[Live Report] Kadavar, 45Rats live at An Club, Athens, Greece 30/11/2014

Delivering the goods

A few years back the norm was to arrive late at the venue and skip the support band. Tonight that wasn't the case since 45Rats have made a name for themselves in the local scene. It's a classic power trio band that plays instrumental songs. Despite the lack of vocals their compositions where a nice warm up to our ears, while we were waiting for Kadavar. Their presence on stage was subtle focusing on delivering their arrangements. Among others they offered us a preview of two new songs and ended their set with “Prediction: Pain”. They need to work a bit more on their stage presence but overall their performance was flawless.

An club's stage is quite small for Kadavar’s drummer set-up therefore he had to be placed at the front of the stage.  The drummer and bass player were dressed all in black looking like they had come out of an early 70's photo-shoot. It took them about half an hour to set-up the stage and everything started according to plan. Unlike what usually happens in gigs here in Greece, where people have to wait for a long time before the headliners show up on stage CTS productions had posted a schedule of tonight's show and tried to keep to it. I really don't think people minded a ten minute delay. The club was half-full with around 250 punters from a very rough estimate. Those who showed up though for tonight's show were actual fans of the bands. The show started with a few problems since the singer couldn't hear his own voice. That didn't affect the band's performance since we could hear him and he said, that he'll try to sing louder. The second and biggest problem (if you ask me) was all those annoying wannabe photographers that crammed themselves in front of the band at such a small venue essentially blocking the view of the group for the rest of us. Thankfully the band was aware of that and twenty minutes into the show their roadie didn't allow anybody with a camera at the front of the stage, giving us space to enjoy the rest of the show.

As was expected most of their set list was made up of their latest release "Abra Kadavar". Thus the audience enjoyed live versions of some of favourite tracks like: "Living in your head", "Come Back Life" and "Creature of the Demon". Tiger’s relentless drumming stole the audience’s focus from the singer a lot. Mr. Lindermann didn't seem to be intimated by that. On the contrary, he praised both his co-travellers on this trip through time, that's how it felt for as long as their show lasted. It was a trip down memory lane to a past that almost none of us had actually ever experienced, since the majority of the crowd was in their late twenties, early thirties.

Nonetheless Kadavar's appearance that night was thrilling and despite the fact that it was two shows before the end of the tour they didn't look at all tired. Thank you for your visit and we hope to see you again soon.

by Christos A