Periphery, Veil of Maya and Good Tiger - Munich. Concert Review by Alex Bock

Concert Review
Periphery, Veil Of Maya and Good Tiger
Munich, Strom, December 8^th, 2015

On short notice the show was delayed from the Backstage (my fave venue) to the Strom (to be honest one of my least favorite ones, because it’s in the heart of the city, they have late show starts – 9.30 pm – and the shows usually have to end at 12 pm latest). It’s a pretty small venue, which was however really packed that night.

The first opening act were Good Tiger. They are what’s usually called a super group consisting of well known musicians. The band features ex-Tesseract vocalist Elliot Coleman, ex-The Safety Fire guitarists Derya Nagle and Joaquin Ardiles, ex-The Faceless drummer Alex Rüdinger and bassist Morgan Sinclair, who was on tour with Architects as a guitarist. In summer this year they started an IndieGoGo campaign to help finance their debut record ‘A Head Full Of Moonlight’, which was released in early November 2015. They had the goal for the campaign set for 16.000 $ and raised that in about 24 hours. A good basis for starting out. The crowd response to their songs was good. Too bad I missed some of their set, because they started a bit earlier than announced and the people waiting outside weren’t even all in by that time.

Second on the set-list were Veil Of Maya, a pretty heavy Metal band from Chicago, IL. Like Periphery they sound much heavier live than on record. Besides screaming parts there’s also melodic clean vocals, which didn’t stick out that much live though. The audience went along and had quite some fun with their show.

Headliners Periphery got the crowd going the most I guess. But that’s to be expected of the headlining band, right? Like I mentioned earlier, the room was packed and it was really awesome to see the audience as a whole jump around in unison with Periphery’s awesome frontman Spencer Sotelo. I saw them a few months earlier opening for Devin Townsend and I have to say, that a bigger stage would have been so much better, because on that small stage, everything is so cramped. Spencer is, as much as I’ve experienced him live last time, no one to just stand around and sing. He’s moving around all the time, but five guys on a small stage doesn’t give the proper chances to do that. Nevertheless, they jumped and moshed and played their hearts out. There’s so much energy in the band’s performance and Spencers voice is one of a kind. I hope next time they can play a bigger venue again.