Friday night I went to see Evanescence perform live here in Cologne. Before they started their show, there were two guest acts — revis (don't click that link when you're not alone), which were pretty good, and Finger Eleven, which were, to me, rather annoying (not my style, YMMV).
Finally, about two hours after the official scheduled time, Evanescence came on. To start with the bad things first, they stayed on stage for something like 55 minutes (!), the audience wasn't especially great, and worst of all, the sound was a fucking mess. I'm also not a big fan of live performances where parts of the music - in this case, mostly sound effects and intros, but also vocal background arrangements — are played from tape.
Still, Amy Lee was just great - I very much doubted that she'd be capable of performing on stage as well as on their debut album (which I have been playing almost continuously for the last 6 weeks). Trust me, her voice was every bit as perfect as one could have hoped for. Maybe the musicians did a good job as well, but honestly I couldn't tell, the sound being the horrid mess that I might have mentioned before.
So overall, it was still worth it. Hopefully, some years from now they'll have the option of hiring a decent sound technician and playing at a place that allows you to actually hear what the musicians are doing.
AMY LEE RULES