It has only been a month since Grand Island opened for Kaizers Orchestra, but already they are back with a double concert with Howl. They impressed the last time, how did they do this time?

At the Kaizers show last month, I was surprised by the Norwegian band Grand Island that opened for them. They really got the crowd going, and even though Kaizers delivered a heavier punch afterwards I ended up buying Grand Island's new release: Songs from Östra Knoll 122. This album is great, with lots of fun and addicting songs. When I saw that Grand Island would return to Samfundet this weekend I immediately got us tickets.

Grand Island

Since their first release, Grand Island has impressed their Norwegian audiences with fast paced rock music. After seeing them live, and buying their latest album, I became a fan also. These guys are rather special to see live, because you seldom see this enthusiasm to music. I wanted to find a clip that really showed this, but it was slim pickings on YouTube. They have some good music videos, with great audio quality, but all the live clips are rather poor. This one was the best I could find.

The Concert

Here is some music you can listen to while reading the rest of the article. It is a song by Grand Island, Us Annexed. The music video of this song is directed by Aksel Hennie, and is quite weirdYouTube - Us Annexed.

Time for the concert. After waiting about 45 minutes Howl finally entered the stage. I don't understand why almost all bands do this. We have paid to see them play, and the concert should start 22:00 according to their own program, but it takes 45 minutes before they see it fit to start playing. The concert was in Storsalen at Studenter Samfundet, in Trondheim. Since it wasn't a really big concert they had covered all the seats, so that we could not sit down either, except on the beer drenched floor. This only made standing around waiting even more tiresome.

When Howl finally entered my first impressions was: great sound, bad light. We actually changed places in the theater several times to get better lighting, but it was always a sharp, direct light straight in our faces. As if they didn't want us to see anything. Howl played a good set. They were tight, no mistakes, clear vocals, got the audience going. I had not heard much from them before, and I'm not going to buy their record based on that show, but they did make an impression.

Now it was time for Grand Island, for me the main attraction. I was hoping they used a different setting for the lights, but unfortunately they continued to blind us. More than that, the sound quality got worse also. While Howl had clear guitar sounds, good amount of bass and an overall good sound picture, Grand Island seemed to drown in bass and guitar. All the awesome details in the music, and the vocals, ended up in the background. It didn't sound anything like the last time, or the albums. This was really disappointing to me, and with some technical problems the set quickly became mediocre.

When it was coming to an end they really took it up a notch, getting some good songs from the new album in, and it sounded better. The audience that had mostly just been looking at them started moving again, and by the end it was rocking. I usually say that for a concert it's not the first impression that matters, but the last. My overall impression of this band is that they make awesome music, and the albums sounds great. Unfortunately they don't really seem to pull that off live. Perhaps it's a little to complicated and fast, so it becomes a soup of sound.

For this show, I would give Grand Island a grade of below average, but I know they can be better, and I'm looking forward to seeing them live again. Howl made a good performance, and I will be paying attention to them. If you want to listen to some music from Grand Island or Howl, and I recommend that you do, check out their MySpace pages.

Further listening:
MySpace - Grand Island
MySpace - Howl