It was an incomplete Engel that would support Raubtier this late October evening at The Tivoli in Helsingborg.
I’m not talking about guitarist Niclas Engelin either, whom it was some four years since we last saw perform live with the band. No, this time it was vocalist Magnus ‘Mangan’ Klavborn who was out due to sickness. Thankfully the band had decided to go ahead with the show anyway, bringing in stand-in vocalist Lennart Nilsson (ex-Twelvestep), but was this to me unknown man up for the task?

After taking their places on the crowded stage, Jimmy Olausson behind the second smallest drumkit I have ever seen (only beaten by the toy drumkit Pain used as a gimmick during the You Only Live Twice tour), and the rest of the guys crowding together to fit on a stage that held two drumkits (well, maybe closer to one and a half…).
As soon as they were in position though, they dived headlong into the first song, Casket Closing from their first album, Absolute Design, and the band was rocking straight from the start. Even though Nilsson had to have a binder with the lyrics to the songs with him on stage (understandable with the circumstances), he had a very good presence and didn’t forget about the audience under-ways. The rest of the band was a bit more active in their approach one might say though; Marcus Sunesson and Steve Drennan made a lot of runs as they changed side with each other, sometimes stopping up for a bit of dual posing, at other times just letting their hair fly in wild headbanging, and yet other times interacting with the crowd by means of looks, smiles and the occasional fist or handshake – the boys were at the top of their game this evening! It was still Olausson who caught my attention the most this evening though, sitting easily visible behind his small drums, going at them with all the frenzy in the world and much of the time singing along to all the lyrics!

With all this you might have thought that the show was a complete success, but for some reason it never really happened.
Personally I enjoyed very much what I was seeing, and apart from some sound issues which were most apparent in the beginning where Sunesson’s guitar couldn’t be heard, I saw nothing worth disliking here, quite the contrary in fact – but the rest of the crowd seemed to see things differently.
To put it in more explanatory words – even though the crowd was large enough to nearly fill up the hall already at this point, nobody was reacting to the band. The bar was pretty well-filled, but even the people on the floor was only standing still in silence, merely looking at the band. When Olausson tried to get some applause going for Scythe, he was left completely hanging, only leaving him with the option of sitting back down on his stool without successfully completing his attempt. It wasn’t until the third song from the end, Six Feet Deep, that a little bit of spread applause could be heard throughout the hall, and even then it wasn’t until the next one again, Sense The Fire, that the applause amounted to anything. Here we even began detecting some action in the crowd with some spread windmills around the place, and Nilsson even got to shake a few hands in this one.
The only audible mistake Nilsson ever did was to announce Sense The Fire as the last song when in fact they had one more to play, but he quickly realized this himself and corrected it.

What can I say? I really do like Engel, and this was a night in which Engel really deserved to be liked. That’s how awesome they were. Had only Helsingborg greeted them a little better, who knows where this could have taken off to?

Setlist:

Casket Closing
Frontline
Scythe
Question Your Place
Six Feet Deep
Sense The Fire
In Splendour