Sylver Myst

Sylver Myst

The second band to play this evening was Sylver Myst. This Dutch gothic metal band from Someren, a town somewhere in the south of Holland, was founded in 2001. In 2003 the band had a new female vocalist and recorded a demo, called "Strains Of Souls". In the meantime they started playing more and more gigs and the reactions were almost without exception very positive. In 2005 they recorded a mini-cd called "Depths Of Illusions". During the summer of 2005 the keyboard- and the bass player left the band and with two new members the band moved on, still going strong and growing stronger. Now they're on the verge of finishing the recordings of their first official full-length album "Emotions Revealed". The band's line-up is as follows: Marjolein Hüsken (vocals), Rob van Dijk (guitar/grunts), Didier Roumen (lead
guitar), Marco Brugmans (bass), Marc Jaspers (drums), Martijn in 't Veld (synths).


Music
I had seen this young band once before, about 8 months ago during their EP-presentation at Tivoli De Helling in Utrecht and was somewhat reserved, because they were "one out of the many" gothic metal bands I was about to see. But I was positively surprised about their music and performance and they really kept my attention. So now I was very curious if they had grown more. This evening the band played a nice composition of "old" and new material. Their sound is very heavy and powerful, in combination with innovative arrangements. Marjolein was dressed in a velvet red and black coloured dress. Her voice was in very good shape, but in the beginning the volume of her microphone was adjusted a little too low, so when she used
"plain" vocals you couldn't hear her properly. But when she used her opera voice the sound was much more in a right balance. Overall the sound wasn't very well and people kept complaining about that throughout the whole evening. I suspect that the problem with the sound was partly due to the venue itself.




Performance
From the beginning it was clear that the largest part of the audience especially came to see this band live. That's not so surprising when you find out that Helmond is not so far from Someren, where the roots of the band lie. There were actually people who were able to sing along with the lyrics and during the encore some people even lit some sparkling stars to show their enthusaism and support. The bandmembers seemed to be very pleased about that and were all having a good time on stage. It's very nice to see how they're having such a lot of fun together and that really infects the audience. The interaction between the band and the audience was very well. All bandmembers regularly looked and smiled at them and the crowd kept cheering and clapping. At a certain moment between two songs Didier was given a bottle of wine by his bandmates because it was his birthday. The lighteffects were not very special though. It was just a variety of different colours that changed on the rhythm of the songs. When Rob was
grunting, which he did very well, he was not lit by a spotlight. So, you could interpret that as dark grunts, literally, er? I have to conclude that this band really stunned me in a positive way and in my opinion this band also scored highest in tonight's position.




Setlist
00. Intro
01. Escape From Reality
02. Lovtred
03. Depth Of Illusion
04. Strains Of Souls
05. Thrown Away
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06. My Valentine
07. As Heaven Blessed A Dying Rose


Rating
Music: 8
Performance: 9
Sound: 5
Light: 6
Total: 8
- Reflections of Darkness