Yesterday, I saw Trans Siberian Orcherstra's "Lost Christmas Eve" show at Nassau Coliseum. And let me tell you something, Kiss needs to take a lesson in showmanship from TSO. I've always known that TSO was known for elaborate light effects, fog, lasers and fireworks. And I expected them to put on a very Kiss-esque preformance.
The show was 1000% superior. The execution of music and showmanship was just phenomenal. In case you don't know what Trans Siberian Orchestra is, They're basically play thrash metal Christmas music and neo-classical progressive death metal. The band consisted of two guitarists, a bassist (gotta have one of those), a drummer, two keyboard players, several singers, and an electric violinist all backed up by a string orchestra. The entire concert was based off of a story about someone who hates christmas because his wife died of a stroke during labor and his kid is retarded because of it. The story was heartwarming and all but it had little to no relevance to the music. But the rest of the show was just great!
Unfortunatly, you are going to get gripers as with everything. A lot of the bad reviews that the show got was that they're more like a rock band than an actual orchestra. And how it seeing the guitarist head-bang and gyrate around was "innapropriate for children" (will Tipper Cunt ever shut her face?)
But there was one bad review that got me a little concerned. That they were all pretending to play their instruments to a pre-recorded track and that they were all a bunch of posers. I would normally call bullshit with this, but during the show I did notice something that got me very concerned. The electric violin player had a lot of energy as he was running around the stage bowing the living fuck out of that fiddle, but I couldn't hear the actual violin playing. It may have been drowned out by all of the guitars. But this guy was leaping around all over the stage while playing the violin, smashing the violin over his head and he even did an Air-Roth split WHILE PLAYING. I would be impressed with that. But I've seen Kansas twice and I know what an electric violin sounds like without any distortion. So its either his violin was so distorted that it sounded like a guitar, or he was just pretending to play.
Overall the show is a perfect 5 out of 5 for me