Dragonforce finished off the Australian leg of their world domination tour last night at Sydney’s Metro Nightclub in style... superfast ball-crunching style that is.
Just before the show Ukranian-born keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov gave Undercover a call to check in from the road.Clearly proud of his band’s latest effort ‘Ultra Beatdown’, Vadim explained, “After ‘Imhuman Rampage’ we had two years of touring and we got a whole bunch more experience. So by the time we were ready to do a new record, there was loads of songs, and we just tried to pick out the best ideas that would come together. This is a more dynamic record, it’s easier to listen to.
“With this record, Sam and ZP mainly did most of the lyrics,” he said, talking about the band’s epic take on poetry, “and almost every time we write lyrics, for this album we were writing about one particular thing, but we chose the wording to suit the music, so the crowd can relate the songs to themselves.”
“It’s kind of a futuristic theme, if you look at the cover it’s like a video game with a robotic female and all kinds of machinery and all of that kind of stuff.”
If that’s not cool enough, Pruzhanov used a theremin and in true power metal style, went way over the top with it.
““Not a lot of people have used the theremin, especially in metal,” he excitedly explained. “It gives an extra character to the song if you use it in the right places, and I pretty much used it in every song. They used it to produce soundtracks to Star Trek and these things. There’s a song called ‘Reasons To Live’ which starts out with a theremin and a lot of people think it’s a guitar. I just make nosies with that, and everyone thinks it’s a guitar, but it isn’t.”
Their show at Melbourne’s beautiful Forum Theatre included true showmanship, with Vadim, guitarists Herman and Sam and bassist Frederic coming together at one point to play each other’s instruments mid-solo.
Front man ZP’s between-song banter might at times seem cliche, but who can argue with a thousand-odd people cheering until their larynx’s ache with joy to the sweet sounds of “Let me hear you fucking scream!” and while sure, each night the band plays to a whole bunch of people who only know their Guitar Hero II contribution ‘Through The Fire and the Flames’, a majority of the audience was hanging off every word.
So four albums in, were the band worried about running out of steam? “That’s what we thought,” Pruchanov explained, “When we were recording our latest album ‘Ultra Beatdown’, we had loads of ideas and stuff and when we started doing demos, the first original demo wasn’t that great and we thought it was going to be the worst album, but it turned out to be the best.”
It’s this kind of enthusiasm that makes Dragonforce, however cheesy they can be, an experience that has to be had.
...and as a side note for those of you who are too cool to enjoy a hefty dose of The 'Force, even The Dandy Warhols saw fit to turn up at the band's after show party last night at Sydney's Q-Bar.
