The Rock were bringing up an old tradition called mini-Friday this Thursday night; and to help them kick the event into action they offered free entrance, (almost) everything in the bar for 20 DKR a glass, and entertainment provided by two live acts.
The headliners were Germany’s Grailknights who were setting out on their Battlechoir Reinforcement tour, which started out right here in Copenhagen. With them as a special guest they had brought the US band Zandelle.

It was twenty minutes past start-time when Zandelle entered the stage, but I can’t blame them for holding out a while as traditionally people were late getting in. Still, even though they had waited it was still a pretty empty Rock that faced them, and only a handful of youths were getting into the spirit in front of the stage, while the rest were hanging out at the tables and in the bar...
This did nothing to deter their intentions of unleashing some good old true metal our way, and I’m glad it didn’t.
As it turns out, Zandelle were a group of lethal posers, and I mean this in the best possible way. Seldom have I witnessed a band so lively on stage, doing all the rock poses to perfection as they played for us. In a way I guess you could say it felt very innocent and pure, not tainted by different trends, styles and whatnot; and I believe it was this which attracted me to them, as well as it brought out a big old smile on my face which stayed on for the entire show.
I was most impressed by the performance and stage-presence of their brand new bassist James Corallo and their wild beast of a drummer (and a most competent one to boot) Joe ‘Jofu’ Cardillo, but the rest of the guys weren’t far behind.

“How many have the first CD? (one arm came up) Great! A lot of sales tonight then, we love it!”
- George Tsalikis (vocals)

As Zandelle isn’t very big around this neck of the woods (yet), it wasn’t at all surprising that the sing-along friendly choruses were solely performed by the band; however, singer George Tsalikis did a good job introducing us to their music as he proudly told us about their first music videos (Flames Of Rage, Dark Nemesis) and their new album (Flames Of Rage). He also told us that they had a really old song which they recently had redone and wanted to know our opinion of; I must confess for my part that I couldn’t hear much of difference in this one from the rest of the material, but then again this was a live event, and I was not familiar with their work... The song was Bringer Of Doom.
Now, I did say that all choruses were sung only by the band, but that’s actually not the entire truth. See, in their final song, Warlords Of Steel (now there’s a Manowar title if ever I heard one), Zandelle chose to incorporate part of the classic Iron Maiden song Caught Somewhere In Time, and this finally got people on their feet and more importantly open their mouths to sing! Great idea, which I must applaud.

Musically, Zandelle were most certainly technically competent enough (again, kudos to Mr. Cardillo), and they could obviously write songs befitting the genre, but somehow I lacked more personality.
As a live act however, they completely pulled the rug from under my feet at the same time as blowing the roof off of The Rock; in short, they were simply phenomenal! This must be the best damn support act I’ve seen in ages, and I’m happy they had an entire hour of stage time.
For me, the night could have been complete already at this point...

Setlist:

Blood Red Shores
Flames Of Rage
Immortal Realms
Dragon’s Hoard
Dark Nemesis
Bringer Of Doom
The Champion
Inner Strength
The Final Hour
Warlords Of Steel