Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Messegelande / Balingen / Germany
Concert date: 26.06.2009
Attendance: 20
Ticket price: €85.00 (two-day ticket price)
The first day of Bang Your Head!!! had arrived, the fifteenth edition in a row, as tradition demands. We were still pulling ourselves together after the previous day’s boundless “rampage”, which was marked above all by the “battle of the storm drain” and the “concert storm” of the warm-up show with Kreator and Jon Oliva’s Pain. The clock struck 10:00 a.m.!
| Hatstik: 10.00 – 10.40 |
A band that has existed for barely two years opened this year’s festival in Balingen. Reutlingen, where they’re from, is a stone’s throw from Balingen, so they count as genuine locals who got the honor of warming up the stage. They made it onto the festival bill through a contest for a slot at BYH!!! 2009. The trio may have some experience, but in terms of quality, never mind genre, they’re not up to a festival like Bang Your Head. So you have to wonder what a bunch of guys with modern “tricks” pushing their way into metal were doing here. A static trio whose stage dynamics and movement were seriously handicapped by the guitarist being chained to the mic, which was pretty much deadly dull. Stage presence hardly matters anyway, given that their material is uninteresting, predictable and bland. What the guitar doesn’t deliver, HatStik try to cover up with a “groove” in the more active rhythm lines. Even the hat on the guitarist-singer’s head made you think HatStik have more in common with Beatsteaks than with metal or the gritty hard rock we look for at a festival like Balingen’s Bang Your Head!!! The trio isn’t used to big stages, and you really had to concentrate to spot them on stage with the naked eye. Each of them was hidden in their own corner, clinging to it dutifully.
| Alestorm: 10.50-11.30 |
The Scottish lads, who mix power metal ingredients with English beer, were the second negative surprise right at the start of the festival. No charisma, no polished stage act, no polished stage image (unless you’re into showing off Dachau ribs, ears sticking out at right angles, and waving strapped-on keyboards in the style of pop tat à la Modern Talking), let alone the fact that the singer can’t sing, but deliberately twists his voice into some kind of forced-manly “drunkard’s rasp” full of botching, nasal whining and wobbling power in the delivery itself. The band’s second weakness is the guitar itself. It too, especially in transitional melodic embellishments or heavily simplified solos, allowed itself a few semitone “misfires”. All that saves Alestorm is the band’s incredible popularity among young fans of distorted sounds and alcohol who don’t yet know real, authentic music. This phenomenon of Alestorm’s miraculous popularity isn’t entirely logical and demands a complicated explanation, which is probably easiest to find in the band’s promotion of alcoholic concoctions.
Otherwise it’s thoroughly generic, worn-out power metal language, with pirate keyboard solos run through an accordion effect built in. Over The Seas, Leviathan, Terror On The High Seas, Nancy The Tavern Wench, That Famous Ol’ Spiced, The Huntmaster, Set Sail And Conquer, Keelhauled, Captain Morgan’s Revenge, The Quest, Wolves Of The Sea and Pirate Song have no business at a festival as strong as Bang Your Head. Those of us who came to the festival looking for quality took very little of it away from Alestorm this time.
| Kissin’ Dynamite: 11.40 – 12.30 |
This is the band the festival should really have started with. The quintet, born between 1990 and 1992, showed the festival’s true face. The locals, who’ll launch their debut “Steel Of Swabia” this July, play a kind of collision between melodic hard rock and heavy metal. If the opener My Religion, with its simple but catchy, punchy chorus, sketched the outline of a hard rock band on stage, songs like Out In The Rain or Steel Of Swabia dispelled that in an instant and set off thoughts about the typical German approach to heavy metal. More important than guessing genres is the fact that these guys, who are barely molting from fledglings into men, fired off a full cannonade from the stage. Singer Hannes is an extremely self-confident, picturesque stage figure with a polished stage act. On his right hand he wore a replica of a steel fist, in keeping with the song Iron Fist, and, most importantly, he has excellent vocals. Chiseled, melodic and clean, aimed at the highest registers, expressive in every range, with optimal yield. The guys ran around the stage nonstop as if they’d swallowed Asterix’s magic potion, while playing compact, tight, with no noticeable mistakes. They crowned their thoroughly successful, all-out set with an excellent closing track, Welcome To The Jungle.
You can certainly still feel youthful naivety, impetuosity and recklessness, especially in lyrics like Addicted To Metal, but that’s the necessary engine that drives Kissin’ Dynamite forward at 100% from the get-go. If the guys keep up the work ethic and drive they so convincingly showed at Balingen, we’ll surely hear many more good things about this band in the future.
| Ross The Boss: 12.40 – 13.30 |
Our Manowar colleague Ross “The Boss” Friedman also took the time to show up at this year’s Bang Your Head. He ground through the first six Manowar albums, then vanished who knows where, but came back to the scene thanks mainly to the German audience’s long memory of his Manowar work. That’s how he managed to put together a quartet of former members of Divinus and Ivory Night into the Ross The Boss lineup. At the festival the man presented a repertoire made up of Manowar songs and the Ross The Boss debut “New Metal Leader” (2008). The patient German crowd, by then already steaming hard in the sun, stubbornly stuck it out in that same sun out of loyalty to Manowar, and was rewarded accordingly. Death Tone, Gloves Of Metal, Thor (The Powerhead) and Hail And Kill brought the good old Manowar back to life for a short while; the audience happily sang the classics in unison beneath the stage and released an extra dose of decibels into the air.
Of course you can’t skip the material from “New Metal Leader”, which, roughly speaking, is a continuation of Ross’s path after he unhitched from Manowar following the album “Kings Of Metal”. It ties in excellently with the Manowar story, and a layman couldn’t even tell stylistically which material belongs to Manowar and which to the Ross The Boss lineup. On stage, singer Patrik Fuchs came across as an excellent frontman who successfully holds his own against all the Manowar covers. With a heartfelt, committed performance he tied the band’s set together nicely and egged on the crowd beneath the stage with gestures, since Ross is more or less just a static “redneck” figure on stage, busy showing off his pro-American tattoos.
| Voivod: 13.40 – 14.30 |
The first truly interesting set of the festival happened when Canadian thrashers Voivod took the stage. The guys had released their new studio album “Infini” three days before the show, and they officially said it would also be their last. For it they used old recordings of the late guitarist Denis D’Amour – Piggy, who died of cancer in 2005. Dan Mongrain replaced him on stage, while the core of the lineup consists of Denis Bélanger – Snake (vocals), Jean-Yves Thériault – Blacky (bass) and Michel Langevin – Away (drums). The band put on a great show! The set included songs from their first five albums, and as a bonus they closed with a “stripped-down” version of the Pink Floyd classic Astronomy Domine. Even though Piggy is gone, Mongrain confidently filled his shoes, and Voivod, like seasoned old foxes, rattled off classic after classic. Denis Bélanger grabbed attention with his staggering look of a totally “wasted” man on stage, reminiscent of Joe Cocker’s movements after waking up on the worst day of his life. His Motorhead shirt was interesting: the front bore a print of the cover of the album “Rock N’ Roll”, and the back the dates of the “Another Perfect Tour”, which took place four years before that album came out. Technically speaking, a real fake. The wild bassist Blacky was also extremely provocative during the show, deliberately dancing with one foot over the edge of the stage, which was raised more than three meters off the ground.
Voivod also showed class with one more gesture. Bélanger handed out a whole crate of cups of cold water to the crowd, helping them get through the worst of the afternoon heat while buying the band and himself a bit of breathing room. Voivod were the first real attraction of this year’s Bang Your Head, since you very rarely get to see these guys on European stages. Just from the experimental side they build into their musical expression, they’re oddballs on the musical map, and it would be terrible if the band actually retired after these shows, as they perhaps hinted by officially announcing that “Infini” is Voivod’s last studio album. Voivod’s set was the point where the first day of the festival rose to a higher level of quality!
| Primordial: 14.40 – 15.30 |
The Irish metallers, who have developed a special expressive language of black metal, were an exceptional treat for this year’s Bang Your Head. Voivod had already lifted the festival’s level, but when Primordial stepped on stage, you couldn’t shake the feeling that every act wanted to push the bar of conviction higher. Primordial came in incredibly committed and focused. Besides the majestic atmosphere they created from a weighty sound of hypnotizing guitar embrace, grown out of hellishly fast picking, all eyes were on singer Alan A. Nemtheango, who led the band’s set with full confidence. Thoroughly daubed in “corpse paint”, he kept the songs Empire Falls, Gods To The Godless, As Rome Burns, Sons Of The Morrigan, The Coffin Ships and Heathen Tribes feeling real with his immersive performance. Real through all 50 minutes of the Primordial show. In the band’s unique language the guys led those present for just under an hour into their one-of-a-kind world of eternal sorrow and perdition. A truly excellent sound contributed greatly, adding to the extraordinary impression this band left with its Balingen set.
| Sacred Reich: 15.45 – 16.40 |
Sacred Reich! Who’d have thought? Besides Voivod, the second “exotic” of day one. Sacred Reich are also among those innovative metal bands who served up a few records in their catalog that made them extremely recognizable and unique. Take early Slayer and Metallica, add some old-school Sabbath-style stoner haze, and top it all off with frequent changes of motif and tempo. Hmmm, well… depends on who you ask. Every pair of ears picks up musical vibrations in its own way. Sacred Reich played with Phil Rind (vocals, bass), Will Arnett (guitar), Jason Rainey (guitar) and Greg Hall (drums). That’s actually the original lineup from 1985, when the band formed. Did we want anything more? Not at all.
Add an excellent setlist and success can’t fail to follow. That thrash metal had plenty of supporters in Balingen this year, thanks to an interesting selection of some reawakened bands playing the festival, was confirmed by the crowd, which scrambled up to the stage in the unfriendly afternoon heat in by far the biggest numbers up to that point in the festival. Seeing Sacred Reich in Europe in the new millennium isn’t exactly an everyday thing. Especially when the band says it doesn’t plan to release a new album. Okay, let’s finally get to the set. Phil Rind remains the band’s first and only vocalist. His vocal power has stayed undiminished, as has his expressiveness. Over the years of his music career Rind has picked up a nice pile of extra kilos and more or less rolled around the stage like a “meatball”. He could easily have donated a few kilos to his colleague Will Arnett, who is his exact opposite, looking like an emaciated Christ who came back from the Sahara after 40 days of temptation by the devil, or like an embalmed mummy whose bandages all fell off during an afternoon stroll. Luckily he pulled on a “redneck” cap and kept his trademark.
But only the performance counts. And Sacred Reich ground it out like they were 20 years old. Flawless and with untamed fury. The material in the setlist was spot on. Of 12 songs in total, as many as 4 were from “The American Way”, three more from the debut “Ignorance”, and they closed with the crowd favorite Surf Nicaragua. The Black Sabbath cover War Pigs, which the crowd loudly demanded during the show, of course couldn’t be left out. The band’s excellent form and convincing delivery are proof that Sacred Reich are still hungry for blood and that we may perhaps look forward to a European tour by the band that will pass closer to Slovenia.
| Sodom: 16.55-17.55 |
The name that makes up part of the holy German trinity, if not the European thrash metal trinity, Sodom – Destruction – Kreator, kept the same profile of listeners in front of the stage. Only their numbers thickened even more. Now you really couldn’t casually stroll from the left side of the festival grounds to the right (or vice versa) without making a wide detour right past the fast-food stands, costume jewelry and other interesting and more or less sometimes even useful junk. In Germany Sodom are in the category of highly revered bands. They’re locals, after all. The untamed band leader Tom Angelripper admitted as much, greeting the crowd like this: “Halo Balingen!!! Wir sind endlich zu Hause!” That got about 10,000 listeners on their feet in an instant, and the show began!
Sodom, who have performed since 1997 in a consistently solid lineup of Tom Angelripper (vocals, bass), Bernd “Bernemann” Kost (guitar) and Bobby Schottkowski (drums), prepared a balanced setlist, as expected. Half the songs came from the iron era of the start of their career, half from the last three records, when Sodom reaffirmed their old-school thrash approach. The band dedicated Axis Of Evil from the latest album “The Final Sign Of Evil” (2007) to the late King of Pop Michael Jackson, who had died shortly before midnight the previous day.
The sight of just three guys pulverizing thrash and terrorizing the crowd beneath the stage with it was captivating. It was fascinating to realize how just three members cover and fill the sonic space so well. Bernemann’s riffing was outstanding in its white-hot, sharpened sound, and the guitarist didn’t lose a shred of credibility when he had to tackle solos. Sodom shook out a dose of noise that none of the other bands at the festival had managed to produce until then. It was also magnificent to watch the faithful German crowd get stuck in with the trio on stage as it rolled out its material. Sodom seasoned their compact, tight, flawless show with Bombenhagel from their second album “Persecution Mania”, now more than twenty years old, and so incinerated the bodies beneath the stage. It was more than obvious that Sodom are truly unbeatable on home soil. Angelripper’s vocals work deadly!
| Lita Ford: 18.10 – 19.20 |
A complete change of mood at the festival came late in the afternoon from hard rock diva Lita Ford, who returned to the stage last year after 15 years of silence. Material for a new album is reportedly also in the works in the studio. Lita, who last year met Abraham and is accompanied by an interesting lineup, in which the name of keyboardist Michael T. Ross (Angel, Hardline, XYZ) stands out, along with Ron Thal (guitarist of the new Guns N’ Roses), P.J. Farley (bass, Trixter, Raa) and Denis Leeflang (drums, Bumblefoot), no slouches, didn’t exactly have a lucky day. The sound was giving trouble on stage from the very start. Right at the start, with Larger Than Life, the singer furiously stomped her feet a few times and tried with gestures to get across to the techs that they should lower the drum volume. When things just wouldn’t improve, the woman started losing her nerve. First she hurled her jacket off the stage so that it flew straight into the face of a lucky photographer beneath the stage, and then she vented her displeasure mostly through a disrespectful treatment of her instrument (guitar), which she cruelly flung off her shoulders onto the stage several times.
Obviously this energy transferred from the singer to the entire band, who committed a few mistakes during the set; Lita no longer sang with full voice and you could feel she wasn’t trying on stage. A big hole in the show gaped especially once the band started playing Ozzy Osbourne’s cover Mr. Crowley, where the guitar in particular showed a great deal of immaturity in following in Randy Rhoads’s footsteps. Why Lita Ford took on this cover will never be clear to me. It would have been better to add some sweet candy from The Runaways era to the repertoire.
The singer focused her repertoire mainly on the albums “Lita” (1988), Stilleto (1990), and “Dangerous Curves” (1991), with an emphasis on “Lita”, with which she also closed her set, with Close My Eyes Forever and the super hit Kiss Me Dadly, which finally brought a few rays of light to this rather unlucky performance, which we’ll forget as soon as possible. Let me also mention that during the performance of the brand-new songs Piece (Hell Yeah) and Betrayal, with which the band seriously heralded the autumn release of a new album, Lita was joined on stage for duets by her husband and former Nitro member Jim Gilette, who will also produce Lita’s new record.
| U.D.O.: 19.40 – 20.50 |
The second-to-last act of day one was former Accept screamer Udo Dirkschneider, with his band U.D.O. Real euphoria reigned beneath the stage, marked by great anticipation of the band’s set. U.D.O.’s popularity in Germany is incredible. The band is more active than ever in its career and regularly releases studio albums at two-year intervals, with intense promotion through tours. Moreover, they’re a logical continuation of the cult band Accept and regularly include many songs by that band in their live repertoire. The feeling during the U.D.O. show was similar to Sodom’s set. Germans were on stage again, and again Germans showed their unbreakability on home soil. The difference was only that U.D.O. drew some 15,000 people to the front of the stage, if not more. So it was boiling down there!
The band’s core remains unchanged today. The only addition to the lineup is the new (again Italian) drummer Francesco Jovino; otherwise the grey-haired old guy was surrounded on stage, as always, by Fitty Weihnold (bass), Igor Gianola (guitar) and Udo’s Accept “buddy” Stefan Kaufmann (guitar). The band, who know exactly what they want and what the home crowd demands of them, were not idle for a second and hit straight away with the Accept classics Metal Heart and Midnight Highway, sending Balingen into real delirium in the blink of an eye. The feeling of engaged participation was unique, especially through the chorus chants of the Accept anthems as well as the U.D.O. material (Thudnerball, Man And Machine, the newer Vendetta or 24/7)., which included the classics from the debut, Animal House and They Want War.
Since U.D.O. were limited to 70 available minutes, they fired off song after song, and Dirkschneider only took some room in the encore to introduce his lineup on stage. Vocally Dirkschneider is still a confident, dominant figure today, graced with the power of charisma and immersive stage acting. In the outfit of a Vietnam war veteran, he jokingly kept the crowd in check so that they ate out of his hand throughout. In the intense encore, which U.D.O. began with the catchy Holy, where you could still feel that Dirkschneider too has to adjust the curve of his vocal line a bit (sadly, the weight of the years takes its toll), the men drove the auditorium into ecstasy once more with the Accept classics Balls To The Wall and I’m A Rebel. U.D.O.’s Balingen show proved that the saying “You watch German metal bands in Germany” still holds true. An excellent show from head to toe!
| Journey: 21.20 – 23.00 |
Journey were a special chapter all their own, not just on the first day but across the entire run of this year’s 15th consecutive Bang Yor Head!!! festival. Personally I count it a great privilege and honor that I finally got to share the magic of this band at their concert too. What you hear and learn on their studio albums sometimes really does seem like it’s not from this world. Journey are perfectionists at creating melodically top-notch catchiness in rock songs. You could say they’ve always shone in the gift of composing melodically flawless compactness, and their songs creep under your skin from the very first listen.
The band, about which serious doubts arose as to whether it could still confidently carry on, especially when it came to concerts, once it became clear Steve Perry would never return, caught a fresh wind in its sails. Thanks to YouTube, it discovered a kid who led a Journey tribute band in the Philippines. The similarity of his vocal tone and stage presence to Perry’s seemingly irreplaceable charisma was astonishing, and Journey didn’t hesitate to get in touch. With Arnel Pineda’s arrival the kid’s dream came true, and Journey can carry on with full credibility down their path of great musical perfectionism. They proved it with the fresh studio release “Revelation” (2008), which once again confirmed the unique Joruney greatness.
The men finally came to give a little lesson to all those, especially from the ranks of hardened, calcified metalheads, who can shove their jerking-off over semitone clashes versus melodic perfection somewhere. First on stage appeared guitarist Neal Schon. With a look of stern concentration he calmly waited for the intro to finish. The men open their set with Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) and that’s when the band’s first and really only mistake happens. Pineda started singing the first verse of the song “one round” too early. Neil Schon jerked his head toward the singer and shot a grim look at him. Pineda didn’t need many seconds to realize he’d botched it, finally caught up with the frame of the song, and walked up to Schon to give him some sort of “explanation”. All is well. From there on the Journey show worked like a real adventure into a world of sonic perfection. The sound, as if straight out of a jewel box, which I’d only experienced once before, at Gods Of Metal 2006, at the Def Leppard show, conjured an experience that, in terms of quality of execution, was lifted a few steps above the level we’d enjoyed during the previous bands. No need to look long for why. The band has existed since 1973 and has sold over 80 million copies of its albums worldwide.
Pineda sang brilliantly. If you closed your eyes, you could hardly tell whether it was really Pineda or Perry on stage. The singer communicated masterfully with the crowd throughout, spending most of the show on a special stage extension, where from just a meter away he fired up the crowd beneath the stage. His acrobatic movement was also a treat, with a few wild jumps from the stage onto that extension, doing splits in midair!
Live, Journey really don’t skimp on fuel or on decibels. Schon’s guitar is loud and cuts in the riffs so that you get a feeling of extraordinary loudness from the band, really hard-rock-alive dynamite, when Journey appear on stage. Schon reigned with extraordinary control of his instrument, with the filigree finesse of a soft touch. In solo perfection, the known masterpiece of how to offer a convincing and subcutaneously biting melody from just a few basic notes. He chopped away with unbelievable confidence, often shutting his eyes during the show, if he wasn’t tilting his head back. Rarely did he even look at the guitar neck during the show.
After Stone In Love, Jonathan Cain moved back to the keyboards; he even had a (red) piano on stage, and the band launched into the fantastic Rubicon. The sound was full and perfectly balanced in every component. Dean Castronovo needs no words. Fantastic drumming that especially fanned the stage liveliness and the reality of the Journey magic.
The concert flew by. Journey didn’t even bother with the “theater” of an encore, so the hypnotized audience sent quite a few whistles toward the stage at the end when only festival organizer Horst E. Franz appeared, trying to calm the crowd down and announce that the first day of the festival was behind us.
Everything pointed to there being no encore, as Journey closed with their mega hit Any Way You Want It, preceded, just as obligatorily, by Don’t Stop Believin’. There was certainly plenty more material available. Weighing up the ballads, they opted for Faithfully rather than Open Arms, and unused aces were still up their sleeve, such as Send Her My Love, Who’s Crying Now, or Lovin,’ Touchin,’ Squeezin’. But there simply wasn’t time for everything.
Wheel In The Sky was additionally seasoned with a prelude by Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain, who breathed an extra whiff of Southern melody into the song, and then especially in the chorus the crowd again ecstatically backed the band. Of course the crowd included a somewhat older population of listeners. Mature music for mature years, who know their receptor organs deserve far more than just primitive semitone scraping and roaring. Journey’s set was really a brief landing of beings from another galaxy, who for 100 minutes descended to Earth in a flying saucer to remind the masses once more what pure perfection of melodic completeness in rock music is. Journey proved in Balingen that on this front they’re completely untouchable masters of their craft and that they remain so in the new millennium. Great musical gurus, before whom we can only bow. Thank you Journey. See you as soon as possible!
The first day of the festival ran on schedule. The experienced, routined organizers ran the festival with confidence, and the bands really weren’t forced to wait around to blast onto the stage. The newly built Volksbank Messehalle, right next to the festival stage, offered not just entertainment at the metal market but also lots of shade, where we could cool our thoroughly overheated noggins during the day. After Journey a kebab hit the spot, and with the crew we had to thoroughly sum up our impressions and grind through who was who on the first day of the festival. Journey were really a special chapter on day one, one that was talked about only in superlatives the next day!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
KISSIN’ DYNAMITE: 1. My Religion 2. I Hate Hip Hop 3. Out In The Rain 4. Steel Of Swabia 5. Zombie 6. Iron Fist 7. Freaky 8. Ready Steady Thunder 9. Addicted To Metal 10. Welcome To The Jungle ROSS THE BOSS: 1. I.L.H. (intro) 2. Blood Of Knives 3. Death & Glory 4. Death Tone 5. Gloves Of Metal 6. We Will Kill 7. May The Gods Be With You 8. Immortal Son 9. Thor (The Powerhead) 10. Hail And Kill VOIVOD: 1. Voivod 2. The Unknown Knows 3. Overreaction 4. Tribal Convictions 5. Treasure Chase 6. Ravenous Medicine 7. Tornado 8. Brain Scan 9. Astronomy Domine SACRED REICH: 1. The American Way 2. Independent 3. Administrative Decisions 4. Love…Hate 5. Sacred Reich 6. One Nation 7. Crimes Against Humanity 8. Who’s to Blame 9. Ignorance 10. War Pigs 11. Death Squad 12. Surf Nicaragua SODOM: 1. Napalm In The Morning 2. Outbreak Of Evil 3. Axis Of Evil 4. The Saw Is The Law 5. Blasphemer 6. Agent Orange 7. Wanted Dead 8. M-16 9. Ausgebombt 10. Remember The Fallen 11. Bombenhagel LITA FORD: 1. Larger Than Life 2. Black Widow 3. Can’t Catch Me 4. Gotta Let Go 5. Back To The Cave 6. Hungry 7. Falling In And Out Of Love 8. Mr. Crowley 9. Piece (Hell Yeah) 10. Betrayal 11. Close My Eyes Forever 12. Kiss Me Deadly U.D.O.: 1. Metal Heart 2. Midnight Highway 3. They Want War 4. 24/7 5. Vendetta 6. Princess Of The Dawn 7. Living For Tonight 8. Man And Machine 9. Thunderball 10. Animal House —encore— 11. Holy 12. Balls To The Wall I3. I’m A Rebel JOURNEY: 1. The Journey (Revelation) 2. Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) 3. Never Walk Away 4. Guitar Solo 5. Stone In Love 6. Rubicon 7. Only The Young 8. Ask The Lonely 9. Change For The Better 10. Lights 11. Edge Of The Blade 12. Wheel In The Sky 13. Chain Reaction 14. One More 15. Wildest Dream 16. Faithfully 17. Don’t Stop Believin’ 18. Be Good To Yourself 19. Anyway You Want It
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