Virgin Black

Live at The House of Blues, Hollywood, CA 10/13/2008

Review by Travis Baumann

Virgin Black were the opening band for the Samael and Amorphis North American tour. I had not heard of them prior to the show but listened to them on Myspace ahead of time and found them to be a very interesting Dark Metal project with a somewhat experimental approach in that there are really no rules to the sounds or song structures.

The band is based out of Australia and as I said take a fresh look at dark metal. The lead singer, Rowan London has an amazing voice that seems to have no limit to the range it is capable of.

The set starts with both the stage and house lights off so it is as near darkness as a venue can get. We hear a voice, "Ssshhhhh. Quiet. Someone is dying." This is repeated in a low bass vocal tone several times. Suddenly the lights come on and the stage is full of musicians who start a gloomy but beautiful song picking up momentum as it builds.

The band consists of Samantha Escarbe on lead guitar, her hair let down covering her face entirely. She and Rowan make the core of the band and are the founders and song-writers.

Craig Edis also plays guitar with Ian Miller on bass guitar and backup vocals in addition to Dino Cielo on drums. Rowan stood in front with a keyboard which he would play on certain songs.

The atmosphere of this band is brought to the front with moody synthisizers, epic choirs and orchestrations, dark punching guitars, and the aforementioned vocals.

Rowan would go from a high pitched croon to a low bass rumble to all out extreme growl and then break into operatic style projections all on one song. It was really awesome.

Due to the atmosphere and vocal variations these guys are hard to classify. While most definitely a dark metal act, the are not black metal and while having aggressive moments, there is also so much gothic dark beauty in their songs, they can be rather soothing.

The songs all build and meander and some can be quite long changing from one extreme to the other but never tiring the listener.

I found what I think is their newest release, "Elegant and Dying" in the Gothic section of the local CD store and picked it up. It is really a great disc and explores and mirrors their live performance but it is even better seeing them live.

They are a very eccentric band to say the least but are really worth checking out. I have to say that as much as I love Samael, with their technical difficulties and inability to put on a full show, Virgin Black were my second favorite of the night after Amorphis.

I would have loved to actually get a photo of Ms. Escarbe's face but she always had her hair covering her, obviously wanting the audience to judge her on her playing abilities rather than her comeliness.

Rowan was a great front-man even stacked behind keyboards he brought the audience into their Gothic journies and is quite good on keyboards as well. The other band members were into their soulful, gloomy playing and the set seemed only to last five songs because the tracks are so long and transition within themselves into new sounds.

It was really cool getting introduced to such a interresting band on this tour and when I play their CD it recaptures that feeling each time. I don't know of any other bands quite like them and highly recommend them to people who are sensitive to the dark beauty in music and art and are looking for something atypical in the Goth Metal scene.

I hope they get further chances to tour North America and Europe so I can see them again and it would be cool to pick up some of their other releases as well. If I would have known more about them at the time of the show I would have bought up a bunch of their merchandise but hopefully they can get set up on another great billing like this and play Los Angeles again soon.

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