Band website: http://www.trans-siberian.com/index-main.php

Rating:

Review by King Lizzard

Now, mind you, I’ve been around the block more times than I care to mention. I am as jaded of an old prick as one can get. I’m meaner than a junkyard dog and twice as ugly. In the past 35-years I have seen KISS Destroyer and Love Gun tours, Alice Cooper three times, ELO, Elton John, Pink Floyd Animals tour, Queen and just about every big ass arena/stadium rock band in existence in that past time. I’ve also seen enough of the Cirque shows in Vegas, Blue Man Group and other Vegas Strip major shows.

Last night I saw the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and for the first time in my life I had my ass kicked non-stop for three hours and have to say, unequivocally, that this is the best fucking rock concert on the planet. That is, of course, unless you hate hard rock music and classical music, or are an imbecile.

The show was concocted in 1996 by members of the metal band SAVATAGE and has been touring since 1999. TSO consists of a 16-piece band (including string section), 20-vocalists and various lead vocalists. The show is divided into two parts, the Christmas themed part and when that’s finished, they kick into high gear with classics.

The Christmas theme was sweet, with catchy hyped-up Christmas carols and blues and jazz inspired originals wrapped around the concept of an angel flying across the world on Christmas Eve and a father getting his lost child back. The story was told by a storyteller who introduced the separate acts. Some of the acts were a little long and low key, but the vocalists and musicians were virtuoso caliber.

At one point the angel ordered it to snow, which it started to snow inside the Garden Arena (okay, okay, I know it’s shaved ice blown through a vent system, but it was cool how it hit and melted like real snow). “First Snow” got everyone’s heads bobbing and a metal medley of the Nutcracker, with the Trepak Dance and the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, had folks whooping and yelling to 200-year-old music.

The monstrous lighting rigs gimbaled and rotated, morphing and lighting up with neon lights as well as their own lights and lasers, like a living Transformer.

After the Christmas theme the orchestra members were introduced and many people hit the road at that point, thinking the show was over…dumbasses,  they missed the best part, for next came the classical-metal show.

With “In the Hall of the Mountain King” the entire stage is engulfed in flames looking like the depths of hell.

And old woman in ratty clothes sitting in a chair for most of the show gets out of the chair, throws off her rags and becomes a smoking hot blonde in a slinky black mini-dress singing “Queen of the Winter Night” in octave ranges only known to dogs.

A choir sings “Dies Irae” from the Verdi Requiem and “O Fortuna” from the Carmina Burana. Dueling guitarists burst into Zeppelin’s Kashmir and dueling keyboards cover Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D, boogie woogie and a Charlie Brown Christmas. They cover Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, Flight of the Bumblebee, Canon in D and Beethoven’s 5th with fiery bombast charges going off around the arena. For Beethoven’s 5th, which turns into a re-attack of “Christmas Eve Sarajevo (Carol of the Bells)” Angus Clark  (guitar) and Alison Zlotlow (violin) get off the main stage, go to a smaller stage in the back of the arena, which lifts off and hovers over the audience. When they land, they mingle through the audience. Angus ran up to our seat to serenade the missus with a two minute solo before running back to the stage.

Columns of fire changing color, lasers surpassing Pink Floyd, the whole stage ends by becoming a giant pinwheel sparkler.

Personal opinion: anyone who says this concert was horrendous is an idiot. That being said, also note, don’t think that if you saw TSO on PBS or have the video you’ve seen them…I’ve seen their PBS show and all their videos and it’s not even in the same solar system let alone the same neighborhood.

As I said, I’ve seen the best of the best of the best over the past 35 years and this show will blow you away into another universe within the first five minutes.

BTW, there are two TSOs running simultaneous shows.

SET LIST (gathered from the internet— beats the shit out of me if this is what I saw, but it looks close to my recollection I reckon):

If You've Seen TSO, What Did You Think?

• Hells Yes This Motherfucker Rocked!!
• It was okay, I guess
• I'd rather watch my son's high school football team play

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Here’s s some reviews of some TV shows I kinda watch:

PUSHING DAISIES Rating:

Lee Pace is a pie maker who can bring dead people back to life by touching them. If they stay alive for more than one minute something/someone else has to die in their place.

The show is both morbid and sweet with an Edward Scissorhands feel to it, complete with a narrator and overly colorful style. Chi McBride has all the great lines as a detective who solves crimes by hearing from the dead folk themselves who killed them. The piemaker lives with his dead girlfriend and dead dog that he brought back to life, but can’t touch them because he’ll kill them again. The music is drippy emotional and the dialogue has a forties film noir snappiness to it. The characters are odd and the stories have frequent guest stars. Overall amusing, but starting to get stuck in a one-note rut.

ELI STONE  Rating:

Brit import Jonny Lee Miller is an attorney for a San Francisco firm who develops a brain aneurysm and starts having divinely inspired hallucinations, mostly based on George Michael themes, that help him become a lawyer with a mission.

Also in the cast is Victor Garber who, no shit, played Jesus in the 1973 screen version of Godspell. There’s singing and dancing and very elaborate CGI special effects. At the end of season one Eli had his aneurysm removed. He begins season two normal, except his doctor brother now has the sight. BTW, their dad has the sight and he drank himself to death because of it. After negotiating with God (Sigourney Weaver) his brother loses the sight and he gets it back. Kinda lame but generally amusing.

JERICHO  Rating:

Well done ensemble cast, now defunct from CBS, about a fictional town in Kansas who tries to survive after 23 cities get nuked by terrorists. The acting is above average as the USA is plunged into a Mad Max anarchy of the Old West, with no electricity, TV, computers and neighboring towns, mercenaries and thieves assaulting them. The terrorists turn out to be former U.S. Government folks and one of them has escaped to Jericho with the last warhead. The show made it only into 30 episodes and there’s talk of maybe a big screen version.

THE OFFICE  

overall Rating:
This season Rating:

Anyone who isn’t familiar with this series has been living under a rock for years. The Americanized version of the British The Office, this focus on Steve Carell as the dumbass boss of a Scranton, PA, paper company called Dunder Mifflin. Told in “This is Spinal Tap” kind of docucomedy style, this show is somethimes very painful to watch. Rainn Wilson is the uberhero as ass-kissing inbred Dwight Schrute. The story follows the ensemble cast’s drama from day-to-day. I have to say that, so far, the current season is horribly off-game and if they don’t get their shit into one-sock, pronto, I’ll have to take my business elsewhere.

MAD MEN Rating:

Yeah, wanna know why the ratings are so low on this? Because it fucking sucks! An esemble cast of hateful pricks smoke and fuck around this Madison Avenue ad agency in the early sixties. There’s plenty of style, but the one thing that keeps me coming back to a TV series is some likeable characters, which this has none. Even if there was one semi-likeable character, but it’s painfully obvious that everyone is only out for themselves…oh yeah, and every smokes, drinks and fucks TOO GODDAMNED MUCH! When one guy kicked his dog out into the street to get killed by a car cause he was pissed off at his wife, that’s what made me permanently tune off.

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Review by King Lizzard
Since I wasn’t able to find any reviews on the recent Cheap Trick, Heart, Journey summer 2008 tour I decided it was time to break out the old laptop onto the kitchen table and write one myself whilst sipping my morning java.

I’ve been a big fan of all three bands and even opened for Cheap Trick and Heart back in circa 1981. Aside from the fact that I got lost (the roads winding around Mandalay Bay are verrry tricky) and then got hung up in nightmarish traffic we made it to our seat just as Cheap Trick hit the stage. There was a point when I said if I was still sitting in traffic come 8PM I would say fuck it and go home.

Cheap Trick has the same line-up they had 30 years ago and, believe it or not, still look and sound the same, opening with “Hello,” ending with “Goodbye” and encoring with “Dream Police.” They hit “Surrender,” “I Want You To Want Me,” “Big Eyes,” “California Man,” and a few others. Their set was about 45 minutes. The sadness that fills my heart is the mixing was so profoundly awful you really couldn’t tell what they were playing most of the time. I absolutely love these guys, I’ve opened for them and have seen them live about ten times, but the sound mix was horrible… …click here to read more

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After all that excitement, we were ready for the show. Unexpectedly, Styx came out right on time at 8:30. The band walked out from the right side, and I rushed up to the front row gates and snapped pictures. The staff wanted to keep people in their seats, however, so we returned to where we sat in the center of the 8th row. The band was incredibly tight and they sounded phenomenal. They are a slick, well-oiled touring machine, having performed thousands of shows in less than the past 15 years. James “JY” Young, Tommy Shaw, and Lawrence Gowan all look fantastic and were extremely energetic on stage. They started out with “Blue Collar Man”, then played “Grand Illusion” and “Lorelei”. Gowan knows how to work the keys; he was constantly swinging the keyboard and jumping around. The highlight of the show was when JY, Tommy Shaw, and Ricky Phillips would all jam guitar together right in the middle of the stage. The band really enjoyed themselves throughout the performance. …click here to read more

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