WGT 2 - Sonja unter Fledermäusen

It's not really obvious, but actually the Wave Gotik Treffen is a music festival. Some things in short just to put them straight:

Band I really, really missed out on Friday:

• Obviously Samael who must have rocked the Parkbühne according to several viewers.
  First gig in ages without "My Savior" and - what was the second song, pls., Hans? Dawning of "Era Two", hu? Just kidding, witnesses spoke about a return to the sound of the "Passage". Would be great, dudes...!

Bands I might have missed:

• Surely The Gathering. Can someone comment who watched their gig? I was really looking forward to see these old friends, but what I heard was not so good. So pls. post!
• And can pls. someone post who has seen The Old Dead Tree in Kohlrabizirkus? Thanks as well.

First messed-up backstage room:

• Deathstars.
  Maybe you have to when you have such a band name and have to build up a reputation. One band I think I really missed out, regardless of what mixed feedback I got about them. If you know a glimpse of German, read my Close-Up review. They were awesome in Stockholm!

First band I actually wanted to see and did watch:

Katatonia

Please. Please go and buy their great albums! Start with "Last Fair Deal (Gone Down The Drain)", go on with "Viva Emptiness", back to the old ones and after a while I slowly even dig the new one, "The Great Cold Distance". Maybe I still have to listen to it on a long, lonely car-ride over the Autobahn.

But... Tonight was adding to the long line of letting-down gigs in the history of me watching them. Maybe it's my bad aura, dunno. Maybe it's circumstances - in this case that they were booked to Kohlrabizirkus, a former market hall which was adding much too much reverberation to their sound, so that the outcome was downright painful for the first three songs. (By the way, reverb is called "Hall" in German which means the building causing it as well - very fitting in this case...)
And maybe this weak beginning is already half of the spirit of the show not getting shape: The band was playing together much better than in Stockholm, but the audience was not really enthusiasticly reacting on Jonas Renske animating them to clap or things like that, and there was still a drift between the stage-acting of Anders Nyström on one side, the Normanns on the other side and Jonas hidden behind his hair in the middle. On the very positive side: This was the best light effects I have ever seen with Katatonia, and the fitted to the mood prefectly.
But hey, music is about the song: Go, buy their albums!

Setlist Katatonia:
Leaders
Wealth
Soil's Song
My Twin
Deadhouse
Teargas
Sweet Nurse
Ghost Of The Sun
Deliberation
Criminals
July
Evidence