I've never heard about Sonata Arctica until I checked out the release date for 'No Sacrifice, no victory' on Nuclearblast records.
I fell in love with their music immediately!
At the moment I hum their new single 'Flag in the ground' all day long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kObI4XuTR2o

I quite like Sonata Arctica I'm going to see them live in december, yay!
I would advise you to check out the albums Ecliptica and Winterheart's Guild, if you haven't already, my favourite Sonata songs are on those

My first metal band.
They are quite mainstream here in Finland nowadays (lots of radio and good sales)
but not as mainstream as Nightwish.

Thanks for the advise. Winterheart's Guild is great! I guess I've spent the past 7 month all my money for Sonata Arctica albums. The only album that I haven't yet is Ecliptica because I ran out of money.
2009 was a very purchase intense year so far!

I would really like to see them in Munich but I'm going to see Muse at the same day.




I talked to the director of a radio show a while ago. She was like "Sonata..who?"
Obviously they've never played on german festivals like Rock am Ring/im Park before (otherwise I would have known them already).

Rock am Ring (dunno about im Park) is no real metal festival... Imo the best you can call it is a rock festival. So no wonder the attendees of those festivals don't know SA.

OMG What? Metal isn't rock music??? Than I lived my whole life in the misbelieve that metal is a sub-genre of Rock???

Bands like Dragonforce, Turisas, Devildriver ...are at Rock im Park/Rock am Ring too, so why didn't pay Marek Lieberberg attention to Sonata Arctica so far?

I wonder if it has something to do with the record label. Maybe it's just a strange coincidence but bands from Nuclearblast Records are pretty rare at Rock am Ring and Park.

OFF TOPIC!

Sorry Peter!
Aren't we still talking about Sonata Arctica?*confused*

I thought talking about their live shows is also music related.

Yeah, metal is always rock, true. But rock is not always metal, agreed? At least that's what I wanted to say.

So to go on on topic and my 50 pence: Rock am Ring/im Park focus on the non-metal part of rock, so except the ultimate big metal bands that might manage to enter the charts and hence might be able to attract large audiences there are almost no metal bands. And SA is not that big or wellknown outside the German metal world (yet). I definitely wouldn't mind them at Rock am Ring, it's almost right in front of my door

Anyway, no matter why they're there or not, the best SA album imo is Silence, the best song is White Pearl, Black Ocean.

At the moment Flag in the Ground sticks in my head.
Everybody wrote 'it sounds 'uniaish'. I don't think so.

I hope Sonata Arctica will become someday big enough to play on RaR's/RiP's Centerstage!