Primal Fear Gig Report

Lots of bands in Tokyo this spring that are of interest to me therefore yet another gig report.

Primal Fear and I have some “history”. I don’t remember how I stumbled across the band but I had my peak “liking” of Primal Fear around 2007 when their New Religion album came out. After the in my opinion disappointing 16.6 album I turned to other bands. Seven Seals is my favorite album of theirs by the way. I’ve never seen them live before and now finally there was the chance since they came to Japan again (after a five year pause apparently and I missed them in 2009 – must have been in the wake of the 16.6 album).

I don’t have their latest albums “Unbreakable” and “Delivering the Black” (yet) but was hoping they’d play some of their older songs too.

The gig happened in Shibuya’s On-air East, a 1300 people venue, which was not sold out but well filled. No pre-band and at 19:00 the gig was supposed to start and the drummer and one of the guitarists came on stage, but the rest did not show up and they played the intro (from a tape) twice, which was a bit irritating and I am not sure what kind of glitch had happened

But finally the rest of the band appeared and things got going. Ralf Scheepers, the German vocalist, is already 49 years old, but wow… there is quite some body building going on and his voice is still impeccable. The guy is almost intimidating, at least 190 cm tall I suppose and one mountain of muscles. He looks like his chest circumference is two meters! Lol.

Luckily they played some 60% “old” songs that I know and I got good headbanging opportunities. Somewhere behind me stood someone who was trying to compete with Ralf, a Japanese guy singing falsetto and while stuff like that is usually painful, this guy pulled it off and sang quite nicely along with Ralf, impressive!

Somewhere in between Ralf broke out into singing a Japanese folk song??? in Japanese. Oops? Very nice that he learned the words, but I am not sure about the pronunciation, at least I could not understand The audience was also rather perplexed and I wonder if they understood? The singing was beautiful though, despite not really knowing what this was all about.

The crowd was their usual enthusiastic Japanese self, even on a higher level than what I have otherwise experienced and they managed to scream the band back on stage for another bow even after the encore was over, which is quite rare here (the venue owners switch the light on and an announcement tells you to go home). Another interesting aspect for me was that while usually the ratio of men to women at metal gigs is 70:30 or so, for Primal Fear it was 80:20 if at all. I wonder what Primal Fear’s ratio is like in Germany or the US where they just toured. Why do girls not like Primal Fear???

All in all it was a great gig and I’m glad I finally saw them live and now I am inclined to buy their latest album and have a little Primal Fear revival