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| Evanescence's Amy Lee in rocktastic mood |
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Live: Evanescence
Astoria, London
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Evanescence and all-dominant Amy Lee
Dressed in an uneven-hem-layered-skirt, as white as her tight-top partly hidden by lace-up bodice, biker-boots and an elbow-reaching striped ‘glove’ covering her left arm, raven-hairs to equal Lady Godiva, Amy Lee fronts Evanescence’s debut London show with buoyancy. She might look like a fallen angel (or recovered witch?), but it is her stage presence and vocal that makes this one-woman-show.
Ms Lee is the focus, the heart and the soul of the Little Rock, Arkansas, five-strong combo. She, and Ben Moody, is the creative force of the band, the others are just the players, all-black attired, whose charismas (assuming they have some) are overshadowed by the lady with the mic. And, the audience can’t resist her charm, talent and quirkiness. Don’t forget, her heroine is Björk.
But in concert, she is more like a younger edition of Stevie Nicks (this ain’t dissing), inasmuch that there is a sense of off-beat reality, an ‘Alice In Wonderland’ spirit. This is even more enforced with repeated walking off from centre stage, between songs as well as during instrumental breaks, to meet a lady lurking in the wings; her assistant, we guess, but why? To wipe off her perspiration, refresh make up, touch up her hairstyle, administer oxygen? No idea but it is surely curiouser.
Music is intimate and epic, intelligent and melodic, loud and romantic, minimal and complex, strange and oddly familiar. Evanescence can drop huge riffs, play as heavy and intense as any nu-metallers or Rock-industrialists but have such sublime passages that Kate Bush’s best days come to mind. Still, one wonders how much different it all would have been if they had a live keyboardist onstage rather than rely on tapes? The way it is, the songs remain very near their recorded versions.
Their two-week chart topping breakthrough hit, ‘Bring Me To Life’, comes late in the set that contains majority of material from the debut long-player, ‘Fallen’. ‘My Immortal’, ‘Imaginary’, ‘Haunted’, ‘Tourniquet’, add to the show’s heat that, in parts, is as hard as Amy’s black-polished nails but also as clean and velvety as her alabaster skin (one imagines). Before the final with the disc’s closing track, no encores bro, ‘Whisper’, the bodice is off for a whirlwind vision in white who truly puts her bid in as a bone fide star. A regret to the boys, but this is Amy Lee’s world we have witnessed.
Still, Evanescence members know that beauty lies within…
SashaS
20-6-2003
Evanescence’s album ‘Fallen’ is available now on Wind-Up/Epic
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