Friday night, went to see Brave at Rube’s in Harvey, IL, which is a restaurant/bar where they have a separate room cleared out in which bands can play. 4-inch high stage, dropped ceiling, and it kinda felt like you were seeing a band playing in someone’s basement at a college house party. So nothing fancy, but it was good enough to get the job done.

The opener was the local band Abolisher, who I really wanted to see after downloading some of their songs in preparation for the show. The band’s name doesn’t really fit their sound, IMO. I guess they’d probably be classified as “power metal”, but of the American variety like Iced Earth, Jag Panzer, or Nevermore, rather than the European variety. Meaning that much of the sound is based in their melodic, galloping riffs, and they aren’t happy-sounding at all. Unlike the aforementioned bands, they don’t have an operatic singer; the vocals are more of a somewhat rough thrash style. Not a lot of range, but effective, and the lead guitarist and bass player contributed some additional styles of vocal delivery from time to time. What makes them really cool are both the frequent, good-quality head-bangable riffs, and also their epic tendancies. They write some long songs, have some very good extended solos, and mix in some keyboard parts that bring to mind a band like Savatage. Unfortunately, the keyboard (apparently handled by the bass player) was in the shop, so they weren’t able to play what probably would have been some of their best songs. Still, the stuff they did play was great. I picked up a 4-track, 31 minute CD for $5, and am really enjoying it. Go to their website and download the 13-minute “A Stolen Season”, and you’ll understand why I was so interested in seeing these guys.

Then after a pretty good wait, Brave came on. Everything was pretty similar to the show in July, but since that show was excellent, that was perfectly fine with me. The setlist was pretty much the same as far as I could tell, except that they played “Bluer Skies” (which was cool because I really like that one) and did an encore of “Spirit” (from the EP) as a request from the crowd. Although the “stage” was low, it was big and wide, so the band had a lot more room to move around and were more animated this time (particularly in the singer and bass player positions). The violinist even walked out into the “crowd” for a solo. There were 50-60 people watching them, so that doubled or tripled the turnout at their last show here. I finally picked up the EP to round out my collection, and it’s really good; I can understand why it’s the only thing some people really like from them. I don’t agree, but it’s definitely different.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 24th, 2002 at 11:40 am and is filed under concert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.