By Andrew Bansal
July 6th 2014, The Viper Room, West Hollywood CA: Edge Of Paradise is a Los Angeles-based female-fronted heavy metal band formed in 2011 and they’ve been steadily building a fan base through well-written music and impressive live shows, although their gig activity in the LA local scene hasn’t been much of late. But last Sunday July 6th at the Viper Room in West Hollywood, they played a hometown show to present tunes off of their upcoming album ‘Immortal Waltz’ along with a couple of older ones. Having been introduced to the talents of Edge Of Paradise three years ago, I’ve kept track of their progress and was looking forward to finally getting the opportunity to see what they’re like as a live band.
The quartet of Margarita Monet (vocals), Dave Bates (guitar), Nick Ericson (bass) and John Chominsky (drums) promptly hit the stage at 9:30 and played a 30-minute set that turned every first-timer in this sparse but attentive audience into a new fan. The Viper Room stage was unusually dark this evening, so much so that the band members had difficulty locating their equipment and stage positions at times, but aside from a couple of minor and momentary technical issues, their sound came through with unmissable conviction, and the set flowed and built itself up beautifully from one song to the next, comprising slow to mid-paced tunes for the most part but succeeding in holding the crowd’s attention for its entirety.
All four members brought forth a strong performance on their respective instruments to go with tremendous stage presence, Monet’s soaring vocals at the forefront along with Dave Bates’ solid guitar work that consisted of the heavy and the melodic in equal measure. Altogether, some of the band’s music, specially on the newer tunes, is reminiscent of early Queensrÿche, in terms of the style, structure, impact and catchiness. This is imaginably close to what Queensrÿche would probably sound like with a female vocalist.
This was Edge Of Paradise’s first ever show at the Viper Room, which is rather surprising, but judging by the quality of the performance and the crowd response, it certainly won’t be the last. Amidst a plethora of female-fronted bands that focus excessively on cookie-cutter growling vocals, it’s refreshing to see the rise of bands such as Edge Of Paradise that revolve around the clean female voice instead (with no growling male backing vocals, one must point out), and along with the likes of Kobra And The Lotus, they can definitely be added to the list of new and noteworthy clean-singing female-fronted bands.
Whilst Margarita Monet and her band mates handled the Viper Room stage extremely well once they got used to their surroundings, Edge Of Paradise clearly seems destined for all kinds of stages big and small. I was hard pressed to find any shortcomings in them but the first and only one that came to my mind during their set was, they might benefit and enrich from adding a second guitarist, but on the same token that may ruin the identity of their sound. All in all, an excellent set and a great reason to step out on an otherwise mundane Sunday evening, and it’s safe to say that Edge Of Paradise is melodic metal done right.
Edge Of Paradise links:
EdgeOfParadiseBand.com
facebook.com/EdgeOfParadiseBand
twitter.com/EdgeOfParadise1
instagram.com/EdgeOfParadise
Viper Room links:
ViperRoom.com
facebook.com/theViperRoom
twitter.com/theViperRoom
instagram.com/theViperRoom