ELUVEITIE TOUR BLOG, WEEK 2: AMERICA! CANADA! COLD!
[To chronicle their current tour — the U.S. portion of which features 3 Inches of Blood, Holy Grail and System Divide in support — Swiss folk metallers Eluveitie will be writing an exclusive tour blog for MetalSucks. Week one of the tour took them through Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Curitiba, Brazil; read about the Brazilian tour in the Week 1 Tour Blog. Week 2 follows, in which we learn that Eluveitie hate touring with other folk/pagan metal bands but absolutely love Walmart. -Ed.]
Sleep for 10 hours straight on the plane and wake up in the freezing cold. Awesome. Temperature shock FTW part II! BUT there’s a Starbucks at the airport which gets us all excited and stuff.
First stop, Philly! Apart from the bad news of people not making it to the show because roads are blocked and shit like that we’re stoked to see our good friends from Holy Grail. 3 Inches of Blood unfortunately can’t make it to the show because their van broke down… System Divide sound really good, great to be on a tour with bands that are worth listening to. Side note: We fucking hate touring with folk/pagan metal bands (apart from Finntroll). Isn’t it ironic ;-)
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New York, New York… freezing cold, we can’t wait to go to Canada, haha. A huge basket full of gifts is waiting for Kay in the backstage (wtf?). Amazing show, great fans. Especially the dude who came all the way from fucking Columbia to see us! Wow! 3 Inches of Blood are still taking care of van problems… we hope they make it soon. At the end of the day we still don’t know where that mysterious package came from… Will we ever know? We suspect him of sending the damn thing himself.
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Worcester. We get out of the bus and dive into a huge pile of snow, Chrigel takes on his traditional dental hygiene mission to the dentist (the prices in Switzerland are ridiculous) and in the meantime we figure out how to set up our light-installation (yeah, we can slowly start affording awesome shit now like real bands) on a tiny stage. The show is interesting… the crowd is great even though we experience a shitload of technical bullshit. Chrigel’s mic stops working, the violin gives up too… a lot of things go wrong. No drinks, no party and off to bed. Oh yeah, 3 Inches of Blood didn’t make it again. Bummer.
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Long drive to Canada, border control is short and painless and a few hours later we’re freezing to death. Quebec City, hello! Three Inches of Blood STILL don’t make it and the only thing we do is drink way too much coffee making us run around like morons during soundcheck and being tired by showtime…. but the great crowd wakes us up, cool show and again no after-party for us. This tour has been so UNparty so far it’s ridiculous. Good for our livers though I guess. Apart from Sime, he’s always got some expensive whiskey stashed somewhere, no idea how he does that.
Happy days, 3 Inches of Blood make it to Montreal! It’s surprisingly warm (maybe because we’re in the gay area? Merlin is scared to go for Indian food, not only because of the food itself, but because of the walk there) until a huge snowstorm breaks out. We’re from fucking Switzerland and have never seen something like that before, inches and inches of snow within like an hour or something. Insane. What’s even more insane is our amazing fanbase once again! The show is great and afterwards we find a young woman waiting in front of our bus almost freezing to death. She came all the way from Australia to see us!!
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Toronto. Some more gifts awaiting Kay (how the hell does that guy do that?!). This is going to be a busy day, tonight’s show is basically a festival because two tours are combined. Death Angel and Eluveitie, killer combo (“We kill, they combo.” – Merlin Sutter)!! We set up and soundcheck in two hours (yes, that IS possible… Anna and Merlin who are part of the crew setting up want to start always working that fast, but that will probably never happen) and have hours to kill after that…. nothing of that is worth mentioning. Coffee, food, movies, nerding about… boring crap. Show is fun and we finally make it out to a bar after the show! Three happy fans, no other bands… Sometimes it sucks to headline because once you’re done the party is basically over.
First day off. WAL MART (hellyeeeeeah!!), hotel. Diners, and lots of awesome stuff. We buy a blender for 13 bucks at Wal Mart to make our own smoothies. Oh yeah, baby! And Merlin gets all excited about a cliché redneck buying ammo in the sports and hunting section. We love America. Most of us anyways, the ones who don’t just have to live with the fact that the mystery person writing most of this blog is America’s Nr. 1 fan. Muahahaha
