Location: Tolmin / Sotočje / Slovenia
Date: 07/23/2018
Metaldays, which has been putting Slovenia on the map as a country with big metal festivals ever since 2004, is always a pleasure to come back to. Over the years it has become exactly what its slogan promises, turning Tolmin into a proper metal holiday for a week, and this year the festival sold out for the first time before it even started. The organizing crew tries out new things every year, and most of them are very welcome. This time, Sunday’s view of the meadow packed full of tents was a gorgeous welcome. Once again the festival offered a “warm up” night on Saturday, and on Sunday came the first real festival day with bands on the New Forces stage. As for us, we kicked off the festival’s concerts on Monday.
We started Metaldays 2018 with a toxic assault from Bavarian thrashers Dust Bolt. The German four-piece doesn’t say anything new with their thrash, but with raw energy and a great performance they won over a few hundred heads in front of the stage in no time. In the past it was actually rare for the first bands on the second stage to draw such a big crowd, but this year it was more the rule than the exception. That’s a fact that clearly speaks to the high quality of the Boško Bursać stage’s lineup, and at the same time an obvious sign of how sold out this year’s Metaldays was. All of this played into Dust Bolt’s hands too. They quickly got a proper mosh frenzy going in front of the stage, and everyone on stage was bursting with energy too, because the headbanging around the guitar necks just wouldn’t stop. Dust Bolt are genre-wise very close to their countrymen Kreator, but they also add influences from Bay Area thrash and in places even hardcore. Any lack of originality is made up for with explosiveness and youthful fury, which among modern-day thrashers only the likes of Crisix and Lost Society come close to.
The Americans Pillorian led us into completely different musical waters. They’re fronted by John Haughm, the former mastermind of the excellent American folk/doom/black metal band Agalloch. Agalloch broke up two years ago, with Haughm moving toward black metal with Pillorian, while the other three members continue Agalloch’s musical story in Khorada. At Metaldays, Pillorian presented their debut Obsidian Arc, released last year, in a dark light and proved they aren’t just Agalloch 2.0. Haughm’s new baby is much more wicked, furious and contemptuous than its gentler predecessor. The dark heart of Pillorian beats in the rhythms of traditional black metal, though the Americans showed that they’re not that easy to pin down as completely classic black metal. The ghosts of Haughm’s musical past are very much alive and sneak out mainly in the eerie guitar melodies, the melancholic atmosphere and Haughm’s piercing, nihilistic screams. Already the second very pleasant surprise in a row.
The same can’t quite be said for the next act, the Czech grinders Jig-Ai, who delivered exactly what you’d expect from a band that plays grind and, on top of that, comes from the Czech Republic. The Prague trio served up a blast of the real thing, though a fairly generic goregrind, full of polka rhythms, blasts and d-beat drums, spastic outbursts and sick ideas. Like their countrymen Spasm, Rectal Smegma or Gutalax, Jig-Ai offer a whole palette of, ahem, interesting ideas about ninja groupies, bukkake, bodily fluids and orifices. With lyrics that would make feminists’ blood boil. Delivered, fittingly, as if coming from the throat of a rabid wild boar from the woods. This Prague filth was written for goregrind fans, but our Prekmurje buddies Vulvahtrone push this genre much better and with more oomph.
While things were already merrily boiling at the “forest” stage, the main stage finally woke up at half past four in the afternoon. That’s when Austria’s Moros climbed onto it. The band, with more than a decade of experience, combines elements of death metal and thrash. They have just one studio album under their belt, “Lakeside Terrorfrönt,” released in 2014. Last year they already played in Tolmin, on the festival’s warm-up day. It was a solid, tight show. The songs Skeleton King, Lakeside Terrorfrönt, 7 P.M. and Psychotic Maniäcs grabbed you with zeal and sturdiness. The guys are confident, and while their songwriting doesn’t contribute anything groundbreaking to the metal alphabet, they tackle what they do with heart and dedication. The most entertaining thing was watching singer Mons, with his psychotically darting eyes under a baseball cap in the middle of the afternoon heat, his face beet red and the veins in his neck bulging, announcing through his growls that Monday’s afternoon sun had ruthlessly set upon the festival grounds.
The performance by the Dutch band Vuur had already gathered quite a few curious onlookers in front of the stage. This is a band that came together the year before last around the (by now almost famous) singer Anneke Van Giersbergen (ex-The Gathering). She’s the kind of artist whose voice many a performer would love to have on their studio release, and she’s especially well known among fans of Devin Townsend and Ayreon. Anneke now has her own band, and it has a studio debut under its belt too, “In This Moment We Are Free – Cities,” released last year. Although the promo copy pushes them into the prog metal category, Vuur come across as a collective that isn’t all that interested in metal. The songs are layered and dynamic, and Anneke’s vocal experimentation naturally stands out, as she really lets loose this time and takes absolute freedom in her vocal expression and in the overall result. Strapped with a Gibson SG guitar, Anneke is with her vocal charisma the band’s main magnet, though their music lacks a bit more recognizability, an itch of its own compositional focus, which in other words means a bit more creative self-confidence as authors. Drummer Ed Warby, a familiar face from Ayreon and Gorefest, was especially impressive, and struck us with his precision and variability. So a band with creative potential for the future and a really lovely addition to the festival lineup. Definitely a band that will grow artistically with new studio releases. The band also develops a concrete rhythmic groove which, with the welcome lower tuning of the massive guitar riffs, grips satisfactorily. The band presented their studio debut and closed the show with The Gathering’s song Strange Machines.
Hecate Enthroned are legendary extreme metallers from Wales. Of the original lineup, guitarist Nigel Dennen is in the sextet today, closely followed in seniority by bassist Dylan Hughes and guitarist Andy Milnes. This trio forms the core of the band in its new era too, as the band, with black metal roots, has started bringing more and more death metal elements into its music. Although they’ve been on the scene for a long time, Hecate Enthroned are rather lazy when it comes to albums. The latest, “Virulent Rapture,” came out in 2013, and almost a whole decade passed between it and its predecessor “Redimus” (2004). The band has been promising a new studio album for quite a while, and current vocalist Joe Stamps, who uses a rather distinctive, let’s say “croaking” growl, said so out loud during one of the breaks in the Tolmin set. So the band tackled a completely new song, Revelations in Autumn Flame. With this song too, the band sticks to rudimentary, that is old-school riffs, which keeps contact with their roots while also looking after the high musicality that generally characterizes their compositions. The band has shed all the nomenclature of black metal frills and kitsch that once accompanied it, and with which back then they successfully “provoked” e.g. their generational “fellow sufferers,” the far more notorious Cradle of Filth. They touched on that era in Tolmin too, and among other things the song Dark Requiems and Unsilent Massacre rang out, taken from the self-same-titled second studio album of the band. The band showed a great deal of onstage tightness and coordination during the performance, which is surely a result of rich experience and a long mileage. The show came with excellent sound and was almost exclusive, as the band is incredibly hard to catch on stage lately.
The first visit this year to the New Forces stage passed in a considerably more refined atmosphere. In the late afternoon we made our way through the fog of the Ljubljana Marshes, and before that we took a short trip to the idyllic Belgian cities of Ghent and Bruges, home of the melodic death metallers Reject the Sickness. The five-piece released their second studio album The Weight of Silence this spring, and presented it with great force in just under half an hour. The guys convinced on stage with their liveliness and bounce, a bit less with their musical identity, which can’t really be faulted but at the same time doesn’t stand out in the least from the gray average of a flood of similar-sounding bands.
Much more pleasant, then, was the fog of the Ljubljana Marshes with Morost. In a good half hour, the girl and guys once again, sadly to a rather small crowd, presented their vision of atmospheric death/black metal in a good light, marked by broken rhythms, atmospheric guitar parts, a lively rhythm section and Jonas’s raw, sharp vocals. The tracks from the debut Solace and Solitude convinced again, even more so the novelties a la the progressively inclined The Conundrum, a bit less the poorer-sounding keyboards and the band’s dismal stiffness, as they still stand on stage as if buried in the ground. The teasing with new tracks is already downright cheeky, and we’re waiting for the new album!
Jinjer are a Ukrainian metalcore quartet who last September opened a show at Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna for the notorious Arch Enemy, on the very day of the final showdown in which Slovenia beat Serbia and so conquered all of European basketball. The black vocal panther wrapped in mystery, Tatiana Shmailyuk, who doesn’t look very Ukrainian at all, is the band’s main generator of attraction. Vocally she knows no unknowns. From crystal-clear, softly dreamy delivery of verses to furious, ominous growls. The band skillfully builds all this into its toxic rhythmic groove kinetics. For a woman, the growl is convincing and “robust” enough. In contrast to the static stage figures of the guitarist and bassist, Tatiana is a true “athlete,” who with her dynamic running used every nook of the stage’s expanse. The band bets everything on the infectious melodic formatting of the songs. The tracks are based on a lower-tuned wall of riffs, backed by a voluminous, ever-active and dynamic rhythm kinetics. A band that is technically extremely accomplished and therefore carries development potential. Also into the fields of experimentation, though the question is how much they dare. The proven musical groove they occupy is currently opening up space for them with the audience, and after a convincing festival performance in Tolmin, the number of its followers has surely grown. Among other things, the band played the songs: Words Of Wisdom, Who’s Gonna Be The One, I Speak Astronomy, Pisces, Outlander, Cloud Factory and Bad Water.
The absolute best and most unexpected surprise followed when all six members of Monday’s New Forces stage headliners, the American Oubliette, crammed onto the stage. The French-sounding name means a type of dungeon, the only entrance to which is through a trapdoor in the ceiling, and the Americans really did live up to the name, pinning some two hundred heads in front of the stage in place for three quarters of an hour with top-notch melodic black metal. The core of Oubliette is the married couple Mike (guitar; Inferi) and Emily (vocals) Low, and besides them the band is made up mainly of members of the black/death outfit Enfold Darkness. Oubliette released their second studio album The Passage right before Metaldays, played most of it in Tolmin too, and absolutely stunned us with a superb performance. The girl and guys are genre-wise close to bands like Thulcandra and Canada’s Frostbite, and they’re distinguished by Emily’s furious yet clear and distinct vocals, a strong rhythm section and a rich atmosphere woven by no fewer than three guitars, which masterfully swing between tremolo brutality, epic riffing and skillfully constructed pentatonic melodies. Oubliette are proof that the US state of Tennessee isn’t musically just country-achy-breaky-heart, but evidently has a strong underground extreme metal scene. This was Oubliette’s very first show on European soil, and I strongly hope it’s not the last, as their Monday set stays in memory as one of the nicest of this year’s festival.
With England’s Ingested, the second stage made sure fans of modern brutal music got their fix too. This is a band that uses elements of brutal death metal and deathcore. You could also describe them as slamming deathcore. Ingested served it up with fast guitars and drums, guttural vocals and of course breakdowns, which was definitely to the liking of the warmed-up crowd at the front, so a moshpit or two could form. Ingested may not be anything exceptional, but they definitely spiced up the festival lineup.
Poland’s Hate were described years ago as “baby” Behemoth, when they shifted from brutal death metal to blackened death metal, which was evidently more palatable to a bigger audience. The associations with Behemoth popped up this time too, but there’s a bit more behind Hate, and to define them as a pale copy of Behemoth would be unfair. The band served up uncompromising death metal that also used black metal devices. A proven formula, and the band showed its long mileage. The tightness was more than solid. At times drummer Pavulon (Vader, Decapitated) was struggling, as he’s very fast but occasionally lost some precision. The emphasis was of course on the latest albums, and for anything more you’ll have to catch the band in a club.
The main stage was reserved for fans of progressive music. The Norwegian progressive rock band Leprous has become one of the most talked-about bands in the progressive scene in recent years. They first won people over as the backing band of black metal bigwig Ihsahn, but it later turned out that Leprous had to operate as an independent band because they’re too ambitious. Behind that ambition stands vocalist/keyboardist Einar Solberg, who showed exceptional vocal abilities. The band emphasized material from the latest album Malina (2017). With what they played, they also proved excellent tightness and precision. The young drummer Baard Kolstad took care of the offbeat rhythms and never ran out of ideas for how to spice up even the simplest parts of the songs. Besides the instrumental tightness, the vocal harmonies, which were flawless, deserve praise. With this performance Leprous proved they’re a hard-working band that will put in the effort for every show.
On the main stage, after the “cerebral” Leprous, the Scots Alestorm completely flipped the record. Like a few other bands at the same festival, over the years they’ve long since earned their inventory number, so before the show began, battalions of party-hungry visitors poured relentlessly toward the stage. Alestorm enjoyed by far the biggest crowd on the main stage up to that point. That was expected. Cliché power metal whose poetry could belong in the opening credits of some alcohol brand’s ad is lately going through almost a streak of self-parody. The band now drags a giant inflated duck sculpture onto the stage, which it floats out over the crowd toward the end of the show. In the background hangs a banner with bananas from which two goose heads peek out. We experienced something like that ten days ago at Germany’s Bang Your Head!!! festival, though the festival draws a rather different clientele than the one you find at Metaldays. Alestorm are in fact one of the “creators” of the Metaldays clientele. Their party march strung together beer-soaked assaults: Keelhauled, Alestorm, Mexico, The Sunk’n Norwegian, Nancy the Tavern Wench, Rumpelkombo, Hangover, Captain Morgan’s Revenge, Drink and Fucked With an Anchor. An amusement park of cynicism from short-pants-wearing Scottish power metal mockers. The crowd went wild, and if you hadn’t before, at a show like this you realize all the uniqueness generated by the energy and vibe of the double confluence in Tolmin, which gives Metaldays its stamp of uniqueness. So for the first time in the coming week of the festival, the folks blasphemously and boundlessly cut loose. Expected. In moves that are at times downright absurd, Alestorm conjure a moment full of mockery and goofiness, which is also embodied by the figure of frontman Christopher Bowes himself. And that evidently ignites. Not only is Christopher a completely average singer who knows it himself, but with his constant stage activity he gladly hits a wrong note on the keyboards now and then, which simply belongs to the band’s stage customs and habits. The man also drew attention with a white T-shirt reading: “I Got Lost in the Gay Dolphin.”
Three years ago the Americans Skeletonwitch delivered one of the more unpleasant pieces of news when they showed the charismatic bearded vocalist Chance Garnette the door, allegedly because of too-deep looks into the bottle. The band’s fate hung by a thread for quite a while, but they pulled themselves together and settled their ranks with new vocalist Adam Clemans (Wolvhammer). The fan base split in two here: some can’t get over Chance’s departure, while others welcomed Clemans with open arms. Personally I’m on the side of the latter, though I don’t deny that the absence of Chance, who convinced just by looking like someone who emerged into civilization from the woods after a few decades, is strongly felt. Still, Adam bravely stepped into big shoes and has already recorded the strong EP The Aphotic Gloom and the brand-new album Devouring Radiant Light with Skeletonwitch, which came out just days before Metaldays started. This Skeletonwitch show was therefore mostly in the light of both releases with Clemans, who live, like the whole band, convinced with unbridled energy, even though with him Skeletonwitch come across a bit more “serious” and “mature” live, and above all Clemans with his vocals brings the band musically closer to the darkness of black metal rather than a raging stampede of death/thrash metal. Even so, Skeletonwitch delivered one of the festival’s best energy blasts. The duo of Garnette/Hedrick once again impressed with their racing guitar work, and the new tracks, especially Well of Despair, Red Death, White Light, Fen of Shadows and Temple of the Sun, thoroughly wore out the neck muscles. Add classics like the two-and-a-half-minute blast Beyond the Permafrost and the eternal I Am Death (Hell Has Arrived) and the picture is complete, and Skeletonwitch undoubtedly wrote themselves in among this year’s better performers.
The area in front of the Boško Bursać stage filled up even more than for Skeletonwitch when the Norwegian black metal veterans Carpathian Forest stepped onto it, having not visited Slovenia for an eternity. Frontman Nattefrost and his crew put on an hour-long show of primitive, three-chord black metal that, with punk and rock ‘n’ roll energy, made for a real party in front of the stage. The cult circus performer Nattefrost impressed even more, acting on stage like some kind of black metal kid. He already marched onto the stage with a huge upside-down cross, dressed in a black cowl under which, of course, he had nothing on. So we got to see plenty of bare thighs when he put his foot up on the monitors, and a bare ass was naturally not missing either. Even better were his wacky dance moves, his joking banter that made us laugh to tears, and plenty of “ughs.” One of the more, to put it mildly, interesting shows of this year’s Metaldays. Ugh!
Similar to Alestorm (and later on that same stage (newly) even Behemoth), the Swiss folk metallers Eluveitie have become a “folk-adopted” band of the Metaldays festival. Given how very often they appear at the festival, I’d dare say Metaldays built their name and that Eluveitie consequently grew into a bigger band. In 2009, for instance, when they played in February as the opener on the Kreator tour, nobody knew them at Zagreb’s Boogaloo. Today they reap great popularity among the young guard of metal fans and fill big venues. The nonet didn’t deliver the best they can that evening, though. First of all, they didn’t sound especially in tune, and they didn’t deliver decent sound either. The band did gather a crowd of several thousand in front of the stage, a similarly packed area to what we’d seen a little earlier when Alestorm were clowning around here, and with a somewhat reserved performance the band could comfortably lean on past work and past triumphant epics at the Tolmin festival. Chrigel Glanzmann wasn’t quite himself, perhaps it shows that he had only just returned from sick leave, because of which Eluveitie had to skip a few summer festivals. The band is also performing with a refreshed lineup, but in the professional business Eluveitie are engaged in, that shouldn’t be a reason for a less convincing show in Tolmin. Still, Eluveitie pulled out the essence and, on the wings of the songs Your Gaulish War, King, Nil, Lvgvs, Quoth the Raven, The Call of the Mountains, A Rose for Epona, Thousandfold and the obligatory Rebirth and Inis Mona, made their many fans happy.
The first day of the festival was closed on the Lemmy stage in grand style by the Polish, well, behemoths, Behemoth. The stage setup took quite long, as Inferno was once again seated behind his kit on a high platform, and the guitar trio each had their own podium and huge microphones, as usual decorated with Luciferian symbols. Behemoth greeted Tolmin this time with Ov Fire and the Void, and the rest of the set was again largely in the light of the rather, with the exception of the souped-up Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer, boring The Satanist. Why the stage setup took so long was clear right from the very start, as the Poles prepared a real fire spectacle full of erupting explosions and jets of flame. The view of the stage was truly spectacular, but sadly the dismally exaggerated showmanship and overblown theatricality, which occasionally border on parody, quickly came to the surface. The experience was also somewhat spoiled by the rather poor, too quiet and muddy sound and Nergal’s nebulous banter. Behemoth did redeem themselves by presenting the new track Wolves of Siberia, which will find its place on the new album, but sadly it’s a rather average song that is a logical continuation of The Satanist. The biggest surprise was thus the guest appearance of Niklas Kvarforth (Shining) on the cover of the Cure classic A Forest, which turned out rather well even though the vocals in particular were quite poorly audible. Behemoth thus closed the first day on the big stage with a solid, good performance, but nothing more than that.
On the second stage, the last day was wrapped up there by the legendary N.W.O.B.H.M. veterans Diamond Head in the headlining role. A band whose albums unknowingly shaped today’s global metal titan, Metallica. Everything in the band today of course revolves around the only original member, guitarist Brian Tatler. The year before last the band released the comeback album “Diamond Head,” after solidifying with a new screamer, the Danish vocalist by the name of Rasmus Bom Andersen. When Diamond Head come on stage, it’s clear what’s demanded of them. Material from the eighties. As much of it as possible. The band clearly knew that and delivered the bulk of its show accordingly. Among the new songs from the otherwise very solid album “Diamond Head,” we heard Set My Soul On Fire and Bones in Diamonds, and the repertoire was heavily weighted with material from the cult studio debut “Lightning To The Nations” (1980), from which, besides the title track, we got: Shoot Out The Lights, Helpless, The Prince, the opening Play It Loud, and toward the end It’s Electric, Sucking My Love and the closing Am I Evil?, without which they’d have faced a stage lynching. The band didn’t skip the album “Borrowed Time” (1982) either, playing In the Heat of the Night alongside the title track, and there was a brief flash from the album “Canterbury” (1983) when the band performed To the Devil His Due. Diamond Head maintain their tightness and impregnability. This year they’re also announcing a new studio album! Rasmus Bom Andersen wasn’t as gymnastically fired up as last year on the much bigger stage of Bang Your Head!!!, where he could also exploit the spacious “catwalk,” but he still delivered a confident and correct vocal performance. The legendary quintet delivered plenty of nostalgic moments, and in the front rows you could count quite a few older fans who, along with the band on stage, relived the birth of the great metal boom at the turn of the seventies into the eighties. Priceless. A lovely closing act to the first festival day.
Nina Grad (photo): Dust Bolt, Pillorian, Jig-Ai, Reject the Sickness, Morost, Ingested, Jinjer, Leprous, Skeletonwitch, Carpathian Forest, Behemoth
Sebastijan Videc (photo, video): Moros, Vuur, Oubliette, Hate, Alestorm, Eluveitie, Behemoth, Diamond Head
Aleš Podbrežnik (text): Moros, Vuur, Hecate Enthroned, Jinjer, Alestorm, Eluveitie, Diamond Head
Primož Novak (text): Ingested, Leprous, Hate
Rok Klemše (text): Dust Bolt, Pillorian, Jig-Ai, Skeletonwitch, Carpathian Forest, Behemoth
