Gig Review: Bullet For My Valentine, The Maple Room

Last Wednesday my girlfriend and I went to the Melkweg for the Bullet For My Valentine show. The opening band was The Maple Room, a Belgian emocore band. I had listened to the songs on their Myspace page before the show. They're pretty much a by the numbers emocore band. Some metal riffs, clean vocals in the verses, screams in the chorus. The first two songs on their Myspace page sounded pretty good, the clean vocals were a bit dull, but the production was good. Why they still had the two other songs on their page I don't understand: bad production, bad accent, mediocre songwriting. Compared to the first two songs, it sounded like another band. It's nice to hear a band can progress that much, but if I were them I had removed those old songs a long time ago.

When they started the sound was pretty crappy, but luckily it did get a bit better. Of course I'm not sure why they sounded so bad in the beginning, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't given an opportunity to do a sound check. Apart from the bad sound, they performed an energetic show. Nice to watch, but the rest didn't impress me too much. The Maple Room has two singers, one for the clean vocals, and one for the screams. The screams were ok, but the clean vocals weren't that good. If you're playing guitar at the same time, or switching between clean vocals and screams, I'll cut you some slack, but if your only role in the band is to do the melodic, clean vocals, you'd better have a good voice.
Too bad their singer had a mediocre punk rock voice. Not one of the melodies was catchy enough to stick in your head. His accent didn't make things much better.

Bullet For My Valentine took quite some time before starting their show, more than a half hour after The Maple Room they finally started to play. The show from Bullet From My Valentine was good, but it didn't blow me away like the shows of Coheed And Cambria and Alexisonfire did. The pauses between the songs were too long, and referring to every other song as their next, current or previous single started to irritate me.
While on cd they sound like a pretty standard emocore band with some 80s metal thrown in, live they really upped the metal dose. Again especially the clean vocals didn't sound as good as the rest, making the songs sound a bit too similar after a while. This time the vocals didn't mind me that much though, because the singer also plays guitar, and handles the screams, but it would have been nice if he had sounded better. Overall a good show, but not a great one.