Seldom does it happen that a tour swings by, where you would actually like every band on the billing equally much. I am glad to say that such a thing happened to me the night Amorphis chose to swing by Copenhagen on the same night, and venue, that Metallica Jam made their traditional J-Day appearance, and not only that, but they had Orphaned Land with them as well!

Now, if you don’t know Orphaned Land, I’d like to say it’s your own damn fault, and that you should really, really run down to your local CD pusher and make the acquaintance; on the other hand, I myself had not made their acquaintance until recently, and can’t, by that reason, yell at anyone for not knowing them yet.
I will however implore you to listen to them. I will not try and put a label on their music, as I believe there has not yet been created one which covers as many aspects at once as the band does, but by naming things like middle eastern traditional, progressive, melodic and extreme metal I hope to give you some idea of the width of what Orphaned Land can do.

But I’m getting side-tracked here, let get back to the show at hand.
Orphaned Land was first out, and for that reason, the hall had not yet been filled as they came on stage, but they appeared to be happy about playing none the less, and there were in fact more people in the front who seemed to be familiar with the band than I had thought there would be. And they were happy with what was presented to them.
As I had seen the band once this year already, I recognized some of the comments used by vocalist Kobi Farhi (i.e. “I’m not Jesus Christ”), but they still worked well, and did their job of opening the crowd up more for the band to work their magic on us.
Compared to the other show, I was sad to see that there were no guest’s during this concert though, and Shlomit Levi’s part of Sapari was played from a tape. On the other hand, I do realize that bringing guest artist’s along for a whole tour, for us in single songs only won’t really be an option…

I felt the band had a great energy this night, and once again guitarist Yossi ‘Sassi’ Sa’aron tried to steal the show with an everlasting smile and great showmanship, but the throne was not easily won as all the band-members shone in their own right; Farhi was an iconic frontman with his getup and manners, both Uri Zelcha (bass) and Matti Svatitzki were positively trying to screw their own heads of with their wild headbanging, and the impromptu belly-dancing by drummer Matan Shmuely was priceless.

When all is said and done, this was a great way to start the evening, and since it was the first show on the tour, I can only hope the band found it as good a beginning as I did.
Ok, so it has to be said; Orphaned Land, for me, played the best gig of the evening, and I hope they’ll come back headlining next time, so that the set will be longer than the much too short 30 minutes we were given tonight.