The Cruxshadows

review by Travis Baumann

The Cruxshadows played on September 29th, 2001 at a small venue right off of Hollywood Blvd. called Bar Sinister which caters to a dark ecclectic crowd every Saturday night.

On this occassion, they set up a stage in the patio area of the club, covering their normally smoking water fountain with a cat-walk runway addition. The Cruxshadows consisted of first and foremost frontman Rogue, an extremely tall gentleman with spikey hair adding a good eight inches of to his alreay tall frame. He took the gang-plank and was not still a moment as the set unfolded.

Behind him, up on the stage itself was a guitarist, a very attractive red-head female one at that, a male keyboardist on the right and another attractive female but this one with raven hair, alternating between keyboards and playing violin string pieces for certain songs.

The sound system at Bar Sinister will not go down in the Hall of Fame as one of my favorite but the Cruxshadows sounded good on this night, and I am always impressed with how much a live string instrument like a violin or cello can add to a live arrangement.

The red haired guitarist also sang on one song and lent back up vocals on several others. The male keyboardist was hard to make out alot of the time due to his diligent work behind his instruments.

They played alot of my favorite songs like "Marylin, My Bitterness", "Monsters" (my personal favorite of theirs), "Cruelty", "Jackal Head", and "Euradyce, Dont Follow Me" (which had really good crowd sing alongs, better than most bands/concerts I've witnessed.)

They interluded all of the above with some really interesting slower musical pieces with Rogue doing almost spoken word telling intricate stories and myths similar to "Telemetry of a Fallen Angel".

It was a very intimate and entertaining show and alot of fun. The Cruxshadows have definitely defined their own sound and mood in the Gothic genre with some extremely original song writing and sounds as well as a very cool mythos and lyrical base behind the music.

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The Cruxshadows