Location: Messegelande / Balingen / Germany
Date: Friday, June 26, 2009
Day one of Bang Your Head!!! had arrived, the fifteenth edition in a row, as tradition demands. We were still pulling ourselves together after the previous day’s all-out assault, which was marked above all by a “battle of the gullet” and the “concert storm” of the warm-up show with Kreator and Jon Oliva’s Pain. The clock struck 10:00 a.m.!
| Hatstik: 10.00 – 10.40 |
A band that has existed for barely two years opened this year’s festival in Balingen. Reutlingen, where they’re from, is a stone’s throw from Balingen, so we can count them as genuine locals who got the honor of warming up the stage. They made it onto the festival bill by winning the contest for a slot at BYH!!! 2009. The trio may have some experience, but in terms of quality, never mind genre, they’re not up to a festival like Bang Your Head. So it’s fair to ask what a bunch of guys with modern “tricks” who are shoehorned into metal were doing here. A static trio, whose stage dynamics and movement were seriously handicapped by the guitarist being glued to his mic, which, more or less, was deadly boring. Stage antics barely matter anyway when the material is uninteresting, predictable and bland. What the guitar doesn’t deliver, HatStik try to cover up with the “groove” of a more active rhythm section. Even the hat on the guitarist-singer’s head had me thinking HatStik have more in common with Beatsteaks than with metal or the gritty hard rock we look for at a festival like Balingen’s Bang Your Head!!! The trio isn’t used to big stages, and you really had to concentrate to find them on stage with the naked eye. Each of them was hidden in their own corner and clung to it diligently.
| Alestorm: 10.50-11.30 |
The Scottish whippersnappers who mix elements of power metal with English beer were the second negative surprise right at the start of the festival. They have no charisma, no polished stage act, no polished stage image (unless you like the Dachau-ribs show, the ears sticking out at right angles, and keyboards slung on like pop-factory Modern Talking-style stuff), never mind that the singer can’t sing, and instead deliberately twists his voice into some kind of forced, macho “drunkard’s rasp” full of botched notes, nasal whining and wildly fluctuating power in the delivery itself. The band’s other weak spot is the guitar. It too managed a few half-tone “misfires,” especially in the melodic transitional embellishments and the heavily simplified solos. All that saves Alestorm is the incredible popularity of this band among young fans of distorted sounds and booze who don’t yet know real, authentic music. This miracle of Alestorm’s popularity isn’t entirely logical and demands a complicated explanation, which is probably easiest to find in the band’s promotion of alcoholic brews.
It’s otherwise a completely generic, worn-out power metal language, with pirate keyboard solos run through an accordion effect. Songs like Over The Seas, Leviathan, Terror On The High Seas, Nancy The Tavern Wench, That Famous Ol’ Spiced, The Huntmaster, Set Sail And Conquer, Keelhauled, Captain Morgan’s Revenge, The Quest, Wolves Of The Sea and Pirate Song have no business at a festival as strong as Bang Your Head. Those of us who came to the festival looking for quality didn’t get much of it from Alestorm this time.
| Kissin’ Dynamite: 11.40 – 12.30 |
This is the band the festival should really have started with. The quintet, born between 1990 and 1992, showed the true face of the festival. The locals, who’ll launch their debut “Steel Of Swabia” this July, play a kind of collision between melodic hard rock and heavy metal. If the opener My Religion, with its simple but catchy, punchy chorus, sketched the profile of a hard rock band on stage, songs like Out In The Rain or Steel Of Swabia dispelled that in an instant and brought to mind the typically German approach to heavy metal. More important than guessing at genres is the fact that these guys, who are barely shedding their baby fuzz and turning into men, were firing on stage with a full cannonade. Singer Hannes is an extremely confident, colorful stage figure with a polished stage act. He wore a replica steel fist on his right hand in keeping with the song Iron Fist and, what matters most, he has a great voice. Carved, melodic and clean, aimed at the highest registers, expressive in every one of them, with optimal efficiency. The guys ran around on stage nonstop as if they’d swallowed Asterix’s magic potion, while playing tight, superbly rehearsed, with no noticeable mistakes. They crowned their hugely successful, all-out set with an excellent closing cover, Welcome To The Jungle.
You can definitely still feel a youthful naivety, impetuosity and recklessness, especially in lyrics like Addicted To Metal, but that’s the necessary engine that drives Kissin’ Dynamite forward, a full 100%, from the very start. If the guys keep up the same work ethic and drive they convincingly showed in Balingen, we’ll surely hear plenty more good things about this band in the future.
| Ross The Boss: 12.40 – 13.30 |
Our Manowar colleague Ross “The Boss” Friedman also found the time to show up at this year’s Bang Your Head festival. He ground out the first six albums with Manowar, then vanished who knows where, but came back to the scene thanks mostly to the German audience’s long memory of his work with Manowar. That’s how he managed to put together a quartet of former members of Divinus and Ivory Night into the lineup Ross The Boss. At the festival the man presented a repertoire made up of Manowar songs and the Ross The Boss debut “New Metal Leader” (2008). The patient German crowd, already roasting in the sun by then, stubbornly stayed out in that same sun out of loyalty to Manowar, and was rewarded accordingly. Songs like Death Tone, Gloves Of Metal, Thor (The Powerhead) and Hail And Kill brought the good old Manowar back to life for a short while, and the crowd happily sang the classics in unison below the stage, releasing an extra dose of decibels into the air.
Still, you can’t skip the material from “New Metal Leader,” which, roughly speaking, picks up Ross’s path after he unhitched from Manowar with the record “Kings Of Metal.” It ties in excellently with the Manowar story, and a layman couldn’t even tell stylistically which material belonged to Manowar and which to Ross The Boss. On stage, singer Patrik Fuchs came across as an excellent frontman who also handles all the Manowar covers with ease. With a heartfelt, committed performance he held the band’s set together nicely and fired up the crowd below the stage with gestures, since Ross is more or less just a static “redneck” figure on stage, busy showing off his pro-American tattoos.
| Voivod: 13.40 – 14.30 |
The first truly interesting show of the festival came when the Canadian thrashers Voivod took the stage. The guys released their new studio album “Infini” three days before the gig, and have officially said it will be their last. For it they used old recordings of the late guitarist Denis D’Amour – Piggy, who died of cancer in 2005. Dan Mongrain stands in for him on stage, while the core of the lineup is Denis Bélanger – Snake (vocals), Jean-Yves Thériault – Blacky (bass) and Michel Langevin – Away (drums). The band put on a great show! They worked in songs from their first five albums, and as a bonus finished with a stripped-down version of the Pink Floyd classic Astronomy Domine. Even though Piggy is gone, Mongrain wore his shoes with total confidence, and Voivod, like seasoned old foxes, reeled off one classic after another. Denis Bélanger grabbed attention with his staggering, completely “wasted” stage presence, reminiscent of the way Joe Cocker moves after waking up on the worst day of his life. His Motörhead shirt was interesting: the front carried the cover of the album “Rock N’ Roll,” the back the dates of the “Another Perfect Tour,” which took place four years before that album came out. Technically, a proper fake. The wild bassist Blacky was also extremely provocative during the show, deliberately dancing with one foot over the edge of a stage raised more than three meters off the ground.
Voivod also stood out with one more gesture. Bélanger handed out a whole crate of glasses of cold water to the crowd, helping them through the worst of the afternoon heat while buying himself and the band a little time for a breather. Voivod were the first real attraction of this year’s Bang Your Head festival, since you very rarely get to see these guys on European stages. Just from the experimental side they build into their music, they’re oddballs on the musical map, and it would be a real shame if the band actually retired after these shows, as they may have hinted by officially announcing that “Infini” is the last Voivod studio album. The Voivod set was the point where the first day of the festival rose to a higher level of quality!
| Primordial: 14.40 – 15.30 |
The Irish metallers, who developed a distinctive expressive language out of black metal, were an extraordinary change of pace at this year’s Bang Your Head festival. Voivod had already raised the festival’s level, but once Primordial stepped on stage, you couldn’t shake the feeling that each act wanted to push the bar of conviction higher than the one before. Primordial approached everything with incredible commitment and focus. Besides the majestic atmosphere they created on a hefty sound, a hypnotizing embrace of guitars grown out of hellishly fast picking, all eyes were on singer Alan A. Nemtheanga, who led the band’s set with total authority. The man, thoroughly decked out in corpse paint, kept every song, Empire Falls, Gods To The Godless, As Rome Burns, Sons Of The Morrigan, The Coffin Ships or Heathen Tribes, feeling real with his lived-in performance. Real through all 50 minutes of the Primordial show. In the band’s unique language, the guys carried the crowd off for nearly an hour into their one-of-a-kind world of eternal sorrow and doom. A truly excellent sound helped enormously, adding to the extraordinary impression this band left with their show in Balingen.
| Sacred Reich: 15.45 – 16.40 |
Sacred Reich! Who’d have thought? Alongside Voivod, the second “exotic” of day one. Sacred Reich are also one of those innovative metal bands who served up a few records in their catalog that made them highly recognizable and unique. Take early Slayer and Metallica, add some old-school Sabbath-style stoned heaviness, and top it all off with frequent changes of motifs and tempo. Hmmm, well… depends on who you ask. Every pair of ears picks up musical vibrations in its own way. Sacred Reich played with Phil Rind (vocals, bass), Will Arnett (guitar), Jason Rainey (guitar) and Greg Hall (drums). That’s actually the original lineup from 1985, when the band was formed. Did we want anything more? Not at all.
Add an excellent setlist and success can’t fail to follow. That thrash metal had plenty of supporters in Balingen this year, thanks to an interesting selection of some resurrected bands playing the festival, was confirmed by the crowd, which piled in under the stage in the not-so-friendly afternoon heat in by far the biggest numbers up to that point in the festival. Seeing Sacred Reich in Europe in the new millennium is not exactly an everyday thing. Especially when the band says it’s not planning to release a new album. Anyway, let’s get to the show. Phil Rind remains the band’s first and only vocalist. The power of his voice is undiminished, and so is his expressiveness. Over the years of his musical career, though, Rind has picked up a nice pile of extra pounds and more or less rolled around the stage like a meatball. He could easily have given a few pounds to his colleague Will Arnett, who is his exact opposite, looking like an emaciated Christ back from the Sahara after 40 days of temptation by the devil, or like an embalmed mummy who lost all his bandages on an afternoon stroll. Luckily he pulled on a “redneck” cap and kept his trademark.
Anyway, only the performance counts. And Sacred Reich ground it out like they were 20 years old. No mistakes, and with untamed fury. The material in the setlist was perfectly chosen. Out of 12 songs in total, 4 were from “The American Way,” three more from the debut “Ignorance,” and they closed the show with the fan favorite Surf Nicaragua. The Black Sabbath cover War Pigs, which the crowd loudly demanded during the show, of course had to be there too. The band’s excellent form and the conviction of the delivery are proof that Sacred Reich are still hungry for blood, and that we may hope for another European tour from them in the future, one that will land closer to Slovenia.
| Sodom: 16.55-17.55 |
The name that forms part of the holy German trinity, if not the whole European thrash metal trinity of Sodom – Destruction – Kreator, kept the same kind of crowd below the stage. Only now it was even denser. You really couldn’t stroll casually from the left side of the festival grounds to the right (or the other way around) without making a wide detour around the stands with fast food, costume jewelry and the rest of the interesting, and sometimes even useful, odds and ends. In Germany, Sodom are in the category of highly revered bands. They’re locals, after all. The band’s untamed leader Tom Angelripper admitted as much, greeting the crowd like this: “Halo Balingen!!! Wir sind endlich zu Hause!” That put some 10,000 listeners on their feet in an instant, and the show began!
Sodom, who have performed since 1997 in a consistently solid lineup of Tom Angelripper (vocals, bass), Bernd “Bernemann” Kost (guitar) and Bobby Schottkowski (drums), put together a well-balanced setlist, as expected. Half of the songs came from the raw early period of their career, half from the last three records, when Sodom reaffirmed their old-school thrash approach. The band dedicated the song Axis Of Evil from the latest album “The Final Sign Of Evil” (2007) to the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson, who had died shortly before midnight the previous day.
The sight of just three guys blasting out thrash and terrorizing the mass below the stage was captivating. It was fascinating to realize how well just three members cover, or rather fill, the whole sonic space. Bernemann’s riffing was outstanding in its white-hot, razor-sharp tone, and the guitarist didn’t lose an ounce of credibility in the parts where he had to tackle solos. Sodom shook out a real dose of noise, the kind none of the earlier bands at the festival had managed to produce. It was also magnificent to watch the loyal German crowd get involved with the trio on stage as it rolled out its material. Sodom seasoned their tight, highly polished, flawless show with the song Bombenhagel from their second album “Persecution Mania,” which is more than twenty years old today, and so incinerated the bodies below the stage. It was more than obvious that on home soil Sodom are truly unbeatable. Angelripper’s voice works deadly!
| Lita Ford: 18.10 – 19.20 |
A complete change of mood at the festival came in the late afternoon with hard rock diva Lita Ford, who returned to the stage last year after 15 years of silence. She’s also reportedly working on material for a new album in the studio. Lita, who met Abraham last year and is backed by an interesting lineup, in which keyboardist Michael T. Ross (Angel, Hardline, XYZ) stands out, along with Ron Thal (guitarist of the new Guns N’ Roses), P.J. Farley (bass, Trixter, Raa) and Denis Leeflang (drums, Bumblefoot), names that are nothing to sneeze at, wasn’t having an especially happy day. The sound on stage was giving trouble from the very beginning. Right from the start, with the song Larger Than Life, the singer angrily stamped her feet a few times and tried to tell the techs with gestures to turn the drums down. Since things just wouldn’t improve, the woman began losing her cool. First she hurled her jacket off the stage, and it landed right in the face of a lucky photographer below, then she showed her displeasure mainly through a disrespectful attitude toward her instrument (guitar), which she cruelly flung out of her hands onto the stage several times.
Clearly this energy spread from the singer to the whole band, who committed a few errors during the show. Lita wasn’t giving full vocals anymore either, and you could feel she wasn’t trying on stage. A big hole opened up in the show especially once the band started playing Ozzy Osbourne’s cover Mr. Crowley, where the guitar in particular showed a great deal of immaturity in following in Randy Rhoads’s footsteps. Why Lita Ford took on this cover will never be clear to me. It would have been better to add some sweet candy from The Runaways era to the repertoire.
The singer focused her repertoire mainly on the albums “Lita” (1988), Stiletto (1990) and “Dangerous Curves” (1991), with an emphasis on “Lita,” with which she also closed her set, with the songs Close My Eyes Forever and the super hit Kiss Me Deadly, which finally brought a few rays of light to this rather unfortunate show, one we’ll forget as soon as possible. Let me also mention that during the performance of the brand-new songs Piece (Hell Yeah) and Betrayal, with which the band seriously announced a new album for this fall, Lita was joined on stage for duets by her husband and former Nitro member Jim Gillette, who will also produce Lita’s new record.
| U.D.O.: 19.40 – 20.50 |
Second to last on the first day of the festival, former Accept screamer Udo Dirkschneider arrived on stage with his band U.D.O. Below the stage there was real euphoria, in the spirit of great anticipation for the band’s show. The huge popularity of U.D.O. in Germany is incredible. The band is more active than ever in its career and regularly releases studio albums two years apart, with intensive touring to promote them. On top of that, they’re the logical continuation of the cult Accept and regularly include many songs by that band in their live repertoire. The feeling during the U.D.O. show was similar to the Sodom set. Once again Germans were on stage, and once again Germans showed their unbreakable spirit on home soil. The only difference was that U.D.O. drew some 15,000 people to the front of the stage, if not more. So it was boiling below the stage!
The core of the band remains unchanged today. The only new face is drummer Francesco Jovino (Italian again), otherwise, as always, the gray-haired little man on stage was surrounded by Fitty Weihnold (bass), Igor Gianola (guitar) and Udo’s Accept “buddy” Stefan Kaufmann (guitar). A band that knows exactly what it wants and what the home crowd demands from them was in no way idle, and struck straight out with the Accept classics Metal Heart and Midnight Highway, sending Balingen into real delirium in the blink of an eye. The feeling of committed participation was unique, especially through the choruses of the Accept anthems as well as the U.D.O. material (Thunderball, Man And Machine, the newer Vendetta or 24/7)., which also included the classics from the debut, Animal House and They Want War.
Since U.D.O. were limited to 70 available minutes, they lined up song after song, and Dirkschneider only took some time in the encore to introduce his band on stage. Vocally, Dirkscneider is still a commanding, dominant figure today, graced with the power of charisma and a lived-in stage act. Dressed as a Vietnam war veteran, he kept the crowd in check as a joke, so that it ate out of his hand the whole time. In the intense encore, which U.D.O. kicked off with the catchy Holy, where you could still feel that Dirkschneider has to adjust the curve of his vocal line a bit, sadly the weight of the years takes its toll, the men drove the audience into ecstasy once more with the Accept classics Balls To The Wall and I’m A Rebel. The U.D.O. show in Balingen proved that the saying “You watch German metal bands in Germany” holds true. A great show from head to toe!
| Journey: 21.20 – 23.00 |
Journey were really a chapter of their own, not just on day one but across the whole of this year’s 15th consecutive Bang Yor Head!!! festival. I personally count it a great privilege and honor to have finally been able to share the magic of this lineup at their concert too. What you hear and discover on their studio albums sometimes really seems like it’s not from this world. Journey are perfectionists at creating melodically superb, singable rock songs. You could say they’ve always shone in the gift of composing melodically flawless, compact songs, and their songs get under your skin the moment you hear them, right off the bat.
A band that had serious doubts raised about whether it could still carry on confidently, especially live, once it became clear that Steve Perry would never return, caught a fresh wind in its sails. Thanks to YouTube, they found a kid who ran a Journey tribute band in the Philippines. The similarity of his voice and stage presence to Perry’s seemingly irreplaceable charisma was astonishing, and Journey didn’t hesitate to get in touch with him. With the arrival of Arnel Pineda, the kid’s dream came true, and Journey can carry on with full credibility down their path of great musical perfectionism. They proved that with their fresh studio release “Revelation” (2008), which once again confirmed the unique greatness of Joruney.
The men finally came to give a little lesson to all those, especially among the hardened, set-in-their-ways metalheads, who can stick their half-tone-clashing masturbation, set against melodic perfection, somewhere. Guitarist Neal Schon was the first to appear on stage. With a look of stern concentration, he calmly waited for the intro to finish. The men open their set with Separate Ways (Worlds Apart), and that’s when the band’s first and really only mistake happens. Pineda started singing the first verse of the song “one round” too early. Neil Schon jerked his head toward the singer and shot him a grim look. It didn’t take Pineda many seconds to realize he’d botched it, finally catch up with the song’s structure, and walk over to Schon to give him some kind of “explanation.” All good. From there on, the Journey show felt like a real adventure into sonic perfection. A sound straight out of the box, which I’d experienced only once before, at the Gods Of Metal 2006 festival, when I saw Def Leppard, conjured up an experience raised a few steps above the level we’d enjoyed at the earlier bands’ shows in terms of quality and execution. You don’t have to look long for the reason why. The band has existed since 1973 and has so far sold over 80 million copies of its albums worldwide.
Pineda sang brilliantly. If you closed your eyes, it was hard to tell whether it was really Pineda or Perry on stage. The singer communicated masterfully with the crowd the whole time, spending most of the show on a special stage extension, where from just a meter away he fired up the crowd below the stage. His acrobatic moves were also a treat, as he made a few wild jumps from the stage onto that extension, doing a split in midair!
Journey live really don’t skimp on fuel or decibels. Schon’s guitar is loud and cuts through in the riffs, so you get the sense of an extremely loud band, really hard-rock-alive dynamite, once Journey show up on stage. Schon reigned supreme with extraordinary control of his instrument, the filigree finesse of a soft touch. In soloing perfection, the well-known masterpiece of how to offer a convincing, under-the-skin catchy melody from just a few basic notes. He chopped away with incredible confidence, and several times during the show he simply closed his eyes, if he wasn’t throwing his head up in a sign. He rarely looked at the guitar neck at all during the show.
After Stone In Love, Jonathan Cain switched back to keyboards, he even had a (red) piano on stage, and the band tackled the fantastic Rubicon. The sound was full and perfectly balanced in every component. There’s no point wasting words on Deen Castronovo. Fantastic drumming that especially fanned the liveliness on stage and the reality of the Journey magic.
The show raced by. Journey didn’t even include the “theater” of an encore, so the hypnotized crowd sent no small number of whistles toward the stage when only the festival organizer Horst E. Franz appeared, trying to calm the crowd down and tell them day one of the festival was behind us.
It all smelled like there would be no encore, since Journey closed with their mega hit Any Way You Want It, preceded, just as obligatorily, by Don’t Stop Believin’. There was certainly plenty more material left. While weighing up the ballads, they chose Faithfully over Open Arms, and unused aces were still up their sleeves, like Send Her My Love, Who’s Crying Now, or Lovin,’ Touchin,’ Squeezin’. But there simply wasn’t enough time for everything.
The song Wheel In The Sky was further seasoned with a jam by Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain, who breathed a bit of extra Southern flavor into the song, and then, especially in the chorus, the crowd once more backed the band ecstatically. Of course, the crowd skewed toward a somewhat older population of listeners. Mature music for mature years, for people who know that their receptor organs deserve much more than primitive half-tone noodling and roaring. The Journey show was really a brief landing of beings from another galaxy, who came down to Earth in a flying saucer for 100 minutes to remind the masses once again what pure perfection of melodic polish in rock music is. In Balingen, Journey really proved that in this respect they’re completely untouchable masters of their craft, and that they remain so in the new millennium. Great musical gurus, before whom we can only bow. Thank you, Journey. See you as soon as possible!
The first day of the festival ran according to schedule. The experienced, seasoned organizers ran the festival with confidence, and the bands really weren’t forced to wait to blow up the stage. The newly built Volksbank Messehalle, right next to the festival stage itself, offered not just entertainment at the metal market but also plenty of shade, where we could cool our thoroughly overheated heads during the day. After Journey, a kebab hit the spot, and with the crew we also had to thoroughly sum up our impressions and chew over who was who on day one of the festival. Journey were really a chapter of their own on day one, and the next day people were still talking about them in nothing but superlatives!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
