Author: Rok Klemše
Venue: VPK Mediapark, Ljubljana
Concert date: 10/28/2010
Attendance: 700
Ticket price: 29€
It’s the year of our Lord 2010 and Christian blood is flowing in rivers again. The pagan tribes have saddled their faithful steeds, sharpened their axes and swords, and set off on a war march across Europe. This time it’s the Heidenfest 2010 tour, featuring the Dutch Heidevolk, the Americans Swashbuckle, the Germans Equilibrium, the Finns Ensiferum and an all-star tribute to Bathory lineup.
First to leap onto the stage was the Dutch tribe Heidevolk, who sing of Dutch culture and history and Germanic mythology. On the Heidenfest 2010 tour, Heidevolk are pushing their recently released latest record Uit oude Grond, and they clearly do a more than decent job of warming up the crowd for the bands that follow. The Dutchmen got a taste of that here too, because, quite surprisingly, a nice number of people were already waiting in front of the stage at seven. Heidevolk clearly didn’t shy away from the support and gratefully gave back the energy they got from the floor. The guys energetically set sail across the North Sea, after first paying tribute to the Germanic goddess Nehalennia for luck, and then bit into the merciless waters of the cold sea. Heidevolk successfully blend aggressive riffing with traditional folk tunes and melodies, as their two vocalists, Mark and Joris, proved with great confidence and dynamism in just under half an hour. It’s precisely those dynamic, multi-voiced vocal lines that make Heidevolk sound so epic and pompous, which is exactly what proper folk metal calls for, and they top it off with lyrics written in a native Dutch dialect. Surprisingly, thanks to their melodic quality and a certain warmth, the Dutch tunes worked extremely well live. Heidevolk can only be proud of that, since singing in your native language can easily have the opposite effect. The lion’s share of the set went to the latest record, but sadly that came at the expense of what is perhaps their best album, the previous one, Walhalla Wacht, which was only represented by Saksenland. Heidevolk delivered their club debut on our soil well, though they kept cliché-toasting the grateful and lively crowd with drinking horns, which have become a real fashion fad among young metalheads. They sheepishly sip raspberry soda from them because that’s just cool, if Korpiklaani and similar hocus-pocus bands say so.
Probably the band that stuck out most from the concept of the night were the American thrashers from New Jersey, Swashbuckle, who unfurled the sails, hoisted the “Jolly Roger” and strutted onto the stage to the sound of trance… The American trio found its “niche” in pirate sea-shanty tunes, and the best you can say about their music is “poor man’s” thrash metal. Swashbuckle are simply horribly generic thrash metal, borrowing heavily from giants like Exodus, Kreator, Slayer and others, and making up for the lack of quality with a circus-act approach. The three of them stick to their pirate concept like a drunk to a fence, complete with the obligatory buccaneer outfits. Instead of looking wicked and bloodthirsty, though, the rhythm section most resembles the clumsy duo from Pirates of the Caribbean (a pirate version of Laurel and Hardy, so to speak), while the guitarist, with his colorful assortment of generic “copy-paste” riffs, most reminds me of the clumsy Guybrush Threepwood from the cult adventures Monkey Island. The funniest part of Swashbuckle’s show was the two roadies who came skipping onto the stage dressed as a parrot and a shark, but otherwise the American trio’s set was quickly forgotten. The only true, real pirate metal band is still the one and only cult Running Wild, and compared to them Swashbuckle can’t even rattle a plank, let alone chug a bottle of rum.
Let’s go back to the Dutch town of Arnhem, where we hopped into longships with Heidevolk and rowed up the Rhine and its tributaries against the current all the way to Munich, where the next act jumped aboard: the German folk metallers Equilibrium. Like their predecessors, the Germans used Heidenfest to present a fresh album, their third, titled Rekreatur. Equilibrium went through serious lineup changes at the start of the year, when two key members, vocalist Helge Stang and drummer Manuel DiCamillo, left the band, and its future was seriously in question. The guys and the girl found their solution in vocalist Robse Dahn and drummer Heta Refaeli and started writing Equilibrium’s history anew. From the very first notes of the first track on the new record, In Heiligen Hallen (In the Holy Halls), the Germans drew a mass of young metalheads to the front of the stage, and they ate out of the band’s hand until the end of the last song. Equilibrium were visibly surprised too, and smiles were spreading across their faces on their own, from start to finish. The Germans devoted a full three quarters of their set to Rekreatur, which has obviously already caught on well with our youth, because despite the German lyrics you could hear some group singing along with the band. Robse and the others showed their satisfaction with excellent tightness and a truly lively, energetic show, though Robse will have to take an English class, because I haven’t heard such broken German-accented English in a long time (last from Herr Flick in Allo Allo). Sadly, Equilibrium decided to almost entirely ignore their fantastic debut Turis Fratyr, which was a truly unique and distinctive folk metal release, giving us only two tracks from it. Even worse, we got served nonsense from the new record like Die Affeninsel (Ape Island) instead. With songs like this, Equilibrium are moving away from the more serious approach to folk metal that we heard on the debut, toward goofball, folk-for-its-own-sake that we already have more than enough of with Korpiklaani and Alestorm.
The headliners of this year’s traveling Heidenfest were the Finnish melodic death metallers with a pinch of folk melody, Ensiferum. The Finns are old acquaintances on our stages, having first played here back in 2004, when, as a still relatively small band, they presented the then-fresh record Iron on the stage of Orto bar. Ensiferum then played Metalcamp twice more (most recently this year), and with this year’s Heidenfest they stopped here as headliners for the first time. In the last two years Ensiferum have become a pretty big and widely recognized band, and thanks to their highly melodic, catchy music, singalong choruses and structurally simple songs, a band that’s friendly to a wider commercial audience too. The result is a young crowd with a musical taste that’s still not fully developed, and Ljubljana was no different, as the largest number of people crammed in front of the stage during Ensiferum, with an average age of about sixteen by my estimate. Obligatorily, and obviously, smeared with Ensiferum war paint. The Finns threw themselves at their hour-long set with full force, covering tracks from all four records, with extra emphasis on the latest, From Afar. Petri Lindroos and his pagan band of warriors heated the Cvetličarna hall to boiling point and blew its roof off with epic, pompous choruses whose sheer catchiness effortlessly pulled in the voices of the crowd of several hundred. The fast-fingered picking, heaps of tremolo picking, supersonic solos and pulsating drums make Ensiferum’s music incredibly lively, rowdy, energetic and positive, while the atmospheric keyboards of the sweet Emmi Silvennoinen bring elements of Finnish folklore and northern melancholy into the music. First and foremost, though, Ensiferum are undoubtedly a melodic death metal band that bets on speed, melody and rawness, and live the multi-voiced singing came off brilliantly this time, adding a touch of an ancient pagan ritual with collective chanting to the show. You could see from far away that Ensiferum couldn’t stop smiling at the crowd’s response. Bassist Sami Hinkka again proved the liveliest and most energetic, with a thousand and one grimaces, and even the usually dead-static Markus Toivonen showed some signs of life. Ensiferum certainly played their best show here, but something still tells me that without the charismatic Jari Mäenpää, this simply isn’t the real Ensiferum anymore.
Finally, we got the real treat of this year’s Heidenfest – the “tribute to” Bathory, Twilight of the Gods. Bathory are, without a shred of doubt, one of the most influential bands in metal, “to blame” for the birth of black and viking metal. With their first three albums they laid the foundations of black metal, and with their later work they created a whole new genre, viking metal, above all with the cult record Hammerheart. Without its influence, the bands that played before Twilight of the Gods probably wouldn’t be playing the metal they play, at least not in that form. The legendary mastermind behind the name Bathory, Tomas “Quorthon” Forsberg, died of heart failure in 2004, leaving behind an indelible legacy. A legacy that Twilight of the Gods decided to pay tribute to. The tribute band borrowed its name from the title of the Bathory album released in 1991, Twilight of the Gods, which is also another name for Ragnarok, which in Norse mythology denotes the death of most of the gods, the decline of the world, so its end, but at the same time a new beginning, since the end of the old world heralds the birth of a new one. Under the name Twilight of the Gods, a truly all-star lineup has come together – Alan Nemtheanga (vocals, Primordial), Frode Glesnes (bass, Einherjer), Nick Barker (drums, Dimmu Borgir, Cradle of Filth), Blasphemer (guitar, Mayhem) and Patrik Lindgren (Thyrfing). These top-notch musicians decided that the memory of Bathory shall not die and, in the best possible way, to revive in people’s minds the magic that flows through every single Bathory album. Twilight of the Gods climbed onto the stage to the eerie roar of waves and the unforgettable guitar intro to Shores in Flames, which is just one living proof that master Quorthon could create something magical from such simple guitar patterns, soaked to the bone in unforgettable atmosphere. From the very first moments, Twilight of the Gods proved they take their mission deadly seriously and consider presenting the legend of Bathory an honor. The guitar duo tightly recreated the beat of Quorthon’s lines, which rest on simplicity yet are enormously effective when it comes to emotion, sincerity and true northern pagan spirit. One of the best extreme drummers, Nick Barker, justified his reputation anyway, but this time the biggest question mark hung over the vocal performance, since Quorthon was famous for his unique and inimitable voice. Well, the exceptional Alan did his vocal job with flying colors! True, he breathed a bit of Primordial’s spirit into the Bathory classics, but he managed to preserve the ethereal quality of the vocal lines that Bathory have in abundance. It was gorgeous to hear the classics Valhalla live, plus the phenomenal A Fine Day to Die, and Home Once Brave and Under the Runes. Still, right at the start Alan warned that they are NOT Bathory, that there is ONLY ONE Bathory and that there will NEVER again be a real Bathory, and that Twilight of the Gods are just a humble tribute to the genius of Bathory. As expected, TotG closed the unforgettable, magical journey with the immortal destroyer Blood Fire Death, and at the very end Alan said only that we should keep Bathory’s legacy alive. Thank you Twilight of the Gods, and thank you Bathory and Quorthon for music that is immortal just like the gods are immortal. The only minus this time goes to the crowd, which left Cvetličarna en masse after Ensiferum finished. It’s sad that young metalheads obviously don’t (yet) know how to appreciate truly quality music and the spirit of Bathory that blows through every pagan/viking metal band. I really hope that in a few years they’ll smack themselves on the head and realize what they missed. And I hope Bathory’s legacy will live on through them too.
Photos: Nina Grad
Setlist
HEIDEVOLK:
1. Nehalennia
2. Saksenland
3. Ostara
4. Vulgaris Magistralis
5. Beest Bij Nacht
6. Krijgsvolk
EQUILIBRIUM:
1. In Heiligen Hallen
2. Blut im Auge
3. Unter Der Eiche
4. Der Wassermann
5. Der Ewige Sieg
6. Met
7. Die Affeninsel
8. Unbesiegt
ENSIFERUM:
1. By the Dividing Stream
2. From Afar
3. One More Magic Potion
4. Hero in a Dream
5. Ahti
6. Stone Cold Metal
7. Abandoned
8. Deathbringer from the Sky
9. Lai Lai Hei
10. Twilight Tavern
11. Iron
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS:
1. Shores in Flames
2. Valhalla
3. The Sword
4. A Fine Day to Die
5. Father to Son
6. Home of Once Brave
7. Under the Runes
8. Blood Fire Death
Photo Gallery
