Zeraphine:

I had been a fan of Dreadful Shadows for some time now, especially liking their "The Cycle" album. Sven, the lead singer has an awesome, deep voice rivaling all of the dark romantics in the scene including Mr. Eldritch. The band itself focused on a melodic, melancholic sound ranging from full-on ballads to more rocking material as well.

Much to my disappointment I never got to see Dreadful Shadows live and with "The Cycle" their stint as a band had come to an end. I was very excited to hear that Sven and another band-member had moved on to a new project now called Zeraphine (after a short period under the name Helix). While Dreadful Shadows featured English lyrics, Zeraphine would express Sven's darkly romantic verse in German (which many Germans were very excited about).

Zeraphine had just released their debut album as the festival rolled around and they would be supporting the new material via a headlining event at Werk II for the 2002 festival in Leipzig. We got there as fast as we could, once again sacrificing many other awesome bands for this opportunity and Sven and company surely did not disappoint.

We had the great chance to run into Sven back in the press area and expressed our interest and fandom for his talent and found Sven to be super-nice. He definitely could have had an ego or an attitude seeing his talents and appearance but such was not the case. He was down to earth, very gracious and a lot of fun to meet.

The show was packed as I stated earlier, this was a much anticipated performance for many of the German speaking attendees. We luckily made our way into the photo-pit before it got over-ran and found a nice place to snap from. It became apparent that there would be no moving around as it was shoulder to shoulder in the pit but with the intimacy of the Werk II pit, that still gave great coverage.

We had just bought the CD upon us hitting the continent so we were not totally familiar with the new material but Sven's voice and the other member's playing style lent instant familiarity to the sounds and soothed at the same time as energized the audience. After we snapped away our three songs of photos we moved back to the middle of the club to catch the rest of the performance. The place was packed and people were really enjoying the performance. Women sat perched on their men's shoulders trying to catch a glimpse of Sven in action.

The light show was played down, the band not needing smoke and lights to mesmerize the crowd, so you could see them quite clearly at most points of the performance and watch them feeding off one another.

It was a great show and a great way to end this day to say the least. I look forward to future material and future concerts from these guys.

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Zeraphine