[Nightwish]

Okay, onto the concert review. It was standing room only, and the club personnel told me it was within a dozen or two tickets of completely selling out, which is almost unheard of for a non-weekend club date with a band that isn't top of the charts in America. They said it was the biggest crowd they can remember for a weekday show, and it rivaled some of the crowds for big-name bands on weekend shows.

Sonic Syndicate was pretty good, they rocked the house pretty well. They've got a good overall sound, but like others here, I can do without the screechy and howling vocals. They've got some clean vocals, too, just not enough of them. I guess that's what's en vogue with metalcore bands, though. And yes, I totally agree, Karin is hot, hot, hottttt! I was about ten feet away and couldn't take my eyes off of her!

But Nightwish just blew me away, as they knew they would. It was by far the best club show I've seen, and it rivaled some of the best arena shows I've seen. Like Braincase said, there's no longer any worry that Annette can't fill Tarja's shoes. I knew she sounded good on her own material, but I wasn't sure how she would do singing Tarja's songs. But she did quite well with them! She doesn't have Tarja's full soprano range, but she did a great job of finding alternate melodies that fit her vocal range and still fit the song.

I was a little surprised that they opened with "Bye, Bye, Beautiful." I was expecting them to save that until later in the show, and to open with "The Poet & the Pendulum." Instead, the opened the second half of their show with "Poet," after a short intermission. Marco and Annette bantered and joked back and forth quite a bit, really keeping the crowd in it. They were obviously having a lot of fun on stage. Annette was dressed in an adorable Heidi-style traditional Swedish outfit, befitting her homeland (she's from Sweden, the rest are from Finland) and was quite the entertainer prancing and dancing around the stage like a little pixie!

The high point of the show was the first song of the encore, for which they brought out John Two Hawks and performed "Creek Mary's Blood," complete with the Native American flutes that John plays. Interestingly, he also did some of the singing, in the English-language parts of the song, complementing Annette, a role usually filled by Marco. Did they do that in KC? She said they were only doing it for some of the shows this tour, but not for all of them.