Location: Tolmin (confluence of the Tolminka and Soča) / Slovenia
Date: August 9, 2012
Day four of this year’s Metal Camp 2012 has arrived, a festival we’ll never cover under the “Metal Camp” banner again! Day four was actually the only day of the festival when the weather threatened to turn on us. Around early afternoon the sky scowled, the clouds fused into one impenetrable mass, and a grayness settled over the grounds that smelled dangerously of rain. And sure enough. A few minutes before four p.m., right before the first act of the festival’s main stage, Austrian black/death metallers Warcult, stepped up, a downpour hit and just dragged on and on. When the horizon over the Tolmin confluence closes in, it often happens that a cloud like that wedges itself right there and refuses to budge, despite the proverbial fleetingness of summer showers. So I listened to the band from inside my tent, because my camera gear is too expensive to expose to a soaking for the sake of Warcult. Warcult sound pretty generic to the ear, and it’s hard to pull out anything that smells even a tiny bit authentic. A band that still lacks charisma on the songwriting front will have to spit in its hands a bit harder if it wants its shows to sink deeper into the minds of just any consumer of extreme metal branches.
Before Before the Dawn the sound tech on stage joked around while testing the mics, in the style of typical Scandinavian cynical humor: “Whay is it raining today?” Of course that was very funny, and worrying at the same time. But the downpour eased off in the opening minutes of the Finns’ set, which means the front of the stage filled up enough to give the band some real support. Before the Dawn, who spent many years languishing in the Finnish metal underground as a solo project of band leader and boss Tuomas Saukkonen, finally established themselves on the international scene after signing with the German label Nuclear Blast Records, where they released the album “Deathstar Rising” (2011). Fired up by a favorable turn of events and finally grown into a quartet, whose hard-won credibility is handy for live shows too, Before the Dawn confirmed their excellent creative chemistry this year with a freshly released studio album, their seventh, titled “Rise of the Phoenix”. A title that matches the band’s epic journey from its founding in 1999 to this very day. Before the Dawn proved at the festival that they offer a nifty mix of polished charisma and performance sharpness, with elements of melodic death metal and gothic and doom touches. They won people over with their tightness, crushing heavy-rolling riffs, and the excellent vocal brutality of Tuomas Saukkonen, who spent most of the set with his left foot propped on the monitor, “firmly chained” to the mic stand. Against a backdrop of synth elements (e.g. repertoire tracks like Wraith, Pitch Black Universe). Judging by what I saw and heard, Before the Dawn can be counted among the more interesting names that still have room to grow and win over more of the crowd.
Grand Magus are walking a similar path to Before The Dawn, only they broke through a bit earlier. Mostly thanks to the album “Hammer Of The North” (2010), which put them on the world map. Especially after Grand Magus successfully worked their way through the European festival circuit in 2010, followed by a stint as support for Motorhead on the iron trio’s autumn-winter European tour of 2010! “Hammer Of The North” gave us a few immortal anthems that became real live favorites. Emboldened, the band kept its creative momentum going after switching from Roadrunner Records to Nuclear Blast Records and this year released their new studio album “The Hunt”, which they also played plenty of at this year’s Metal Camp festival. The trio from Stockholm, Sweden, led by charismatic vocalist and guitarist Janne “JB” Christoffersson, along with bassist Fox and drummer Ludwig “Ludde” Witt, once again impressed everyone with their mockingly direct dose of metal primordium and rawness, conjured up by the point of a primal guitar phrase draped in the legacy of ossified metal textbook rules. JB, who showed up at Metal Camp in the exact same shirt as two years ago at Bang Your Head festival in Balingen, that is, a washed-out, torn Rainbow shirt with the “Rising” album motif, still wears the classic “pilot” Ray Ban shades, and has newly let his beard grow, so combined with his sparse hairline JB now looks like a friendly garden gnome, far from the angry grump the musician wants to conjure with his stage presence. The band opened their set with Kinglslayer (album “Wolf’s Return”, 2005), built on the opening warm-up with the opening track of the album “Iron Will” (2008) called Like The Oar Strikes The Water, and went on to present, with Valhalla Rising and, right after it, the excellent anthem Sword of The Ocean, the new studio album “The Hunt” too, which obviously smells even more epic and bombastic than its nicely mixed predecessor “Hammer Of The North”, where Grand Magus neatly merged elements of doom metal with the Scandinavian sense of melody and epic bombast in metal. The setlist also had I, the Jury, Hammer Of The North, and Ravens Guide Our Way, taken from the band’s much-praised previous album. The band left another outstanding impression with the whole set and wrapped it up with the closing track Iron Wil. Grand Magus are an example of the exceptional caliber a three-piece lineup can reach. That is, the classic trio. Their stage sound is authentically organic, raw, dense, and full, and what really convinces is the incredible volume of thick riff smear, superbly backed by JB’s vocal approach on one side and the dynamic rhythm line on the other. A seriously ravenous set!
The first to take the festival stage with a full one-hour set were Finnish folk metal jesters Korpiklaani. As expected, the space in front of the stage was packed, in line with the trends. Once again a heap of all sorts of creatures in the crowd, painted up and dressed as all manner of apparitions and scary things. The top spot among them surely went to Batman, who in his excessive drunkenness crowd-surfed damn well all the way to the photo pit and crashed straight onto the right foot of this article’s author. Penance. A sextet devoted to promoting alcoholic derivatives, with its boozy debauchery they naturally gave the crowd a perfect alibi to get completely hammered. The stands around the venue were jam-packed, the folks were thirsty for beer, it flowed in streams, and the number of grotesque sights around the festival grounds grew in proportion from minute to minute. Korpiklaani started raging with Hunting Song and then Cottages and Saunas. A predictably predictable set, which of course didn’t lack the humanitarian anthem Vodka, nor the obligatory Happy Little Boozer, nor of course Beer Beer, and Tequila, Wooden Pints, Kirki, and the closing Pellonpekko backed up the same attitude. A proven, tight, and confident show, built on combining folk rhythms and melodies with the punch of metal. Despite promoting the new album “Manala” (2012) with the songs Rauta, Kunnia, and Mätsalle, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Korpiklaani shows are getting more and more predictable. But the crowd undoubtedly went nuts to the end, and the band got a dose of audience madness you can only dream of! After the show, people mostly went looking for food at the stalls to balance out the alcohol gradient in their blood, which hit the pizza joints at the back corner of the venue, right by the main entrance, hardest, as they literally ran out of supplies at that moment.
Edguy were the festival’s only German representative drawing on the tradition of classic Euro power metal. I say German! And yet Edguy try to invent some new style in metal, and in recent years have deliberately crossed it with cues from melodic rock, which with their rather mediocre new release “Age Of The Joker” does them more of a disservice than it maintains their hard-earned credibility. Still, this festival set confirmed too that Edguy keep the crowd’s extraordinary affection. Euphoria in front of the stage once again! The crowd’s interplay with the band was simply outstanding. Knowing the verses by heart kept the band, and singer Tobi especially, riding high. Tobias wasn’t having his best day when it came to vocal delivery, and right at the start of the set he grabbed both ears a few times, which meant he was having trouble with the monitors. Edguy remain a pleasant stage attraction, always thrilling with a full-blooded charge, full use of the huge stage, and above all the sparkling, goofy, joyful temperament of singer Tobias Sammet. The overture to the band’s jokey character came already with the taped intro, the Wham song, the evergreen hit “Last Christmas”! Then the quintet exploded onto the stage with Nobody’s Hero from the current album “Age Of The Joker”. The mood jumped a few notches higher when the band then cut loose with Tears Of The Mandrake, graced with an incredible build-up and the ravenous melodicism of the chorus, which the bulk of the several-thousand-headed crowd in front of the stage joined in on instantly. A thoroughly confident set, expectedly excellent! No slip-ups! On the setlist Vain Glory Opera especially caught fire, while Lavatory Love Machine, Superheroes, the new Robin Hood, Ministry Of Saints, and the closer King Of Fools were more or less the expected picks. The band also allowed itself a bit of fun, which of course sent adrenaline soaring again among the boiling heads when they worked the lead phrase of the Iron Maiden classic The Trooper into Babylon. A band that likes to make fun of itself, calling what it plays “pussy metal”, despite a few sound hiccups and singer Tobi’s not-quite-best form that day, brought yet another successful set to a close, backed by an extraordinary response from power metal fanatics.
If Madball on day two were a welcome warm-up for all fans of bands with the “core” tag, and The Black Dahlia Murder on day three its build-up, then with Hatebreed the festival hit its peak in that regard, I’d even say one of the peaks of this year’s Metal Camp performers. The quintet’s return, after 2009 when they already played Tolmin, with a lineup made up of eternal frontman Jamie Jasta, original members Chris Beattie on bass and the returning guitarist Wayne Lozinak, plus drummer Matt Byrne and guitarist Frank Novinec, who has actually counted as the new guy on the team since 2006, brought Metal Camp the top spectacle of day four, one nobody topped afterwards, not even Amon Amarth with the help of pyrotechnics – they played after Hatebreed, as the headliners of the festival’s fourth day. The music Hatebreed play is simply built, can’t stand melody, and mostly builds on groove suspension and a one-dimensional napalm stampede of guitar riffs, which leave plenty of room for the raging show of Jamie Jasta, the band’s first icon, an outstanding frontman who is torn apart by eruptive energy. It was exactly this bluntness, this blend of aggression, stage madness, and unstoppable fury born of pain and anger, at the extreme of his daily stage rage, that conjured up a one-of-a-kind experience at the festival. The crowd, which filled every last corner of the green “plateau” in front of the stage, jumped as one, created wide-open “circle pits,” and moshed unstoppably up front. At Jasta’s command they pulled off plenty of “stupid stuff,” meaning they were blindly eating out of the singer’s hand. A mass of strobe flashing, full escalation of white and red spotlights firing, fog effects, a smokescreen of dust from the herd-like stomping of an endless crowd that had instantly lost all common sense, left no survivors on this kind of battlefield. No mercy! From the first beats of Defeatist to the closing Destroy Everything, which actually burned Metal Camp to ashes! The setlist also had these Hatebreed gems: Hands Of A Dying Man, Doomsayer, Live for This, I Will Be Heard, Facing What Consumes You, Everyone Bleeds Now, Merciless Tide, To the Threshold, Last Breath, Preservance, Never Let It Die, In Ashes They Shall Reap, As Dieahard As They Come.
There’s hardly any need to waste words on the main act of the festival’s fourth day. Metal Camp’s eternal guests Amon Amarth, a band that truly can’t hide anything anymore, even if it wanted to. The name is taken from Tolkien’s “Sindarin” for the volcano “Mount Doom” of Middle-earth. Bearers of melodic death metal, probably its most epic and bombastic variant, one that would quickly turn into a power metal band if you swapped the growling for clean melodic vocals. But Amon Amarth are hellish. Devilishly fast, most of the riffs sit on the ultrasonic rolling of the double bass drum pedal. The show, packed with pyrotechnic effects, also presented the new studio album “Surtur Rising” (2011) – Surtr is a giant of Norse mythology, which the stage set, built around the new album’s theme, announced right away. With the expected intro, which wrapped the stage in solemn blue and then flowed into green, and then once the quintet stepped on stage and flashed into the new War Of Gods, the stage was engulfed in pyrotechnic flames and a galaxy of strobes, in a fury that seemed to drive the devil himself out of his lair, swarms of flies and all. The sound was excellent! After the fast start, once the band finished the second song of the set with Runes To My Memory, the incredibly charismatic singer Johan Hegg addressed the crowd thoroughly in a longer pause. First he thanked the audience for turning out in such numbers and asked if they were feeling good. He announced a venomous continuation of the show, with an equally venomous setlist, and called everyone into the hellish whirlpool as the band lunged into Destroyer Of The Universe. The whole crowd headbanging in nonstop salvos! Hegg, who didn’t forget to strap on his famous Viking drinking vessel – a curved horn – is a master of solid communication. Eye contact, riling up the crowd, repeated thanks in half-broken Slovenian, but credit to the musician for the effort, as you could hear this from the stage a few times: “Hvala Slovinsku!” The bearded mountain man, who is turning more and more with the years into the idyllic face of a hidden reserve for the most serene Odin, is basically the key link between the band and the audience, and despite the apocalyptic visions of the fairy-tale-inspired band, he keeps an Amon Amarth show interesting. “Skoll!”
The Swedes confidently commanded the giant stage and the role of the festival’s musical anchor, though during the show I couldn’t shake the feeling that Hatebreed had completely stolen the cream off the top of the fruit bowl that evening. The band held the crowd close with a varied repertoire drawn from their discography, which strung together: Live For the Kill, Cry Of The Black Birds, The Fate Of Norms, The Pursuit Of Vikings, For Victory Or Death, Victorious March, the closing Twilight of The Thundergod, and Guardians Of Asgard.
Viking metal thus closed the festival’s fourth day, which was among the less interesting ones when it comes to the main stage lineup. The second, smaller stage offered some acts worth a good look that day, such as Rijeka’s experimental weirdos Father, old acquaintances from the Saxon show on May 30, 2010, in Ljubljana, Britain’s Crimes Of Passion, and a first-rate attraction, the legendary NWOBHM metallers Hell, back in action, who on the second stage, with a spectacular show that created a real hell on stage, as headliners swept away all the competition of the day.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik & Jerneja Jerak
