1998/01/16, Libro Music Hall, Vienna, Austria

Written by Chris Sampson (Chris@cgs123.demon.co.uk) for Dominion mailing list

I thought the venue for this was pretty good. About 2500 capacity and with lots of curtains hanging down at the back and on the roof, so they'd obviously thought about the acoustics. The T-Shirt stand is selling the usual array of backstock along with a new tour shirt which has the cog wheel thing from the new head & star on the front, and the tour cities on the back. A bit disappointing to be honest. Also on sale is the fab new fanzine GPS and the Scoda Blush CD.

Scoda Blush are the first band up: a three piece guitar/vocalist, bass and drums and they play fairly melodic rock. Nothing particularly special, and now that they're on MR their career will undoubtedly enter that Twilight Zone reserved for MR bands.

Next up are Think About Mutation who are scary. Six lunatics charge about the stage, the three guitarists - feet spot welded onto monitors, hair flailing in every direction except that gravity intended, synchro Quo style headbanging, and Townsend windmills - thrash out a Napalm Death style racket. This is backed up by a manic techno drum beat and deranged ranting from the vocalist. The first 30 seconds are electrifying. Then deep, intense migraine sets in and I wander off to the bar for some relief. The boy Wadsworth, who likes this sort of thing bless him, could barely contain himself. Probably worth checking out, though I don't think they're playing the London dates.

The Sisters are in good, verging on great form. For me the apathy of the Austrian audience took the edge off the gig, but you can't blame the band for this. The line-up is the same as the Distance Over Time tour, though Adam has splashed out on a new guitar which is the same as the old one only white. The light show is awesome and the smoke machines are working overtime. Amphetamine Logic is absolutely awesome - very dark for the verses with that Chromoscope thing whizzing (sic) around, then it erupts into a retina-searing riot of blinding strobes for the chorus. Completely wired and hats off to Nigel.

The first of the new new songs, Suzanne, not a cover of the Cohen song, is a tricky blighter to get to grips with on a first listen. There's a trancy bass line that's ripped straight off James Ray's Edie Sedgwick, the vocals were fairly slow as well. I can't remember much of the lyric, except the last line of the chorus was "give it a name Suzanne", and there were too many rhymes for my taste - the chorus was four lines with each rhyme being the same: name, blame, etc. I wonder if Von is deliberately making his lyrics less oblique, at least in structure. The Eliotic free verse of Floodland seems to have been pushed aside in favour of more traditional verse/chorus structures. Romeo Down is an exception to this, and is all the better for it.

I liked Summer better the second time at Prague. Flood 2 and Dominion are in there as usual and at last the locals start to get excited. While I remember, namechecks for the UK mob: Simon Wadsworth, Oliver DW, Speedy D, Jackie, Spencer, Steve and some others I've forgotten.

The first encore is the other new song, Romeo Down. This is vintage Eldritch, and the best of the new songs by a mile. Adam plays the lead riff on bass, and it's a brooding, distinctly nasty song, reference points are Valentine and Flood I. There's lots of lyric in there, the first line was something like "It's just a heartbeat... it'll go away", and I think there was something about Juliet towards the end.

Some tosser in the audience switches on the house lights after the first encore, but the band come back for yet another superb Comfortably Numb and then FALAA for the third encore. Top stuff, but you Austrians need to learn what your feet are for.

Written by Bernhard Lukas (lutz@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at) for Dominion mailing list

Concert was great with impressive lightshow and an awesome Mr. Eldritch, but the audience was in a bad mood - maybe due to the fact that they played too much new material. No Vision Thing, no Jolene!

Compared to Wiesen 1997, the lights and (theatrical) stage appearance of Andrew Eldritch improved very much, but on the other hand the guitar sound and the guitarists' acting on stage lacked a lot.

It was more an excellent presentation of new material than a "concert", the show was really perfect, nearly too perfect (but too much new stuff). If Andrew exchanged 2 new songs for old "goodies" like "Jolene" or "Alice" and chose "Ribbons" as the opener instead of "Kiss The Carpet", the audience would have been much more enthusiastic / stunned, or whatever.

Anyway, excellent work, and 2 songs ("Summer" and "War On Drugs" not included), but bad circumstances (boring venue, boring bands before TSOM, stupid fans demanding more "old shit", etc.) made the event not as much worth being remembered as Wiesen or Ochtrup.

BTW, great bass sound from the Doktor!

Also, they repeated the FALAA-verse towards the end of the song more often (I guess), which I liked quite a lot. The new songs sometimes need a bit of rework, but in general the actual Sisters-style rules!

Some friends of mine have been a bit disappointed of the Sisters playing so much new stuff, but appreciated "Comfortably Numb" and "War On Drugs" very much.

Written by Michael Krammer (etxmicl@aom.ericsson.se) for Dominion mailing list

> The T-Shirt stand is selling the usual array of backstock along with a
> new tour shirt which has the cog wheel thing from the new head & star on
> the front, and the tour cities on the back. A bit disappointing to be honest.

I wasn't surprised to find that most shirts except the Event Horizon one sold out. I think the tour t-shirt is more than disappointing. It's ugly.

> The Sisters are in good, verging on great form. For me the apathy of the
> Austrian audience took the edge off the gig, but you can't blame the band for this.

Well, to some extent I think you can. The order of the songs in the setlist was far from optimal. They shouldn't have opened with a song like Kiss the Carpet, and perhaps they should have played some of their more well-known songs earlier. Obviously the band felt that themselves and opened with FALAA in Prague. But I must say that I'm confused about the audience. It really seemed like Dominion was the first song that was even recognized. I've never seen such an unenthusiastic crowd in Vienna before and that's strange, because the atmosphere at the last gig in Vienna (the Overbombing tour) was very good and the same goes for the gig in Wiesen last summer.

> The light show is awesome and the smoke machines are working overtime.

Yes, the light show was really something special.

> The first encore is the other new song, Romeo Down. This is vintage Eldritch,
> and the best of the new songs by a mile. Adam plays the lead riff on bass,

I think that song also shows how much better it would be if Andrew employed a bass player for the rest of the songs.

> Top stuff, but you Austrians need to learn what your feet are for.

The best song quote from the evening: "Watch them do the standing still".