Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Balingen / Messegelände / Germany
Concert date: July 13, 2017
Attendance: 10,000
Ticket price: €109.00
The nineteenth Bang Your Head festival has arrived, and with it a new RockLine expedition to Balingen, Germany. It’s one of Europe’s most important summer festivals. It prides itself on an always colorful mixed bag of mostly classic heavy metal acts, plus some hard rock indulgences, with occasional no-strings detours into extreme metal waters. This year it delivered a seriously interesting, stylistically varied lineup. It couldn’t boast any band you’d call a clear headliner over the three days, but the supporting acts guaranteed a great time.
After the warm-up day, when Stormwarrior, Bloodbound, Angel Dust, Sanctuary and Death Angel shook the Messegelände hall, the notorious German festival officially kicked off. This year it again pulled in a solid 10,000 visitors and more.
The opening slot went to the Americans Killcode. Over the last two years they’ve staged a real invasion of the German music scene. They played the festival for the second year in a row, and two weeks later they also appeared as a “hidden surprise” at this year’s Rock Of Ages festival. It’s fair to assume the same management is pushing Killcode that looks after Twiosted Sister, Dee Snider, Vince Neil and yes, Slaughter too, who played this year’s BYH!!! edition. So you book, say, Vince Neil, and you get Killcode, Slaughter and who knows who else thrown in as a package. Killcode are a quality outfit. Nothing special, really, since it’s hard to pull anything out of rock’n’roll these days, authorship-wise, that you haven’t already heard. Still, this heartfelt quintet can absolutely hold its own, with a polished stage look and an excellent performance, especially in how tight and vibrant they are together. Their set felt even a notch more relaxed and confident than last year, when they played the festival’s hall. An energetic, seriously dynamic band that found its feet superbly on the sprawling main stage.
Next up were the Polish power metallers Crystal Viper. What’s special about this band is really just its likable singer Marta Gabriel, while musically it brings nothing out of the ordinary. It has good connections and backing, so it can win itself a festival slot again and again. A good show, no highlights. Nice tightness, banter between the members, but like I said, a bit generic and worn out, so during the gig we headed off to the nearby discount store for some German beer.
Then came one of the first big attractions of the festival’s opening day: the set by the cult American thrash metallers Toxik, active again. You read that right. They’re here. The band’s second restart in 2014 worked out, and they’re reportedly recording a new album. Josh Christian is the only original member, and vocalist Charlie Sabin, who goes back to the eighties, keeps him company. The shaggy-haired, curly redhead has a magnetic stage presence. He kept the mood cheerful the whole time, even as the daytime heat was starting to bite. His vocal charisma hasn’t left him either. The rhythm section of the revived Toxic is of newer vintage, and the band hadn’t played in quite a while, so they came across a touch less compact, as if they were still finding their feet and groping around at moments. That’s what happens when you wake up from a years-long sleep and decide to carry on with your career. Toxik released a comeback EP this year and played all three tracks from it (Stand Up, Psyop, Breaking Glass). They devoted the bulk of the set list to the cult albums “World Circus” and “Think This”, with Spontaneous, Heart Attack, Social Overload, Greed, False Prophets, Count Your Blessings, World Circus, a surprising cover of the Black Sabbath classic Symptom of the Universe and the closing fury of Think This. A bomb. Wholehearted to the bone and fiercely played. Josh Christian is an incredible virtuoso. He keeps up a breakneck speed and lightning pace. Hardly anyone can catch him, and the band has already confirmed autumn dates, including a stop in Vienna, Austria. So Toxik are coming back and promising a new studio album. Definitely one of the main attractions of this year’s Bang Your Head festival and of the first day in general.
Later in the day we danced to softer notes, and somewhat younger music fans took over the front of the stage. On it stood Gloryhammer. It was a recap of what we enjoyed at the beginning of February, when Gloryhammer opened the nights on the tour with HammerFall. Parody. Bizarreness. Kitsch. They mixed a bit of film, a bit of legend, and plenty of fantasy storytelling. Every character in the quintet on stage is a story of their own. In their costumes they were visibly hot. Even kitsch has its price. But kitsch and glitz are in vogue again, and listeners sadly put that ahead of the musical substance of the performers. The general genericness radiating from the ideas and guitar phrases is really made up for by the stage scenery and a well-rehearsed act. You’re never bored and can (at the very least) smile sweetly the whole time, unless you’re a die-hard fan who knows every verse by heart. This Scottish-Swiss alliance of five guys, with Alestorm boss Christopher Bowes of the pirate drunkards on keyboards, has two albums in its pocket: “Tales From The Kingdom Of Fire” (2012) and “Space 1992: Rise of the Chaos Wizards” (2015). The band got a three-quarter-hour slot and, through its party theater on stage, completely delighted the crowd, who made no secret of their big love for the band. Among other things, Thomas Winkler once again deftly took out an ugly green long-eared troll. With a giant hammer.
The festival action continued with the German power metallers Orden Ogan. By now the band has finished its new studio album “Gunmen”. So they’ve already shown off the new backdrops and two brand-new tracks, the title song Gunmen and Fields of Sorrow. The rest of the set list was filled with material from the previous album “Ravenhead”, one of the more interesting ones in their discography. Orden Ogan did start the set with somewhat older notes, with tracks from the album “Easteren Hope”: the opener The New Shores of Sadness and right after it We Are Pirates. One moment Orden Ogan pull a bit toward Running Wild, then a bit toward Blind Guardian, then Helloween. In short, textbook power metal woven out of German expanses. And on home turf Orden Ogan have serious support from the crowd, who knew their material well. That goes for the songs from “Ravenhead” too, led by the closing The Things We Believe In, before which Orden Ogan also played Deaf Among the Blind, the excellent F.E.V.E.R. and Here at the End of the World.
Next came a set by yet another band that I can’t remember playing in Europe the last time. Maybe at one of the latest Sweden Rock festival editions. These are the American glam rockers Slaughter, who even tuned up themselves before the show began. Slaughter have released five albums in their career, all through the nineties. Besides lead singer and rhythm guitarist Mark Slaughter, the band includes original bassist Dana Strum, and it’s filled out by two excellent musicians: guitarist Jeff Bland and the hard-hitting drummer Zoltan Chaney. In a bit under an hour, the band played a few classics, led by The Wild Life, Burning Bridges, Fly to the Angels, Real Love and Up All night. They “stole” some minutes for a round of covers of cult classics from rock’n’roll history, from Heaven and Hell to teasing with Led Zeppelin. These are extremely experienced musicians. Still, you could feel the band wasn’t tight enough, so the show came with quite a few hefty flubs. And yet. Mark Slaughter, amply weighed down by the passing of time, deftly patched up all these little mishaps with his huge stage charisma. He’s a seasoned performer! You just have to put him on a stage. Everything works for him, and he can turn even the smallest thing into proper theater. The other essential building block, deftly pulling listeners away from their attention, was the crazy drummer Zoltan Cheney, who did pretty much everything on the drums except play them in a “normal way”. So. Slaughter threw a great party, and the handful of fans of the sweet old legacy of glam metal and rock who remembered to dress up properly before coming to the front had a more than immense time at the show.
At six in the evening the stage of the neighboring hall came to life too. It was taken by the excellent Swedish melodic rock revivalists Eclipse. Their set overlapped with the one by the cult British NWOBHM standard-bearers Venom. Yes. The Venom with Conrad Lant aka Cronos in the lineup. Since I’d already seen Eclipse a few times, I skipped part of their show and watched Venom for the first time in my life. Eclipse confirmed they’re in excellent shape, and Erik Martensson remains an excellent frontman. In every respect. And Eclipse got serious support from the crowd. The hall surely held a good thousand people during their set. The band mostly presented the current studio album “Monumentum”, and the obligatory Battlegrounds and the even more obligatory Wake Me Up were of course there. The band also slipped three tracks from the previous album “Armaggedonize” into the set list.
Venom. While Cronos’s former partners Abaddon and Mantas storm onward with the other Venom faction called Venom Inc. (we caught them at this year’s Metaldays festival), Cronos hasn’t lost any sleep since about 2007 and the final split of the band’s cult figures. Back then he more or less cemented the new Venom lineup by calling in Stuart Dixon on guitar and sitting Danny Needham behind the drum kit. Cronos has kept all his sharpness, scandalous demonic charm and highly venomous look. Vocally too. The man has no shortage of energy in his mature years. His by-now “folk-famous” guttural but still distinctive and piercing voice is the guarantee that the cult classics of this legendary band still ignite on stage so well today. The trio is brilliantly tight, and Cronos is the very definition of big charisma, with most eyes in the packed venue fixed on him. Together they put together a solid repertoire of fifteen songs and devoted about a third of the show to tracks from the still-current latest studio album “From the Very Depths”. It proves that Venom haven’t changed much musically, and the nature and energy of the newer songs blended superbly with the cult classics from the first half of the eighties. Surprisingly, in this new era Cronos doesn’t look back to the past much. He completely ignored the albums “Possesessed” and “At League With Satan”, and Venom preferred to play songs from the newer era, led by Pandemonium (“Ressurection”, 2000), the title track of the album “Fallen Angels” (2011) and The Evil One from “Cast In Stone” (1997). Anyway, the crew rewarded the hardened devotees with the obligatory tracks from the cult Black Metal. They played the title track in the encore, keeping company with the unforgettable Countless Bathory and Buried Alive. The band ended the set with Witching Hour, the closer from “Welcome to Hell”, while the title track of that album had already been played in the regular part. Venom also seasoned the set list with the singles Bloodlust and the universally beloved Warhead. The band drew hordes of big devotees, who went wild during the show. The energy was extremely appealing, and in other circumstances, without the overlap with other acts, you could never get tired of a Venom set. Cronos is still crazy enough, satanic enough, with a proper surplus of poison in his steel veins, demonic energy and big sparks in his eyes. The show flipped in an instant. In the end, the consolation was that ten days later Venom Inc. would play plenty of Venom music at the Metaldays festival in Tolmin.
In terms of programming, the Bang Your Head!!! festival of metal isn’t known for putting extreme-to-brutal bands of the metal genre universe up front. And yet. Every year there’s room for some death and black metal acts. So on the first day of the festival, the legendary Norwegian black metallers Satyricon took the stage in the late afternoon hours. Their Bang Your Head set was actually their first-ever visit to Balingen. This time the band didn’t play the cult album “Nemesis Divina” in full, but brought back into the set list songs from the current period of artistic vision. They’re a cult, highly respected band, but also one that counts as among the most experimental in the black metal genre. They developed their own style and sound, and in the early era they were seen as the key act that hewed and defined the look of modern black metal. Satyr cut his hair again and combed it back with brilliantine. A proper Valentino “look”, which is nothing new. He performed like that back in 2011. Battered black leather and smears of white paint on the face are mandatory. The crowd was very calm during the show, and you could “breathe normally” and move around closer to the stage (during Venom it was absolutely dog-eat-dog in that regard), but the crowd’s age mix shifted. Still, fans of the extreme branches of metal once again logically made up a small minority of the festival’s attendance. The band built its repertoire around more recent times, letting “Now, Diabolical” take the lead, joined by tracks from “The Age Of Nero” and the current “Satyricon”. Unlike the band’s outings on summer European festival stages last year, when they played the cult “Nemesis Divina” in full at the Czech Bruta Assault, for instance, this time we caught only one song from that album, Mother North, which they played right before the end. The end was marked by the newer K.I.N.G. once again. Excellent in execution. Satyr is a man of big charisma, and the stage was flooded with giant clouds of fog through an hour of diabolical praising of Satan and his antics. If Venom put out an album called Black Metal, Satyricon later actually co-defined the new genre of the same name. Black Metal.
The big heavy metal veterans, Britain’s Demon, who played the warm-up show of the Balingen BYH festival some years ago, in 2010 to be exact, got a more substantial slot this time. In an hour and twenty minutes they put on one of the best shows of the festival’s first day. No holds barred. After the 1997, 2005 and 2010 appearances, this concert was the band’s fourth at Bang Your Head overall. It overlapped with Satyricon, so because of my photography duties I had to skip a good chunk of it and miss it, but still. I caught the first twenty minutes and most of the second half. And there was plenty to see. The crowd really filled the hall. It was jam-packed. And that same crowd definitely got its money’s worth. The legends presented themselves as an extremely coherent, incredibly tight crew, still sharp and energetic for their age. The sextet opened (as expected) with Night Of The Demon, followed among others by Into the Nightmare, The Plague, Sign of A Madman, Standing On The Edge of the World, Life on a Wire, Liar, One Helluva Night, Nowhwere To Run, and of course Don’t Break the Crcle and Cementary Junction, the title track of the excellent new studio album that came out this March. Top-notch. Let’s hope we meet them again in such form soon.
The hall stage was taken over by the Swedish metallers Manegarm, who have been active on the scene since 1995. Unfortunately their set overlapped with Saxon, so this extremely good and interesting Swedish quartet met with somewhat weaker attendance. At that moment the whole festival was briskly wading toward the main stage to catch the main attraction of the first day, Britain’s Saxon. Manegarm started out under the core influences of the black metal movement of the time, but over the years they’ve seriously honed and loosened up their sound. In the riffs it kept gritty, raw elements, sprung by Nordic mythology, Vikings and also paganism. They even recorded an acoustic album, but today they mostly like to work folk elements into their music too. Anyway, the band devoted this show to speed and crushing sonic bursts. Manegarm ended the set with I Evig Tid, taken from the third album “Dödsfärd”, and aptly weighted the repertoire with all eras of their career. From the current new album “Manegarm” (2015) they played only one song (Tagen av daga). They certainly also leaned on backing tracks. You have to keep the atmosphere at a high level. Fans of the band surely got their money’s worth. And more. So did those who had maybe seen Saxon at past BYH editions “n-times” already and preferred to treat themselves to some (useful) musical changes and experiments.
Saxon were picked as the headliners of the festival’s first day. No point wasting words on this band. The older it gets, the more it plays on stages. Unbelievable. They’ve already announced a new album, and just last December they promoted the current “Battering Ram” at Kino Šiška. The NWOBHM legends of course feel at home in Balingen. They should have played in this role last year, when American Iced Earth “saved” an unexpected hole in the program. Saxon dragged their steel eagle along that day, covered down to the last square centimeter of sheet metal with powerful spotlights, and the show came with pyro and smoke curtains. A spectacle, then, though not the first one from Saxon at BYH!!! and probably not the last, since Saxon enjoy extraordinary popularity in Germany. Practically blasphemous praise. So the undisputed singer Biff Byford doesn’t even have to try that hard to win the crowd over. This time too, it was his in an instant. Saxon once again delivered a concert spectacle that knows no disappointment. Let’s be honest. Can Saxon even disappoint live? Well, only in the predictable set list, which has hardly changed in the last few years. The obligatory, cult tracks of the iron repertoire, plus three new ones at the start of the show, beginning with the opening Batttering Ram, joined by Sacrifice and Let Me Feel Your Power. The rest of the set list was made up of 20.000 Feet, And the Bands Played On, Motorcycle Man, Solid Ball Of Rock, Dallas 1PM, Power Andf The Glory, Heavy Metal Thunder, 747 (Stranges In the Night), Strong Arm of The Law and of course the super-obligatory finish with Denim And Leather, Princess of the Night and Wheels of Steel. The Eagle Has Landed was there too, of course (though the eagle construction wouldn’t have found its real purpose otherwise, would it?). And? “Crusader” was played as the second song of the encore, even though by that hour of the night a seriously drunk part of the crowd wanted to hear it right away! Where Saxon forgot the songs from the albums “Innocence is no Excuse” and “Destiny” this time, only the devil himself knows.
One of the most interesting acts of the festival’s first day was brought to the program by the former Mercyful Fate guitarists Hank Shermann and Michael Denner. Billed as Denner / Shermann , they vowed to reward listeners with Mercyful Fate classics that devotees of this cult Danish heavy metal band haven’t heard live in a long time. The band took on American singer Sean Pack (The Cage) on vocals, bassist Marc Grabowski helped Shermann and Denner on bass, and the cult Snowy Shaw was on drums. Contrary to expectations, though, the band mostly played material from the new EP “Satan’s Thomb” and the debut “Masters Of Evil”. So the crowd had quite a wait until the first Mercyful Fate song, when the quintet cut loose with Black Funeral, followed by Curse of Pharaohs and Into the Coven. Then another jump back to the fresh original material until the red-hot finish, sealed by two near-demanded Mercyful classics, A Corpse Withouth Soul and Evil. You could tell Shermann and Denner haven’t played together for years. During the show they came across as very stiff and practically motionless, so most of the stage was used for his performance by the excellent Sean Pack, in a stage outfit that made you think Rob Halford (Judas Priest) himself had stepped on stage. Denner and Shermann will of course step up their shows in the future, in terms of coherence and tightness alike. That’s for sure. The great new original material opens the door for them to successfully continue the mature period of their creative careers. The cult of Mercyful Fate, then, came back to life for a moment.
The final set of the festival’s first day went to the Brazilian giants of extreme metal Sepultura, who this year released one of the most interesting albums of their career, titled “Machine Messiah”, proving they haven’t said their last word yet. I skipped the band this time out of general exhaustion, but in these new times Sepultura are still a guarantee of wild shows. They’ve proven that countless times. There’s probably no need to guess that Sepultura slotted cult classics into the repertoire, led by Teritory, Arise and Refuse/Ressist. Anyone who still hadn’t had enough of the day’s racket and crunch surely banged their head to the extreme, unforgettable death and thrash sounds of the one and only Sepultura.
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