Amon Amarth – Tolkien’s Mount Doom Rises Over Friuli, Too (2017)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Majano / Area Concerti Festival / Italy
Concert date: August 7, 2017
Attendance: 4000
Ticket price: €40.25

This year’s festival program in the town of Majano, a good ten kilometers northwest of Udine in Italy, brought two Swedish melodic death metal acts to town on Monday, August 7, 2017. Both are hugely popular with the new generation of heavy music fans, and both seem to be on the road pretty much constantly. No wonder they’re in such high demand among the hordes of heavy music lovers. Amon Amarth plus Arch Enemy. Now that’s one hell of a tandem!

Even though the organizers of the yearly Majano festival decided to make concerts paid again this year (if you remember, last year’s Anthrax show was free!), the (mostly young) crowd nicely filled the grassy field, a stone’s throw from the cute park in the middle of town, where, long before the concert action kicked off, the drinks were flowing and the party was already merrily bubbling.

The clock struck nine in the evening when Arch Enemy hit the stage. They only got 40 minutes, so in that short time they ruthlessly rolled out track after track, and there was precious little talking. The band is about to release a new studio album, and that’s exactly how the set kicked off, with the freshly released single The World Is Yours, announcing the band’s upcoming record. Arch Enemy are always a pleasure to watch. This is a band that’s technically polished down to the last detail and unbelievably tight. Alissa White-Gluz may be a little slip of a girl and, as they like to say, poison comes in small bottles. She brings a bit of extra glam and kitsch compared to her predecessor, from whom she has successfully »adopted« a distinctive, incredibly piercing and convincing »growl«. Fine. How much help she gets from the mixing desk, I won’t speculate, but it’s great to see a vocalist who, unlike many of her peers, actually growls rather than sings. The sound was great. I mean the overall sonic picture. Micahel Amott and Jeff Loomis once again shone in hair-splittingly precise solos, and the band built a distinctive »groove« based on punchy, penetrating guitar phrases, driven by the long-serving, still unbelievably dynamic and fiery rhythm tandem of Erlandsson/D’Angelo. The first few rows churned hard under Arch Enemy’s cannon-fire detonations. For the band this show was a cute, short stop in a run of summer gigs, where playing a longer set is no problem for them either. They’re just that experienced and routined. On top of that, they’re only getting better. The autumn tour is creeping up fast. It’s a show you’ll absolutely have to relive in the extended version on September 30, 2017, when Arch Enemy play as headliners on their new tour at CUK Kino Šiška in Ljubljana.

Next came an hour and a half in the company of a spectacle going by the name of… the Amon Amarth show. We caught the band not long ago at this year’s Metaldays festival, where over the years they’ve become practically a national treasure. The show in Majano wasn’t all that different from what we saw in Tolmin, and yet. Pyrotechnics are now banned in Italy, so this time the Amon Amarth spectacle came with smoke screens only, though the full set design was there as usual, with plenty of fun backdrops from Norse heritage and mythology. The second difference was that Amon Amarth played in completely dry weather, so there were no logistical headaches getting the optimal level of sonic noise, and Majano was thundering and boiling over at full blood. The third difference was that there were, of course, significantly fewer people. Less than half of what Amon Amarth drew in Tolmin. A minor observation, but still. And last but not least, the band dared to tweak the setlist a little and played With Oden on Our Side instead of Tattered Banners and Bloody Flags, bringing it back into their live repertoire for the first time since 2011. The melodies soaring above the riffs are pretty worn out and heard-it-all-before, but the band makes up for this scandalously melodic element of their musical ID card with the theater of Johan Hegg, who once again proved he’s a charismatic and incredibly likable frontman of the real deal, with just the right dose of humor. The towering vocalist won the crowd over in an instant, and they were once again eating out of his hand. Amon Amarth are a superbly tight live machine. There wasn’t a single slip-up to be noticed. No surprise there. They play nonstop, and the tour promoting the current studio album »Jomsviking« has, thanks to its tremendous success, stretched deep into a second year. From all the Viking visits of swordsmen, spearmen and archers, to Hegg’s final assault on the evil dragon in the closing Twilight of the Thunder God, which he of course finished off with Thor’s hammer, one thing was clear. An Amon Amarth show remains a special live spectacle and a guarantee of great fun in 2017. If you’re not a die-hard fan of the band, who of course got their money’s worth once again, you’re still left with, at the very least, an excellent helping of grand stage entertainment, which is just what a modern-day meeting with this band delivers. Where time will carry them next, only the devil knows. Still, the band will surely first grant themselves a hefty dose of rest and well-deserved vacation. They’ve got an incredible amount of live mileage behind them.