DragonForce lays waste to SPB

The British extreme power metal band DragonForce, best known for guitar riffing that seemingly defies the laws of motion, landed in St. Petersburg last night.

My friend Anton took this video of some cuss word-laced between-song banter on his cell phone.  Skip to the end to hear singer ZP Theart speak-sing “This song is called ‘Soldiers of the Wastela-a-a-a-a-a-nd” in a true metal frontman’s full-throated warble.

I have to hand it to the band; they were one of the most active acts I’ve ever seen, bounding across the stage as if they were playing on a multi-level expanse LiveAid, not the rinky-dink, glorified podium in Club Orlandina.  Dynamic guitar duo Herman Li and Sam Totman, the force behind the YouTube hit and Guitar Hero III song “Through the Fire and Flames,” wore out every inch of that stage, climbing the monitors like kids on playground equipment.

Visually, it was “potryasayushii” — “stunning.”  DragonForce’s biblically proportioned sound, however, was just too overwhelming for the mere-mortal metal club.  All the intricate fluttering of the guitar solos and melodies was lost in the chiming din, and keyboards only emerged in rare moments of calm.  It wouldn’t have been bad if the band had a more dynamics built in to the roaring squall, but that will have to wait until the next album, when they will hopefully have settled into a more peaceful middle age.  Probably the only time I’ve actually wished that on the band.

As you can here in the video, Theart had a good time cussing and manhandling the crowd, at one point pulling a Moses move and parting the tide of people for a yelling match.  The Russian fans were clearly miffed by the scattershot brio of his stage banter, which was further confused by profligate use of expletives and a slight Scottish lilt in his British accent, but nevertheless got the picture after a few bright ones picked up on his hand-gesturing.  During a lull in the action, someone even gave it right back to Theart with a cheerful “Fuck you!”

Check out the concert preview I did after an interview with Ukrainian band member Vadim Pruzhanov for the St. Petersburg Times.

Rickshaw ride through Delhi

In continuing my obsession with auto-rickshaw driving in India, here’s a video depicting the entry into the Chandni Chowk district of old Delhi.  And this is before things get really crowded in the narrow roads.  I didn’t manage to catch any of the elephants, donkeys or horses you often see fighting cars for space on the road.

Hare Krishnas in the former capital of Bolshevism

So I was walking down the street in Moscow Monday when my new aquaintence Testa, an ethnic Indian now studying in here, pointed out the Hare Krishna temple near Khodinko Field.  The “temple” was actually a combination of trailers and other temporary housing in the kind of makeshift structure elementary schools put up after a natural catastrophe.  Only in this case, the catastrophe was caused by the Russian Orthodox church and the stolid workings of the government bureaucracy.

Russian Hare Krishna followers have been trying to build a temple here for years but have run into opposition from the government, which sympathizes with the Russian Orthodox Church as the traditional national faith.  I was told that now most of the bureaucratic hurdles have finally been cleared and a real temple will soon be built.

We decided to check out the temple and wound up seated in a circle around a Russian devotee who lulled us into a stupor with his gentle religious entreaties and philosophical musings.  “Religion without philosophy is fanatacism,” he began (in Russian), “and philosophy without religion is empty words.”

We finished up the lovefest by singing the Maha Mantra and eating coconut baked goods.

No converts were made that day, but I do have to respect the Russian Hare Krishnas, who are still trucking after years of Soviet, and now Russian, government oppression.  Since Russian Orthodox is now becoming a de facto state religion due to the happy cohesion of its anti-Protestant direction with the government’s anti-Western streak, I’m all for anything that will prick the little toe of the Russian Orthodox giant.

Volga Boatman Episode 1: St. Petersburg Goodbye

On my way to Nizhny Novgorod, where my “Volga Boatman” adventure began (a little too romantic a title; I’m not about to ‘go to the people’ and start finding the true Russian character by hauling barges), I witnessed an old friend seeing his buddy off at Moscovsky Vokzal.