Shining has grown a good following because of their bleak black metal in combination with a blood curdling live show.
Having heard a lot of rumours of the band, it was still our first encounter with them, and we were interested in seeing what they actually had to offer, and if the band lived up to its myth.

“C’mon, you fucking cunts!”
- Niklas Kvarforth (vocals)

Darkness had fully descended over the second stage of Metaldays, and a soft and slow female singing voice greeted us. Surprising, yet intriguing at the same time.
It didn’t take long for the music to run amok however, as soon as the band was complete on stage. Yet while we could easily hear them, their presence was a bit anonymous as the low light rendered the musicians mere shadows on the stage, and hard to interact with or form a connection to.
This slightly changed when Niklas Kvarforth walked on however. In his blue jeans and white t-shirt, he wasn’t exactly the quintessential black metal frontman, yet he had an energy about him that worked compellingly on the audience at hand. It was a destructive energy, though not nearly as destructive as some of the stories surrounding the band would have me believe. Kvarforth didn’t bring a knife out and start cutting himself while spraying the audience with his blood, is what I’m getting at.

He did push his mic stand down into the security pit several times though, as well as drunk a lot of whiskey. He was also quite active, walking around a lot, and not infrequently sat down on the edge of the stage, to get a closer look at the audience in front of him.
They in turn quickly greeted him in return with shouts and raised devil horns. A lot of people had shown up for Shining, a surprising amount even, and the Metaldays fans were making themselves heard this night.
Another surprise was that the show actually sent out a good atmosphere. The music had some very compelling segments, and Kvarforth was astoundingly positive, looking and sounding happy between songs. The fact that Shining played a snippet of Painkiller just because the venerable Brits would play straight after this, opened even more positivity towards the band.

This all sounds well, and some of it truly was, yet there were also several, not as positive surprises parts of the show. The most glaring one was of course the total disconnect between the rumoured band and the real one. No matter how good something is, if you encounter it with the wrong mindset, it wont go very far. Also, after listening for a while, I started losing interest in the songs, and with no show except for what the frontman provided us, that too became repetitive and slightly uninteresting after a while.
So, Shining didn’t nearly live up to their reputation, and delivered a dividing show, which at least the fans seemed to enjoy heavily.

Setlist (incomplete):

Framtidsutsikter
Jag Är Din Fiende
Ohm (Sommaren Med Siv) (Seigmen cover)
Låt Oss Ta Allt Från Varandra
Painkiller (Judas Priest cover, snippet)