Location: Balingen / Messegelände / Germany
Date: Thursday, 13.07.2017
The nineteenth Bang Your Head festival is here, and with it a new RockLine expedition to Balingen, Germany. One of Europe’s most important summer festivals, known for its always colorful mix of mostly classic heavy metal acts and some hard rock indulgences, with the occasional, no-strings-attached detour into extreme metal waters, brought a seriously interesting and stylistically varied lineup this year. It couldn’t boast any real headliners for the three days, but the supporting acts guaranteed plenty of satisfaction.
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, and this year it again drew a solid 10,000 visitors or more.
The opening slot went to Americans Killcode. Over the past two years the band has staged a real invasion of the German music scene: this was their second year in a row at the festival, and in two weeks they’ll also play this year’s Rock Of Ages festival “as a hidden surprise.” It’s fair to assume the same management that looks after Twiosted Sister, Dee Snider, Vince Neil and yes, Slaughter, who also played this year’s BYH!!! festival, is pushing Killcode’s gigs. So when you book, say, Vince Neil, you get Killcode, Slaughter and a few others thrown in. Killcode are a quality outfit. Nothing special, really, since in rock’n’roll today it’s hard to pull out anything in terms of songwriting that you haven’t already heard. Even so, this heartfelt five-piece can proudly show off a polished stage look, a superb performance and a tight, vibrant chemistry. Their set felt even a notch more relaxed and confident than last year, when they played the festival in the hall. An energetic, dynamic band that was right at home on the vast main stage.
Next up on stage were Polish power metallers Crystal Viper. The band is actually special for having a likable singer, Marta Gabriel, while musically it brings nothing out of the ordinary. They’ve got good connections and backing, so they can always land a spot at the festival. A good show, nothing outstanding. Nice chemistry, communication between the members, but as I said. A bit generic and already worn out, so during the gig we wandered 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 show 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 keeping him company from the eighties is vocalist Charlie Sabin. The big-haired, curly redhead brings a magnetic stage presence. He kept the mood cheerful the whole time, even though the daytime heat was already starting to bite. His vocal charisma is far from gone, either. The rhythm section of the revived Toxic is of more recent vintage, and the band hadn’t played for quite a while, so it sounded a touch less compact and at times seemed to still be searching and feeling its way. That’s how it is when you wake up from a years-long sleep and decide to continue your career. Toxik released a comeback EP this year and played all three tracks from it (Stand Up, Psyop, Breaking Glass), while the bulk of the setlist, with Spontaneous, Heart Attack, Social Overload, Greed, False Prophets, Count Your Blessings, World Circus, a surprising inclusion of the Black Sabbath classic Symptom of the Universe and the closing fury of Think This, was dedicated to the cult albums “World Circus” and “Think This.” A bomb. Committed to the core and ferocious. Josh Christian is an outstanding virtuoso. He keeps up a breakneck speed and lightning pace. Hard for anyone to catch, and the band has already confirmed fall dates, including a stop in Vienna, Austria, this autumn. 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 overall.
As the day went on we danced to softer notes, and the front of the venue filled up with somewhat younger music fans. On stage stood Gloryhammer. It was a recap of what we enjoyed in early February, when Gloryhammer opened the shows on the HammerFall tour. Parody. Bizarreness. Kitsch. They mixed a bit of film, a bit of legend, and stirred in plenty of fantasy tales. Every character in the quintet on stage is its own story and saga. In their getups they were visibly roasting. Kitsch has its price, too. But kitsch and glitz are a trend again, and listeners sadly put that ahead of the musical substance of the performers. The overall generic feel radiating from the ideas and guitar phrases is really made up for with stage scenery and well-rehearsed acting, so there’s no boredom and you can keep (at the very least) smiling sweetly the whole time, unless you’re a die-hard fan who knows every verse of the band by heart. The Scottish-Swiss alliance of five guys, with Alestorm’s pirate-drunk leader Christopher Bowes 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 stage party-theater, completely satisfied a crowd that made no secret of its great affection for the group. Among other things, Thomas Winkler once again deftly slaughtered an ugly green, long-eared troll. With a giant hammer.
The festival action continued with German power metallers Orden Ogan. The band has meanwhile finished its new studio album “Gunmen.” They already unveiled the new backdrops and two brand-new tunes, the title track Gunmen and Fields of Sorrow. The rest of the setlist was filled with material from the previous album, “Ravenhead,” one of the more interesting records in their discography. Orden Ogan started the show with somewhat older notes, though: songs from the album “Easteren Hope,” the opener The New Shores of Sadness and right after it We Are Pirates. At one moment Orden Ogan lean a bit toward Running Wild, then a bit toward Blind Guardian, then Helloween. In short, typical power metal woven across the German heartland. They have serious backing from the crowd on home turf, too, and the crowd knew their material well, which goes for the songs from “Ravenhead” as well, led by the closer 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 another band I can’t remember the last time playing in Europe. Maybe at one of the recent editions of Sweden Rock festival. These are American glam rockers Slaughter, who even tuned up on their own before the show began. Slaughter released five albums in their career, all through the nineties. Besides frontman and rhythm guitarist Mark Slaughter, original bassist Dana Strum is with him, and the band is rounded out by two excellent musicians, guitarist Jeff Bland and the wild drummer Zoltan Chaney. In a bit under an hour on stage the band played a few classics, led by The Wild Life, Burning Bridges, Fly to the Angels, Real Love, Up All night, and “stole” some of the time by jamming 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 was accompanied by quite a few solid blunders, and yet. Mark Slaughter, by modern standards heavily weighed down, deftly patched over all these little mishaps with giant 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, who skillfully led listeners away from paying 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 few lovers of the sweet old-school legacy of glam metal and rock, who didn’t forget to dress up properly when coming to the front of the stage, had more than a blast during the show.
At six in the afternoon the neighboring hall came to life too. Its stage was taken by the excellent Swedish melodic rock revivalists Eclipse. Their show unfortunately overlapped with the cult British NWOBHM standard-bearers Venom. Yes. That Venom, with Conrad Lant a.k.a. Cronos in the lineup. Since I’d already seen Eclipse a few times, I gave up part of their gig and watched Venom for the first time in my life. Eclipse confirmed they’re in superb form, 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 show. The band mostly presented the current studio album “Monumentum,” and of course the obligatory Battlegrounds and the even more obligatory Wake Me Up were not missing. The band also put three tracks from the previous album, “Armaggedonize,” in the setlist.
Venom. While Cronos’s former buddies Abaddon and Mantas storm on with the other Venom faction called Venom Inc. (we caught them at this year’s Metaldays festival), Cronos hasn’t lost any sleep since around 2007, after the final split of the band’s cult figures. That’s when he more or less cemented the new Venom lineup, calling on Stuart Dixon on guitar and putting Danny Needham on the drum stool. Cronos has kept all his swagger, his scandalous demonic charm and an extremely venomous look. Vocally, too. A man of his mature years doesn’t lack energy. His by-now “folk-famous” guttural yet still distinct and piercing voice is the guarantee that the cult classics of this legendary band still ignite on stages so well today. The trio is superbly tight, and Cronos is simply the embodiment 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 a good chunk of it 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 tracks blended superbly with the feel of the cult classics from the first half of the eighties. What’s surprising is that in this new era Cronos doesn’t look back to the past much. He completely ignored the albums “Possessed” and “At League With Satan,” and Venom preferred to play songs from the newer era, led by Pandemonium (“Resurrection,” 2000), the title track of “Fallen Angels” (2011) and the song The Evil One from “Cast In Stone” (1997). Whatever the case, the crew rewarded the hardened believers with the obligatory tracks from the cult Black Metal. The title track was played in the encore, keeping company with the unforgettable Countless Bathory and Buried Alive. The band closed the show with the occult “Welcome to Hell” requiem Witching Hour, while the title track of that album was already played in the regular part. Venom also spiced up the setlist with the singles Bloodlust and the universally demanded Warhead. The band met throngs of devoted fans, who went wild during the show. The energy was extremely appealing, and under different circumstances, without overlaps with other acts, you could never get tired of Venom’s show. Cronos is still crazy enough, satanic enough, with a proper surplus of venom in his steel veins, demonry and big sparks in his eyes. The gig turned on a dime. At the end the consolation was that in ten days Venom Inc. would play plenty of Venom music at Tolmin’s Metaldays festival.
In terms of programming, the Bang Your Head!!! metal festival isn’t known for putting extreme to brutal acts from the metal genre universe up front. And yet. Every year there’s room for acts from the death and black metal ranks. On the first day of the festival, in the late afternoon, legendary Norwegian black metallers Satyricon, took the stage, and their appearance at Bang Your Head 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 setlist tracks from the current era of artistic visionary work of this cult, highly esteemed band, which on the other hand is also considered one of the most experimental in the black metal genre. They developed their own style and sound, and in the early era were seen as a key act that hewed and defined the face of modern black metal. Satyr has again cut his hair and slicked it back with brilliantine. A proper Valentino “look,” then, which is nothing new. He performed like this back in 2011. Studded black leather and layers 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 downright insane in that respect), but the crowd was mixed in age. Still, fans of the extreme branches of metal logically made up a small minority of festival attendance again this time. The band devoted its repertoire to more recent times, gave priority to the album “Now, Diabolical,” which was 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 Republic’s Brutal Assault, for example, this time we caught just one song from that album, Mother North, played right before the end. The finale was again marked by the newer K.I.N.G. Excellent in execution. Satyr is a man of great charisma, and the stage was flooded with giant clouds of fog through an hour of diabolical worship of Satan and his mischief. If Venom released an album called Black Metal, Satyricon later actually co-defined the new genre of the same name. Black Metal.
Great heavy metal veterans, Britain’s Demon, who a few years ago, in 2010 to be exact, played the warm-up show of the Balingen BYH festival, got a more substantial slot this time and, in an hour and twenty minutes, delivered one of the best shows of the festival’s first day. No holding back. The gig, their fourth at Bang Your Head overall after 1997, 2005 and 2010, overlapped with Satyricon, so because of my photography duties I had to miss a good chunk of it, and yet. 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 packed to the rafters. And that same crowd definitely got its money’s worth. The legends presented themselves as an extremely coherent, incredibly tight crew that, for their age, is still sharp and energetic. 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, of course also Don’t Break the Crcle and Cementary Junction, the title track of the excellent new studio album released this March. Top. Let’s hope we meet them again soon in such form.
The hall stage was then taken over by Swedish metallers Manegarm, who have been on the scene since 1995. Unfortunately their show overlapped with Saxon, so this otherwise excellent and interesting Swedish quartet met with a somewhat smaller turnout. At that moment the entire festival was briskly wading toward the main stage to catch the day’s headliners, 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 diversified their sound, which has kept its gritty raw elements in the riffs, fueled by Norse mythology, Viking lore and paganism too. They even recorded one acoustic album, and today they mostly like to include folk elements in their music as well. Anyway, the band devoted this show to speed and demolishing sonic blasts. Manegarm closed the show with I Evig Tid, taken from the third album “Dödsfärd,” and nicely weighted the repertoire with all eras of their career. From the current new album “Manegarm” (2015) they played just one song (Tagen av daga). They definitely also leaned on backing tracks. The atmosphere simply has to be kept at a high level. Fans of the band surely got their money’s worth. And more. So did those who had perhaps seen Saxon at past editions of the BYH festival for the “nth” time and so preferred to treat themselves to some (useful) musical changes and tastings.
Saxon were chosen as the headliners of the festival’s first day. No point wasting words on the band. The older they get, the more they play on stages. Incredible. They’ve already announced a new album, and just recently, meaning last December, they promoted the current “Battering Ram” at Kino Šiška. The NWOBHM legends naturally feel at home in Balingen, and they should have played this role last year already, when America’s Iced Earth “rescued” an unexpectedly opened hole in the lineup. Saxon dragged along their steel eagle on this day too, covered down to the last square centimeter of sheet metal with powerful spotlights, and the show was accompanied by pyro and smoke curtains. A spectacle, then, though not Saxon’s first at BYH!!! and probably by no means the last, since Saxon enjoy extraordinary popularity on German soil. Actually blasphemous worship. So the undisputed singer Biff Byford doesn’t have to try all that hard to win over the crowd. This time too it was his in an instant. Saxon once again delivered a concert spectacle that knows no way to disappoint. Hand on heart. Can Saxon even disappoint live? Well, only in terms of the predictable setlist, which has changed extremely rarely over the last few years. The obligatory and cult tracks of the iron repertoire, plus three new ones at the start of the show, beginning with the opening Batttering Ram, accompanied by Sacrifice and Let Me Feel Your Power. The rest of the setlist 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 closing run of Denim And Leather, Princess of the Night and Wheels of Steel. Naturally The Eagle Has Landed was there too (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 evening 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 former Mercyful Fate guitarists Hank Shermann and Michael Denner, who, as Denner / Shermann vowed to reward listeners with Mercyful Fate classics that fans of this cult Danish heavy metal band haven’t heard live in a long time. The band took on American singer Sean Peck (The Cage) on vocals, bassist Marc Grabowski helped Shermann and Denner on bass guitar, and the cult Snowy Shaw sat behind the drums. Contrary to expectations, though, the band mostly played material from the new EP “Satan’s Thomb” and the debut “Masters Of Evil.” The crowd had to wait quite a while for 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 work, right up to the boiling-hot finish, closed by the practically demanded Mercyful classics A Corpse Withouth Soul and Evil. You can tell Shermann and Denner haven’t played together for years. During the show they looked very stiff and practically motionless, so most of the stage was used for his performance by the excellent Sean Pack, whose stage outfit 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 as well as tightness. That’s for sure. The excellent new original material opens the door for a successful continuation of the mature period of their creative careers. The Mercyful Fate cult has thus come back to life for a moment.
The final show of the festival’s first day went to Brazilian extreme metal giants Sepultura, who released one of the most interesting albums of their career this year, 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 crazy shows. They’ve proven that countless times. There’s probably no need to guess that Sepultura put the cult classics in the repertoire, led by Teritory, Arise, Refuse/Ressist. Anyone who still hadn’t had enough of the day’s racket and ruckus surely thoroughly combed their noggin with the extreme and unforgettable death and thrash sounds of the one and only Sepultura.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
