PlanetMosh Keeping it Metal
Tonight is the album launch for The Charm The Fury’s new album, The sick, dumb and happy. The venue is the Sugar Factory just opposite Melkweg in the band’s home city of Amsterdam, and a queue of fans had formed well before doors opened. By the time the show got underway it was busy, and by the time The Charm The Fury took to the stage it was absolutely packed with fans.
The night started with another local band, For I am King. Fronted by Alma Alizadeh the set starts with a lot of power and speed – there’s little subtlety here, just a wall of sound that would wake the dead. As the set went on they started to show more of their talent as the songs gave more scope for the melody to show through. Alma is a great frontwoman who gets the crowd involved as she gets them waving their arms, showing their fists or making noise. At times she reminds me of Cousin It from the Addams family movie as with the lighting, all you can see is long hair and her glasses. She’s got a good voice too – plenty of power for those agressive sounding vocals.
Next up was Spoil Engine who like The Charm The Fury are signed to Nuclear Blast, and also have a female Dutch singer although the rest of the band is from Belgium. Their modern metal sound goes down a storm with the fans and they’d barely started the second song before the first circle pit of the night formed. It wasn’t long after that before singer Iris Goessens got the fans to form a wall of death. I’d seen them perform at Metal Female Voices Fest around five months ago, but tonight the small packed out venue had a far better atmosphere that the band were able to feed off and really give a superb performance. With their new album, “Stormsleeper” due out in May this is a band to watch out for.
Finally it was time for tonight’s headliners, The Charm The Fury. I’ve seen them several times before but always at a festival or in a support slot, so I was looking forward to seeing a headline show from them – so much so that I’d travelled from the UK just to see tonight’s gig. Well it was definitely worth the trip. Normally I’d be making notes through the night, but I didn’t actually make any during their set as I was too busy enjoying it. Right from the start they were in superb form, and the crowd were really enjoying it, and from the first song right to the last there was a steady stream of stage divers and crowd surfers, not to mention circle pits and a wall of death that involved most of the venue.
The new album has been out a week and it was clear that the fans here tonight had been listening to it a lot and clearly loved it. A good job really as the set tonight featured most of the songs on the album. The singles from the album (“Echoes” and “Down on the ropes”) understandably went down best as the fans have had longer to listen to those two, but not one song fell flat tonight – the energy levels both on stage and in the crowd were at 100% all night. The set ended with a bit of Metallica played instrumentally, but after a very short break they were back for the encore. TO end the night completely, singer Caroline Westendorp decided to follow the example of half the audience members and stage dive before crowd surfing most of the way to the back of the venue (sadly for her she didnt quite make it to the bar).
An absolutely fantastic night – For I am King did a god job getting the crowd warmed up, Spoil engine put in a great performance and then The Charm The Fury finished the night off with a superb performance.
