Amorphis is celebrating their 30th anniversary during 2020. What was supposed to be a huge event during which they would be playing 3 consecutive days at the legendary Tavastia club in Helsinki, with every day spanning a different decade of their career, turned into somewhat of a disappointment when the whole COVID-19 crisis fucked that up. Fans all over the world were asking the band to do some kind of a live stream event to still celebrate their anniversary somehow and now was the time. Amorphis planned to play 2 live streams. Each aimed at different time zones and each having a different setlist, fans all around were getting pretty excited about this one. So there I was, sitting myself down in front of the screen awaiting the Europe version of their live stream, cracking open one of their anniversary beers and getting ready for a couple of hours of good Finnish metal music.

When the live stream started, you could see an interesting set-up in which the guys of Amorphis (****) were standing in a circle. I assume that it might make things less awkward for them not playing in front of a real live crowd like this. Not much difference from their band practices besides playing in a bigger room, I’d guess. Well, besides the fact that there were well over 3000 people watching them play as well… But at the same time it created really cool effects with the lights positioned in a circle around them, crossing each other regularly, creating a literal circle of light around them or by beaming the lights up creating a cylinder of light, all really adding to the atmosphere of the show.

Just like the night before, they opened the set with ‘The Bee’ from their latest highly successful album ‘Queen of Time’ and it showed yet again how damn relevant and good Amorphis still is within the metal scene. They followed with ‘Under the Red Cloud’ from the album before that. With that they played 2 songs of their most recent releases and started to delve mostly into their extensive catalogue for some proper old school Amorphis tracks and songs they haven’t played in several years.

As promised, the second stream had an almost completely different setlist with only a couple of tracks being the same as the night before (‘The Bee’, ‘Sign From the North Side’, ‘Into Hiding’). A very varied setlist showed off the versatility of Amorphis with tracks like ‘Sky Is Mine’, ‘The Wanderer’, ‘Black Winter Day’, ‘Death of a King’, ‘Silver Bride’ and many more. The quality of the audio and video was yet again great, just as we came to expect from SemiLive productions already and the band felt relaxed and enjoying their time in the spotlights.

They hit a small snag when the connection seemed to fail for most viewers during ‘Silver Bride’, but luckily they got things running again in no time so that we didn’t have to miss out on too much of the set. Ending with the epic ‘My Kantele’ this was for me yet another live stream that gave me a double feeling: on the one hand I enjoyed seeing one of my favorite bands playing live again and it was like balm for the soul, but on the other hand it made me miss real concerts so much more again…

Setlist:
The Bee
Under the Red Cloud
Sky Is Mine
Towards and Against
The Wanderer
Hopeless Days
Karelia
Sign From the North Side
Into Hiding
Against Widows
Black Winter Day
Death of a King
Silver Bride
Wrong Direction
House of Sleep
My Kantele