Epica live at O2 Forum Kentish Town, London on November 15th, 2015

Words by Robert Sutton

Photos by Robert Sutton

www.facebook.com/robertsuttonphotography

Epica, the Dutch symphonic metal six piece band who have Simone Simons as their lead singer have just finished a four date UK tour, with their last date being at the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London. The tour was titled as the ‘Ultimate Enigma’ tour in support of their current sixth studio album, which is tilted ‘The Quantum Enigma’ and was released in early 2014. Support for the UK tour has been Scar Symmetry and Eluveitie.

Scar Symmetry are a Swedish progressive melodic death metal six piece band with six albums to their name and have two leading vocalists. They live up to the typical death metal vocals with Roberth Karlsson giving it plenty of growling in their songs whilst Lars Palmqvist gives them the ‘cleaner’ vocals. With an early start time of 6:45pm and only a half hour set time they gave a great warm up to the evening and did win over a few more fans that were clearly there for the next two bands.

Scar Symmetry_1 Scar Symmetry_2

Eluveitie are a Swiss eight piece band that have six full albums and who’s ‘goal was to fuse Gothenburg styled death metal with ancient folk melodies and themes to create a powerful mixture that would soon become the new wave of folk metal’.

Well the mix of very crisp and clean vocals with the growls of death metal certainly does make an interesting combination along with some more traditionally folk instruments like, flute , violin and mandolin. Put a strange beast called l.the hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes into the mix and this makes for a quite unique sound that is Eluveitie. They played a whopping seventy five minute set and certainly put on a great show as if they were the headline act themselves and had the full support of audience for the entire set.

Eluveitie

Epica entered the stage at 9:15pm one buy one to the applause of the audience for each member of the band to their opening track ‘Originem’ .Once all on stage with Simone being the last to enter, they then performed ‘The Second Stone’ from their latest album ‘The Quantum Enigma’.

‘The Essence of Silence’ also from the current album was next and then the band commented about the recent tragedies in Paris and asked the audience for a minute’s silence. The whole audience obliged and I must say it was a strange moment at a concert when the whole place fell silent out of respect.

They played for one hour forty five minutes with a setlist of thirteen songs with a great light setup both for the band members and also the back drop. Simone remarked during the evening on the fact that Epica’s seventh album would probably be released in 2016 but didn’t say what it might be called.

If there was ever a band that live up to their name it has to be Epica they were so Epic…With great audience participation in the mosh pits and also a wall of death that parted about two thirds of the standing section downstairs. What a great show and one I really did not really want to end.

Epica