience. So he said he’d try out something different and simply stay on stage and play some guitar tunes as kind of an interlude. Everyone should go on talking and ignore him for the next minutes. So he sat down on the front of the stage and just ‘strummed’ his guitar, playing some clean guitar chords. The stage was tinged in a blue light. It was really awesome. I can’t remember ever having a band staying and playing on, just like that. After a short while the guitar playing blended over into the song ‘Ih-Ah!’ from the 2009 released album ‘Addicted’, which he performed without the band. They came back on stage to perform the last song of the evening ‘Kingdom’ from the 2012 release ‘Epicloud’ which closed an entertaining fun set.