Bang Your Head!!! Warm-Up Show (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Volksbank Messehalle / Balingen / Germany
Concert date: June 25, 2009
Attendance: 4500
Ticket price: €25.00

Another year has rolled around, and it’s time for a fresh Bang Your Head festival, held every year in the little German town of Balingen, in the Baden-Württemberg region, pretty close to Stuttgart. As is tradition, the organizers put together a “warm-up” show this year too. Unlike last year, when the warm-up gig went down in nearby Hechingen with Frobidden, Breaker and Firewind, this time it found a home in the brand-new Voklsbank Messehalle, right on the festival grounds themselves.

The clock struck eight. In the evening, just so we’re clear. You could count the people in front of the stage on the fingers of one hand, but Snake Ride Rodeo had to hit the stage anyway. The band formed five years ago, but it’s made up of seasoned German musicians. Running Wild fans will surely be well acquainted with the word Preacher. The former Running Wild guy now shreds guitar in Snake Ride Rodeo. The band plays the attack card: a venomously lively smear of riffing guitars that smells more like a drunkenly noisy version of rock n’ roll than anything you could call metal. In Snake Ride Rodeo everything on the guitars creaks and sizzles as the guys drive their material forward. The dirty rumble is backed by a lower-pitched, raspy, throaty and razor-sharp vocal. Picture a Mat Sinner (Sinner, Primal Fear) with a head cold, twanging through his nose. The sound and energy occasionally carry the listener off to something like Black Label Society. Songs like Ashes, Ultimate Fear and Bleed, among others, introduced the band to the crowd. Sadly, the quartet met a lukewarm response from an already pretty empty hall, one that holds 5000 people at a squeeze. Considering that the band plays first and foremost on the energy of a rock-rooted feel generated by the power of the riff, the heavily distorted sound, where the bass gnawed away at the quality of the mix, wasn’t even bothersome. What was bothersome was the realization that the band gave only as much as routine demanded, just enough to keep up an appearance of decency. For anything more, the hall would have needed to be better attended.

British “old-school revival thrashers” Evile took the stage second. This is superbly well-versed thrash metal, devoted to the kind of solid rhythmic gallop that fired up everyone present as the lads, Matt Drake (guitar, vocals), Ol Drake (guitar), Mike Alexander (bass) and Ben Carter (drums), blasted out fistful after fistful of dynamite in furious songs like Bathe In Blood. The whole thing is new, but it carries some traces of old Slayer (early period), with the obligatory inclusion of thorough (even multi-part) guitar solos, played at venomous speed and written with a semitone accent, just as the riffing itself demands from these budding thrash revivalists. The vocals aren’t annoying, “pleasantly roaring”, and they dole out just the right amount of stormy character!

The band’s outfits, or stage getup, are very reminiscent of the eighties, when Metallica wore skintight black pants and tall “Puma” sneakers. As long as the guys keep kneading out excellent songs like these, convincingly loaded with aggression and anger, such as Thrashers, We Who Are About To Die or Armoured Assault, there’s really no need to worry about the future of European thrash metal. An excellent, compact, tightly rehearsed performance, though it suffered a bit at times from solos that weren’t clearly audible enough. Evile came at it with everything they had, confident and cocky, and seasoned their visit with a heaping dose of enthusiasm and untamed rebel energy, fired by relentlessly aggressive thrash metal riff-rolling. A good new band that smells like the old days, and in a quality way! The band, who will release their second studio album, “Infected Nations”, in September 2009, absolutely won us over with this show, and a good 1000 curious souls gave them a warm welcome in front of the stage!   

Jon Oliva’s Pain finally got the hall to fill up. The band, who released their third studio album “Global Warning” last year, have evidently grown tired of playing their own repertoire and kept only one song from it, Walk Upon The Water. The rest of the material was devoted to the one and only Savatage.

That raised some questions. Why the hell doesn’t Jon Oliva just put Savatage back together? Finding a decent answer got even more painful once the crowd was literally screaming for the Savatage classics Chance, Edge Of Thorns, Tonight He Grins Again, Gutter Ballet, Sirens, Believe, Jesus Saves and the closing Hall Of The Mountain King. The question was driven home above all by the slovenly look of Jon Oliva’s Pain, with guitarist Matt Laporte the main culprit. The guy didn’t even have a properly prepared sound on stage, let alone play the Savatage repertoire with any commitment. I don’t know what the reasons are. Was he drunk, or is the feeling that the guys can’t wait to finish the tour and have Jon disband them maybe not misleading? I’m talking about a feeling here, so don’t let it sway you!

We really missed Chris Caffery. Not only did Laporte seem unmotivated, he even allowed himself a few big blunders during the solos, as well as in the lead guitar patterns and guitar embellishments. The venomous “tremolo bends” were scandalously lacking in general; in fact they weren’t there at all, and neither was any real charge in the riffs themselves. Completely worn out, unfelt and seasoned with a generous dose of sloppiness, that’s what we can say about Laporte.

The whole thing was saved by the great Jon Oliva, who sang brilliantly and used his huge charisma to steer the crowd’s attention onto himself, so that they probably overlooked the “wiped-out” Laporte and his stage cheating. For Oliva this is a piece of cake. He sat right at the front, playing keyboards and singing. All the while he entertained the crowd with outrageous grimaces, sticking out his tongue, and so on…

Despite that remark, the Jon Oliva’s Pain show, with a lineup of Jon Oliva (vocals, keyboards), Matt Laporte (guitar), Tom McDyne (guitar), Kevin Rothney (bass), John Zahner (keyboards) and Christopher Kinder (drums), flew by incredibly fast. It was over in a flash. Mostly thanks to the crowd, who merged with the Savatage classics into one and sang them out loud together with Jon. Especially the choruses, so that you could feel a certain magic in the room. A unique feeling, the kind of feeling we recognize on stage only when the one-and-only “Mountain King” is with us. So after what we lived through, there’s only one thing to say. It’s time for a Savatage “reunion”.

An hour and a half for the legends of so-called Teutonic German thrash metal is a bit too short for everyone hungry for the unique energy of this now highly respected and, not least, great European metal act, especially when it comes to its tough-as-nails persistence! The band released their new studio album “Hordes Of Chaos” in mid-January this year and dug into their set accordingly, opening the show with the new record’s title track. German perfectionism, plenty of experience and the home-turf advantage all combined into a fantastic sound picture, which delivered excellent sound throughout Kreator’s performance. It was defined by clearly audible building blocks. You felt it above all in the venomously sharp blade of the riffing from both guitars. That was superbly balanced in the mix, and it was this massive wall of sound, built just so, that carried the hall off on the wide-spread wings of the band’s ultra-thrasher sermon. Miland “Mille” Petrozza, the great chieftain of Kreator, doesn’t even surprise anymore in his performance. In fact, it would be a mistake if he did. Mille likes to use his favorite phrases when addressing the crowd between songs, ones the metalheads who go to Kreator shows pretty much know by heart. Kreator are frequent visitors to stages even in the new millennium; it really feels like they spend most of their lives on stage rather than holed up in various dens forging new material.

In the Kreator sermon, everything revolves around one’s own existence, saving oneself, preserving oneself, in the plague of mass conformist damnation. The band persists, doesn’t let up, and is honed accordingly. No chipped teeth, in excellent shooting form, hardly able to miss their target. Intense mosh pits and an utterly devoted, faithfully “bleating” crowd followed one after another. A crowd of a good 3500 people held on with “German” loyalty and egged the band on through the show, to the very last breath, and the flow of energy between band and audience was magnificent, tangible, and the feelings it stirred were very intense!

Kreator ramped up their show from minute to minute, and it reached its peak and full bloom in the closing stretch, when, as expected, we got two bombs from the band’s debut “Endless Pain”! During the first, Flag Of Hate, Mille waved a special “Kreator” flag at the crowd, and after that Kreator unleashed their fury over Balingen one last time, cutting the audience down with the closing Tormentor. Besides the newer stuff, the show was spiced up especially by the evergreen Coma Of Souls, plus Pleasure To Kill, Betrayer, Terrible Certainty and Extreme Agression. The fierce commitment with which Kreator hack these out even today proves how unshakable the band’s spirit is, and how its faith is still full and devoted to one and only one vision! The vision of frontman Mille Petrozza, who delivered excellent singing, with that typically abrupt accent and relentlessly commanding charisma, a vocal with an extraordinary power yield that was like the cherry on top of a heap of fruit, and who made sure that, through great working chemistry and top-notch tightness as a unit, Kreator conjured up a fantastic show!

The eve of Bang Your Head 2009 warmed our bones and limbs up nicely. Charged with primal, raw metal energy, we headed out for a restorative kebab after the show, and the revelry, full of anticipation for the first festival day, carried on late into the night.

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik  

Setlist

EVILE: 1. We Who Are About To Die 2. Armoured Assault 3. Man Against Machine 4. Killer From The Deep 5. Demolition 6. Thrasher 7. First Blood 8. Bathe In Blood 9. Enter The Grave 10. Schizophrenia KREATOR: 1. Choir Of The Damned (Intro) 2. Hordes Of Chaos (A Necrologue For The Elite) 3. Phobia 4. Terrible Certainty 5. Betrayer 6. Voices Of The Dead 7. Enemy Of God 8. Destroy What Destroys You 9. Pleasure To Kill 10. The Patriarch 11. Violent Revolution 12. Extreme Aggression 13. Coma of Souls 14. Warcurse 15. Flag Of Hate 16. Tormentor

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