Performing: Death Destruction, Amaranthe, Vicious Rumors, HammerFall
Location: Ljubljana / CUK Kino Šiška / Slovenia
Date: 03.12.2011
HammerFall is that musical outfit that hit the scene at the right time, in the right place. Back then, in the second half of the nineties, when the market was drowning in the din and racket of popularized unmelodic roaring, they slyly pushed their debut “Glory To The Brave” (1997) onto it. And all of us suddenly, gratefully remembered the primal source of metal, shaped by N.W.O.B.H.M. bands led by Iron Maiden and Saxon, the biblical metal messiahs Judas Priest, a whole phalanx of classic old school speed metallers from the USA (from Crimson Glory and Liege Lord to Metal Church and so on,…), and thoughts turned once again to the German power metallers from Helloween, Rage, Grave Digger to Running Wild and so on,… Thanks to the arrival of HammerFall, melodic metal bands all over the planet came together and a real invasion of all-round heavy metal revivalism followed, which gave us plenty of new power metal groups, poured fresh defiance into the older ones, or even dragged them out of years of slumber and back into action. So nobody today disputes the importance of HammerFall’s role in their early phase on the metal scene.
While the iron was hot, they quickly forged four albums that are now considered their classic era (up to and including “Crimson Thunder” from 2002), and from then on there was no fear that their name might ever fade, let alone vanish, from the metal scene. To date, the Swedish revivalists have put out eight studio albums in total, the latest of them, “Infected”, just this past spring. If they visited Maribor two years ago on the tour for “No Sacrifice, No Victory” (2009), this time they found their way to the Slovenian capital again. It’s their second visit there (the first was on 29.11.2005 – a joint tour with the Finns Stratovarius).
HammerFall are generous guys. So they called up a young band of seasoned musicians for the tour, fellow Swedes from Gothenburg, Death Destruction, who put out their self-titled studio debut this year. Even if they’re five Milky Way solar systems away in terms of genre, so what? Why bite the hand that feeds you? What’s more, once you find out that HammerFall bassist Fredrik Larsson is also a member of Death Destruction, there’s really no point in arguing anymore. The lineup brings under one roof members from genre-wise very different backgrounds! The aforementioned Larsson (HammerFall, which is why the guy played Kino Šiška twice this evening), Jimmie Strimell (Dead By April) and Jonas Ekdahl (Evergrey) cook up a pretty interesting mix of those backgrounds. The vocals are screamy, i.e. “modernistically” conceived, and the musicians build a firm picture of their musical vision on stage, which they themselves call groove (core) metal. Aggressive, flexible, dynamic and running on high-octane suspension! A very welcome opening 25 minutes for everyone who wanted to start banging their heads right away!
The program rolled on unblemished. After 15 minutes, the sextet from the Swedish-Danish alliance Amaranthe took the stage. If Death Destruction went down smoothly, the same can’t be said in full for Amaranthe. This musical experiment gave birth to a self-titled debut this year and presents itself on stage with no fewer than three vocalists. Female vocals, “core” male vocals and clean male vocals. In this musical jumble I was almost ready at one moment to pin the label of melodic death metal on it, and the next moment a cheap version of power metal, brutally full of character holes and short on charisma. The cherry on top of the questionable stage credibility of the band’s character was the screaming legionnaire Richard Sjunnesson (The Unsigned, ex-Sonic Syndicate), with a hairdo he clearly craved and a Manowar shirt. So Amaranthe are a tough, undefined bone that got stuck in the throats of quite a few metalheads who came to Kino Šiška this night!
Luckily, the bill also included the legendary representatives of American old school speed metal from San Francisco, Vicious Rumors. HammerFall have a clear respect for this band, since it was Vicious Rumors and their classic output that influenced HammerFall in the first place. They had already visited Ljubljana once this year, in the second half of May, when they presented their current studio album “Razorback Killers” (2011) as part of their own headline tour. The lineup underwent a minor adjustment before the autumn European tour with HammerFall. Guitarist Thaen Rasmussen returned to it, having rubbed strings for Geoff Thorpe and company between 2005 and 2007.
Vicious Rumors, who had 40 minutes of concert repertoire at their disposal, bared their teeth with no respect whatsoever and hit straight away. With the classic Digital Dictator. Even though the guitar sound was smeared, it didn’t bother anyone in the slightest, because the band is downright unbeatable on stage. They killed us at Orto bar in May this year and they killed us again this time at Kino Šiška. The band very much enjoyed the full house. Geoff Thorpe didn’t forget to thank HammerFall in one of his announcements for inviting them on this tour (quoting part of Geoff’s sentence: “… a tour of our lifetime…”). With vocalist Brian Allen, Thorpe hit the nail on the head, as with “Razorback Killers” he got closest, most credibly, to the magic of the Carl Albert era. Allen, the embodiment of a vocalist on helium, combining in himself the most venomous heights of melodic “Halfordesque” screams that mercilessly rip through your ears and cerebral cortex, stunned us with a power that didn’t buckle for a second in those short but sweet 40 minutes. The cathartic experience of the explosive Larry Howe on drums, the unbending chieftain of the band Geoff Thorpe, the quickly settled-in returnee Rasmussen, topped off with Allen’s excellent performance, delivered the expected scenario. Because Vicious Rumors are simply better musicians and a better band than HammerFall. They created the most authentic ambience in the cradle where American metal was conceived. Even before the Bay Area thrash metal era sprouted! Razor sharp, technically demanding, aggressive and seasoned with just the right amount of melody! Played to perfection. Classic hammered out on top of classic, a scenario tailor-made for the true fans of the band with just one new song, the otherwise superb Let The Garden Burn, where Geoff Thorpe, in a destructive duet with Allen, finally stretched his vocal cords properly too.
This night, Vicious Rumors walked out of the ring as the quiet moral winners of the evening. Simply because of their defiant and long-lived authenticity! Let’s just hope their show got as far under the skin as possible of everyone in the hall for their gig who was waiting primarily for HammerFall and didn’t know the band yet. This is a band that deserves all the support and metal loyalty for its excellence, faith and defiance. They skinned us alive!
The main standard-bearers of the evening, HammerFall, are men with a pedigree of great ease and freedom from pressure. What they do runs in their veins. And they always do things the way they know best. That’s why everything they take on is so convincing and high quality too. The jam-packed Kino Šiška greeted the band with a roar at half past ten in the evening, when the quintet launched into the opener (for HammerFall’s range of musical sermons, a pretty gloomy one) from the new album “Infected”, called Patient Zero. The opening euphoria was fired up right after by the iron-repertoire classic Heeding The Call, and at that moment the entire hall, from the front rows all the way to the mixing desk and the entrance doors, was on its feet with hands raised high in the air! It’s incredible what kind of support the fans give this band! The view over a sea of young, freshly baked metal souls was excellent, which fills you with great hope for the future of strengthening general metal orthodoxy on Slovenian soil! This was a concert that gathered HammerFall devotees from all over Slovenia, in a wide arc. From those who first enjoyed the band on stage on its “Legacy Of Kings” tour in 1998, to the freshly baked flag-bearers of power metal!
And the setlist was excellent. Solidly mixed and, despite five new songs, with the emphasis on the early albums of HammerFall’s career. In this respect, heaven and paradise on Earth opened up especially for the fans in the hall after the new Dia De Los Muertos, since this was followed by one HammerFall classic after another until the end of the night. Steel Meets Steel and Dragon Lies Bleeding were particularly nice additions to the repertoire, especially the anthemic Riders On The Storm, Legacy Of Kings and Let The Hammer Fall, and, at the close of the regular set, the standout song from the album “Chapter V.”, called The Templar Flame. The interplay between the audience and the band was downright incredible and confirms the recent success of metal concert events at Kino Šiška with Amon Amarth and In Flames. Even singer Jochim Cans couldn’t get over it and at one point even said that the Ljubljana crowd was the best on the entire tour that HammerFall have had so far. How much of that was deliberate fire-stoking and how much truth, only Joachim knows, but still, I could easily believe him this time, provided he really meant it.
The band is fully “oiled”, too. With Pontus Norgren, who once worked, among other things, as Malmsteen’s guitar tech, HammerFall have recently hit the nail on the head, and the partnership with the first HammerFall icon, the lanky Oscar Dronjak, works downright phenomenally on stage. Add to that Joachim Cans’s excellent form on the day, who delivered a truly high-quality vocal performance in Ljubljana and sang the entire repertoire at an exceptional level (like a born frontman who held the crowd firmly beside him the whole time, and as a vocal talent in his own right), and on the other side the solidity of the Larsson/Johansson rhythm tandem, and the Templars’ victory is guaranteed. Anders Johansson, up on his drum fortress raised above everyone, amused himself in all sorts of ways during the lighter songs. Hence a delay or two in the transitions, but totally painless for the ear. At one point Anders spiced up his work by sticking a drumstick in his mouth and pounding the left ride cymbal with the fist of his free left hand.
The band especially rewarded the crowd’s euphoria by opening the encore with the classic Glory To The Brave, where the crowd was once again stunned by its unified roar accompanying Cans’s vocal parts. A less interesting moment near the end of the concert came with the clichéd new and easily missed One More Time, while the expected closing anthem Hearts On Fire fully repaired that impression, once again bringing the unique metal atmosphere of Kino Šiška to life for the grand finale. The sound was very good throughout the concert, not perfectly balanced (the drums pushed slightly to the front), but very, very satisfying.
The triumphant return of the Templars to Slovenia wrapped up after an hour and three quarters and conjured one of the best concert experiences with HammerFall on stage, if not the very best in the last ten years that I’ve been following the band live (as far as their “indoor” shows go). Simply put. When fan fervor and the band’s presence merge into the magic of a unique interplay of chemical bonds. And once the band feels that, it floors the gas, even if it’s smeared with all the routine tricks of the trade! And this HammerFall show was one of those events of unforgettable metal celebration that we can only wish for on our soil in the future!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Nina Grad
HAMMERFALL:
1.Patient Zero
2.Heeding The Call
3.Any Means Necessary
4.B.Y.H.
5.Blood Bound
6.Let’s Get It On
7.Last Man Standing
8.Renegade
9.Always Will Be
10.Dia De Los Muertos
11.Riders Of The Storm
12.Steel Meets Steel
13.Legacy Of Kings
14.Let The Hammer Fall
15.The Dragon Lies Bleeding
16.The Templar Flame
—encore—
17.Glory To The Brave
18.One More Time
19.Hearts On Fire
VICIOUS RUMORS:
1.Replicant / Digital Dictator
2.Minute To Kill
3.Murderball
4.Down To The Temple
5.Abandoned
6.Let the Garden Burn
7.Hellraiser
8.Soldiers of the Night
9.Don’t Wait For Me
