Normally after a full weekend of live music I am saturated for some days and skip early week shows. This year I decided to make an exception as Hällas came to town. Now I follow the band remotely for years already. Yet I never bought an album of them, nor did I attend any show. Half a year ago I came close, loving their latest album Panorama and them coming to Utrecht. In the end that fell apart and I now got a new chance a bicycle ride from home. So back to Paard it was. Ton was going already and inside I also bumped into Rene and Zoe. This meant some familiar faces in a crowd that was small yet very diverse.
Openers of the evening were Earth Tongue. This duo are originally from New Zealand, but live in Berlin nowadays. As a duo with guitars and drums only options seem limited, but they had some nice variety of psychedelic stoner-ish songs. Nice to see live, won't work for me at home.
Hällas opened with the first song of their latest album called Above the Continuum. Now that is a 21 minute song showing their styles in one go. At the beginning I was reminded of 70 prog bands from Italy and some old Genesis. Later on they go more towards hardrock where the names Thin Lizzy (due to the double guitars) and Uriah Heep (due to the keyboards) came up. Throughout their set these names kept on coming back at times with also some medieval folky bits blended in. In the end I saw more a hardrock show than a progrock one, Dressed in black capes they seem to have stepped out of a fantasy movie and teh bassist vocalist did look like the villain i Conan. So after many years I finally got to see Hällas live and yes it was as good as I hoped for. Coming just out of ProgPower weekend the obvious question was would they fit on that festival? For me a definite yes, as their blend of hard rock and prog does make them different yet fitting perfectly well. Finally I managed to pick up a CD of them in Panorama. Now playing same and realizing that Face of an Angel is one of the most catchy songs released this year. They play more shows in The Netherlands, so do go and see them.
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