Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Balingen / Messegelände / Germany
Date: July 12, 2014
Attendance: 15,000
Ticket price: €75.00
Day two of Bang Your Head!!! 2014 started a little later than usual for the RockLine crew. The weather turned, clouds covered the sky, and we were »licking our wounds« after the heavy-duty first day of the festival. Axel Rudi Pell and his marathon show put on an event that will go down in bold letters in the career of the long-lived hard rock troubadour. His anniversary concert was recorded and filmed, in fact, for a DVD and audio CD release. Anyway, we skipped the very interesting More with Chris Tsangarides, resurrected cavalry from the NWOBHM days of metal culture, and showed up for the set by the foaming-at-the-mouth classic US thrashers Hirax. Charismatic frontman Katon W. De Pena, or »Bobby Johnson« to his friends, dictated the course of events on stage. The waking crowd, who were just busy kitting themselves out with ponchos, got hit by a flinty stampede of incredible tightness, built on machine-gunning old-school speed/thrash riffs that peppered the grounds. If More pleasantly scratched our ears in the morning, Hirax delivered a proper punch to the forehead, one that woke up the Balingen hills too and shook them loose.
The third band took the energy to the complete opposite side. On stage stood the seasoned Mad Max, long-lived German hard rockers led by singer and guitarist Michael Voss, who is also a real producer guru in the waters of German-school hard rock. Keeping him company on drums was Axl Cruse, the other original member of today’s Mad Max. The guys rattled off the classics of their career. Voss lost some of his vocal firepower as the set went on, but the band as a whole dominated the stage with routine and experience, and for the good vibes Voss cracked a few lousy jokes, warming up the home crowd even more. Burning The Stage, Night Of Passion, Rolling Thunder, Wait For The Night, Lonely Is The Hunter, Never Say Never and Thoughts Of A Dying Man rang out one after another, and the band closed its set with the The Sweet cover Fox On The Run. Meanwhile the sky opened up and the crowd in front of the stage got thoroughly decimated. Then the outstanding American vocalist and songwriter Rob Rock stepped up with his crew of Scandinavian musicians. He used his time to run through songs from across his career and stunned everyone with an unruly vocal stance that, after all those years of defying the scene, didn’t let this seasoned singer down this time either. Incredible. He was backed by a rock-solid, tight crew of Swedish musical perfectionists, among whom the name of guitarist Carl Johan Grimmark (Narnia) stood out. The rest of the festival went on under heavier sounds. Even radically brutalized ones, when the unique Florida death metallers Obituary »cut the stage out from under us« with their butcher’s riff machinery. Tardy is Tardy. The voice, the charisma. And on top of that, the impressive, naturally preserved curly mane, the kind the made-up Twisted Sister doll Dee Snider can only dream of today. The songs: The End Complete, Stinkupuss, the obligatory Slowly We Rot, Inked By Blood, Immortal Visions, I’m In Pain, Chopped in Half and Back to One! Could a fan of old-school death metal thunder even ask for more? A devastating show. From head to toe.
Stryper, the white hard rockers, with the charismatic Michael Sweet, work great even in the mature years of their career. The new album “No More Hell to Pay” sounds like the freshest thing in the band’s history, packed with great ideas and a refined feel for songwriting. It even happened that Robert Sweet had his drums set up so he was facing the crowd. Alongside the classics Reach Out, sing Along Song, Calling On You, Loud And Clear and Free, the band spiced up the setlist with the Kiss cover Shout Out Loud and delivered the only new song from “No More Hell To Pay”, the excellent and dark Marching Into Battle. The band closed its set with Soldiers Undrer Comand and To Hell With The Devil. Stryper keep their stage shows fresh and dynamic. This time only a couple of Bibles flew into the crowd, and when they hit the asphalt of the festival grounds they properly split apart.
Around five in the afternoon Unisonic took the stage. A supergroup made up of guitarists Mandy Meyer (Krokus, ex-Asia) and Kai Hansen (Gamma Ray), bassist Denis Ward (Pink Cream 69), drummer Costa Zafiriou (ex-Pink Cream 69) and the indestructible vocalist Michael Kiske (ex-Helloween). Today, together with Gamma Ray, Unisonic are what Helloween will never be again, or can’t be anymore. In their current form and lineup since 2003, certainly not. So Unisonic are a real balm for the wounds of all the inconsolable fans of old Helloween. And none of it would fire up if Kiske didn’t have such a wonderfully well-preserved voice. His performance was fully convincing, and Kiske breezed through every part, even the ones we quietly expected him to »coast through« in the lower register, or leave the »screaming« to the crowd. The band mostly played songs from the debut, tucked in the new For the Kingdom and surprised with a take on the Helloween classic March Of Time. Deris can only dream of the vocal form Kiske has today. Unisonic, the very definition of incredible experience, closed their bravura set, as expected, with the Helloween standard I Want Out, that unforgettable riff, that is, staked out by the father of European power metal Kai Hansen.
We skipped Ektomorf and used the time for a breather and some refueling, and then the festival day built toward its peak, with Anthrax, Europe and, as the main draw of day two, Twisted Sister still to come. But let’s start with Anthrax. They put together the expected setlist of nothing but classics, starting with Among the Living, then Caught in the Mosh, Indians and Got the Time. Their stormy set, where everything flew from the crowd and a cloud of dust rose over the grounds, was closed, as expected, with I Am the Law and the cover of Trust’s Antisocial. The lineup featured the new guitarist Jonathan Donais, who replaced Volbeat defector Rob Caggiano. And Beladonna, of course, couldn’t rein in his nimble chatter, with which he salted this colorful comedy theater even more. Anthrax remain a machine!
After the madness of Anthrax the crowd got thoroughly shuffled, and next up on stage were the Swedish hard rockers Europe. They used the set to present the album »Riches to Rags«, and opened with the title track. The charisma doesn’t fade for singer Joey Tempest, and neither does his trademark stage show, the main building block of a dynamic performance by a band that would otherwise be dull in the static stage presence of the rest of its members. John Norum cast his spell again with an excellent feel and a subtle brilliance in how he approached the instrumental middle sections. The band is still an indestructible fortress on stage, and Tempest wisely conserves his energy and routinely dodges the highest vocal registers. As expected, the classics Superstitious, Girl From Lebanon, Sign of the Times and Let the Good TImes Rock didn’t go missing, and the band closed the regular part of the set with Rock the Night. Then they served up the »unnecessary« newer Last Look at Eden and, of course, the song everyone was waiting for, The Final Countdown. A Europe show without Cherokee and Kerry was actually the biggest surprise of the band’s set this time.
For the big finale, Twisted Sister closed out the action on the main stage of the festival. They are old acquaintances of Bang Your Head!!! What has always plagued this band in the headliner slot is a lack of original material. Okay, the album »Stay Hungry« is the band’s expected stage prose… But Dee Snider has to fill such a show with a sea of »stories« and »juicy inventions« that his lush imagination constantly churns out, and with which Twisted Sister routinely stretch their sets. The iconic and incorrigible rock’n’roll chatterbox, or really the sharp-tongued doctor of glam metal, Dee Snider felt more than great in the role of »king of the scene«, and the jam-packed grounds were literally eating out of his hand. So: the opener Stay Hungry, followed by Shoot ‘Em Down, You Can’t Stopp Rock ‘n’ Roll, Captain Howdy, Street Justice, the indestructible We’re Not Gonna Take It, The Kids are Back, I Believe in Rock’n’Roll, Born to Raise Hell, The Fire Still Burns, The Price, Burn in Hell and the closer I Wanna Rock (the encore brought Come Out And Play and S.M.F.). Whether Twisted Sister justified the headliner role or not is debatable, given how repeatable and predictable their concert shows are. For those of us who weren’t seeing them for the first time, the show was surely nothing special. There’s a lot of acting, a lot of comedy theater, which the band, with the cunning and unmanageably charismatic Snider, pulls off with ease. Balingen enjoyed it, went wild, bubbled over with positive vibes. And that’s what counts, and Twisted Sister conquered the festival’s main stage once again, which was their goal.
Setlist
STRYPER:
1. Makes Me Wanna Sing
2. Loud ‘N’ Clear
3. Reach Out
4. Calling on You
5. Free
6. Shout It Out Loud (KISS cover)
7. Marching Into Battle
8. All for One
9. Soldiers Under Command
10. To Hell With the Devil
UNISONIC:
1. Unisonic
2. Never Too Late
3. For the Kingdom
4. Star Rider
5. My Sanctuary
6. King for a Day
7. Exceptional
8. March of Time (Helloween cover)
9. We Rise
10. I Want Out (Helloween cover)
ANTGRAX:
1. Among the Living
2. Caught in a Mosh
3. Got the Time (Joe Jackson cover)
4. Indians
5. Hymn 1
6. In the End
7. Madhouse
8. Fight ‘Em ‘Til You Can’t
9. I Am the Law
10. Antisocial (Trust cover)
EUROPE:
1. iches to Rags
2. Firebox
3. Superstitious
4. Scream of Anger
5. No Stone Unturned
6. Wasted Time
7. Girl From Lebanon
8. Drum Solo
10. Sign of the Times
11. Demon Head
12. Love Is Not the Enemy
13. Let the Good Times Rock
14. The Beast
15. Rock the Night
—encore—
16. Prelude
17. Last Look at Eden
18. The Final Countdown
Photo gallery
