Seeing In This Moment perform live was something I was looking forward to on months on end, their music taking a prominent place on my playlist recently.
While I enjoyed myself at the event quite a lot, I can’t deny that the concert itself was rather disappointing despite the beautiful visual spectacle.
The first, most glaringly obvious flaw – which I was warned about beforehand by people who saw In This Moment live before – is that their albums, especially the latest ones, went through quite an extensive post-production and employed extensive amount of auto-tune. Maria is the mistress of melodic screaming and that part she still performs brilliantly, but a lot of songs required her to keep pitch that seems well outside of her actual performance range, to the point where it was, I am sad to say, cringe-worthy.
Still, that only bothered me temporarily. What kept on bothering me throughout the whole performance was her absolute lack of stage presence. Despite the beautiful stage arrangement making a heavy use of very tasteful projections and her extensive wardrobe, I couldn’t stop thinking how bad the live choreography is, how awkward Maria moves and how it all seems like a slide-show of stills, of her moving from one perfect Instagram pose to another and how, despite her many outfits and impressive headpieces, somehow she managed to have much less presence than the impaired, chair-ridden Alexander Wesselsky on that Eisbrecher gig in Effenar last year: despite barely being able to stand up and not even moving across the stage at all, with no extensive projections to set the mood, that guy owned the space.
And Maria… well, Maria just posed to a huge amount of stills.
Nonetheless, I do appreciate the effort that went into the show. And again, I did enjoy myself and I loved hearing my favourite songs (thought I would prefer if they adjusted the live performance to what she can actually achieve, even if it means down-scaling).
Now, time to get myself some black high-cut robes and fancy elaborate crowns!