Hymnal Choir Crashes Down

Wizards’ Hymn played a concert in Ikebukuro tonight, May 25, 2008. The venue was Ikebukuro Chop, famous for having shows of hard rock. The night opened with a dramatic piano and hymn intro with a hazy blue background. Suddenly the big screen which obscured the view of the band rose slowly. At that point the band took over thrashing away. Then the vocalist walked on stage with a pink dress. The intro song started out very heavy and melodic, then it turned into a power ballad. The vocalist broke into some solo singing, followed by a flawless guitar solo. After this song YuSa began to talk and tried to promote Wizards’ Hymn’s new album, transience, however there was a 10 second wait because she couldn’t remember the album’s name and had to have another member come and whisper it in her ear.

The overall sound quality was great. The bassist picked with his fingers creating a deep bass sound. All the instruments had their volume perfectly complement each other. The 2nd song was the sixth song from the new album, The Trace. The keyboardist also had a laptop which handled certain effects that I noticed were often present during the intros and intermissions of songs. The vocalist moved around the stage barefoot and showed genuine emotion when singing. The next song had heavy guitar riffs all over the place and really rocked. At this point we got a little variation from YuSa who was grunting and screaming into the mic. One of the highlight’s of Wizards’ Hymn was the synergy between the keyboardist and the vocalist. Often the keyboardist would play using an organ setting which as a backdrop to YuSa’s voice created a very epic feeling. During the next intermission the band talked about their new blog which has a focus on daily trivial issues and will be similar to that of a diary of the band members.

The last song was Hindsight, also from Transience which was extremely fast paced and felt perfect for fast driving down a highway. The guitarist raced through solos only to slow down to change lanes for a new musical transition. The band really rocked out tonight. A few drawbacks were a lot of the band members besides YuSa did little movement on stage and didn’t offer much of a visual entertainment. Musically, it was perfect. The band just needs to work on the entertainment factor a bit more.