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Shinedown, The Crave - Pulling Faces On Stage
The last time Shinedown was in Europe they were supporting Disturbed on their headlining tour. Back then they only played big venues and stadiums and frontman Brent Smith wasn't really in the best shape ever vocally. Back then Brent already told Metalrage they would be back in January for a small headlining tour through Europe. After a short week in the UK the band moved to the mainland where they played at the small hall of the Melkweg in Amsterdam.

Opening act of the night was the UK based band The Crave. The band is joining Shinedown on their entire tour and it was their first time on the European mainland. The music the band creates is nothing more than simplistic Foo Fighters rock with the standard rock and roll riffs and sing along lyrics (woohoow). Not extremely bad but after a couple of songs it gets old and boring. The band was trying really hard but failed to get a reaction from the crowd. They are sure not convincing enough to warm up the crowd for Shinedown.

After a long intro Shinedown enters the stage which for them is probably an extremely small stage. The band has already sold over 2 million copies of their albums in the US and now they are playing in front of 600 people in one of the smallest stages in Amsterdam. But nevertheless the band manages to get the crowd going. During the set the band plays songs coming from all three albums including Save Me, Heroes, The Crow & The Butterfly, Second Chance, Cyanide Sweet Tooth Suicide, 45 and If You Only New. Frontman Brent clearly loves to talk between the songs and the audience gets a speech after each song. Normally people in the Netherlands instantly scream Slayer when this happens but tonight people stay focussed and enthusiastically react on the things Brent has to say. And they did everything he asked them for; scream, scream louder, jump, jump again and scream again. Even a thing he so called 'the rise' which happened during every rock show, caused an explosion of jumping people in this small space.

Since their last time in Europe the band has had a minor line up change. Guitarist Nick is no longer with the band but this doesn't influence the quality of the show. During the faster songs the audience explodes and the crowd are using their lighters and mobile phones to create a better atmosphere during the ballads. Personally I would love to hear some more of the harder work of this band but due to the good vocals in the beginning of the set I kinda liked the ballads this time around. Shinedown is a promising act which has been around for quite some time now. They are pretty big in the States and are starting their rise over here in Europe. Best thing this night was clearly the facial expressions of Brent, I have never seen any artist pulling faces like this dude does.