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Motionless In White announced their European/UK tour a few months back. After several weeks, shows started selling out and in some places, the band switched to a bigger venue. That also happened in Munich. So they changed from the Backstage Halle to the Backstage Werk, a venue with about 1300 people capacity. Looking at the places MIW played in Munich before, esp. when they were touring as a headliner, it was a major jump. Motionless In White, like many other bands, started with their first show here in the Club, the smallest venue on the Backstage area. Chris Motionless tells this story every time he gets to Munich, but promised this time, to put that speech to rest now: In 2011 they played in front of about 15 people and they weren’t even interested in the band and practically ignored them. The other times they have been to Munich they played as support act for bands like Lacuna Coil and Asking Alexandria. And every time it seems their audience grew. Now, due to the success of Graveyard Shift and Disguise, the band was able to play one of their biggest headliner shows in Germany.

When I headed towards the venue, there was already a long queue outside. Although people were already getting inside, it didn’t seem to get shorter. Officially the show was supposed to start at 8 pm. Skold entered the stage at 7.45 pm though. Surprisingly the venue was already pretty packed, which is out of the ordinary, because usually only about half the people show up for the opener. Skold is basically the music project of Tim Skold, known to many as the bass player and vocalist of Shotgun Messiah, KMFDM and bass player/guitarist and co-producer of Marilyn Manson. Tim Skold has been tied to Motionless In White for years now. He produced their record ‘Infamous’ in 2012 and is featured in the song ‘Final Dictvm’ on ‘Reincarnate’. He’s a very versed musician that already worked with different musical styles like Glam Rock, Heavy Metal and Industrial Rock. Skolds music now leans very much towards Industrial mixed with electronic sounds.

Lately shows with only two bands get rare. There’s a plus side to that though…..there’s more time for both bands to play. So we had the pleasure of a ten-song set of Skold. He played a variety of songs from his records. The songs and appearance were a perfect match to Motionless In White. The gloomy, though heavy and ‘dark’ songs made quite the impact on me and on many people in the audience too.

Motionless In White started their show out with their latest single ‘Undead Ahead 2’, which was a perfect and dynamic start into a seventeen song set, followed by ‘Necessary Evil’ and ‘Reincarnate’. During the set, singer Chris Motionless asked the audience, who had seen the band live before and who saw them for the first time. More than half the people have seen them live for the first time that night. Last time they played in Munich was in 2014, opening for Lacuna Coil. That was the touring cycle for ‘Reincarnate’. The last two records of the band ‘Graveyard Shift’ and ‘Disguise’ really pushed the career of the band. Aside from headliner tours all over the world, they also toured with ‘big’ bands like Korn and Slipknot, which gave them a great chance to perform in front of bigger audiences. Though they haven’t been to Munich for five years, they have been to Germany every once in a while over the last few years. They played festivals like Rock am Ring and Rock im Park, With Full Force, but also toured with other bands like f.e. Of Mice And Men in 2017.

The majority of the songs played were from MIW’s recent records, which, considering there were mostly newer fans of the band there that night, was a good choice. Many people from the crowd were able to sing along to most of the songs, weren’t that familiar though with older songs like ‘Devils Night’.

From time to time the band had to struggle with sound problems, mostly with the vocals. Though you saw them sing, it was sometimes hard to make a voice out.

Nevertheless, the band made a connection with the audience the minute they went on stage, esp. Chris Motionless, since he is the spokesperson on stage. Although the band has been touring on this album cycle for quite a while now, they seemingly were excited to perform and they enjoyed the show as much as the fans did.

Munich even had a special treat that night, the live premiere of ‘Holding On To Smoke’.

Every good night must come to an end, so after about 90 minutes the band came back on stage for one final encore – ‘Eternally Yours’, during which a handful of red roses were given to some of the fans.

After the band left the stage, Chris Motionless came down to the front row and shook hands with people and thanked them for being there that night. A very nice gesture, which unfortunately isn’t seen a lot these days.

With the big success of this tour (several shows were sold out) I hope, it won’t take another five years for Motionless In White to get back to Munich. Fingers crossed!

Motionless In White are currently still on tour in Europe/UK. After a short Christmas break they will head out on tour with Beartooth in January, starting January 4^th in Seattle, WA.