A little bird had whispered in my ear that Ville Sorvali of Moonsorrow fame was part of Black Sun Aeon, and this was a enough for us to decide to check out this for us completely unknown band.
Turns out, the only part he has held in the band was the part of guest lyricist and guest vocalist on a couple of albums, so he was nowhere to be found at this gig…

It wouldn’t have been a problem to have him there though, as the band was missing a bass player.
The smallness of the crew was actually one of the first things that hit me about Black Sun Aeon, apart from the lack of Sorvali of course. In all, the band consisted of a drummer, Tuomas Saukkonen (whom I have come to understand is the only ‘real’ member of the band), and two guitarists, Mikko Heikkilä and Pyry Hanski. Vocal duties were divided between Saukkonen and Heikkilä, where the former handled the harsh vocals and the latter took care of the clean ones.
There was another one as well, at least for a while. During the third or fourth song, a woman entered to some cheering from the crowd. Her name was Janica Lönn, something which I have found out later on as there was no presentation at the concert. Just as abruptly as she entered, she was gone again – a couple of songs or so after she took the stage she put her mic down in the middle of a song and left, not to be heard from or about again...

If this behaviour strikes you at odd, I’ll tell you that it actually fit the performance as a whole rather well – the band actually looked really bored, and apart from Hanski who was doing some wild headbanging a lot of the time, there really wasn’t anything to watch with the band.
Well, that’s not completely true; at one point Heikkilä noticed something in the crowd, and a short smile sped across his face as he pointed at whatever had caught his attention. Though I tell you, this was really the entire extent of it.
The sound was ok, although it would have been nice if the bass and keyboards had been played live instead of being pre-recorded. This of course meant that we could pretty clearly hear Black Sun Aeon’s doomy music, and I’ll admit to not thinking that it was half bad, though without completely capturing me. The catastrophe of the thing was still the performance though, or rather the lack thereof, and this was what really killed this concert for me.

This review is a bit shorter than what I usually try to write, but honestly, when a band does nothing, there really isn’t anything to write about, and that was exactly what was going on here. I really had to consider whether the band thought this show was as boring as they were giving the appearance of.
If you’re a doom-fanatic, you will most likely find pleasure in Black Sun Aeon’s music, but don’t expect to find us running out of our way to check them out on a live stage again.