Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Location: Vojenska pevnost Josefov, Jaromer, the Czech Republic
Concert date: 09.08.2012
Attendance: 20,000
Through countless Czech villages (if back home it’s a quirk that every village is blessed with a little church, practically every Czech village is blessed with a pub, if not a whole brewery) we set off for the biggest Czech metal festival, Brutal Assault, for the fourth year in a row. This year it hit its seventeenth edition. Every year the organizers work to make the festival better, fix the mistakes of previous years, cut out the weak spots and bring in plenty of new stuff. One of those this year was the Wednesday warm-up, which admittedly already happened last year, but this time around it featured established bands alongside the local and Polish acts for the first time. So on Wednesday Engel, Anaal Nathrakh and Alcest played, but I’ll admit I’d looked into a few too many glasses of liquid Czech beer and spent Wednesday night hanging out on the streets of Josefov, where during the festival loads of vendors set up stalls pouring beer, cooking goulash and turning whole pigs on the grill.
My first walk into the festival grounds came early Thursday afternoon, and despite the early hour the courtyard of the old Prussian military fortress Josefov was already packed. This year again there was no shortage of beer stands (the organizers sadly made a senseless decision and ended their deals with the Gambrinus, Kozel and Pilsner Urqell beer suppliers, going exclusively with a range of Budvar beers, which were far worse and more watered down than the offerings of previous years), a selection of food that goes well beyond kebabs, burgers and pizza, and this year Jack Daniels got its own tent too. More details about the festival itself will follow in the upcoming reports; what comes next is my take on the music on the officially first day of the festival, which from eleven in the morning to two at night served up a whole twenty acts on the two main stages, plus seven on the third one, which opened its doors for the first time this year in the hall next to the metal market.
After a Czech-Polish foursome that offered nothing musically exciting enough to be worth your attention in the early Thursday morning hours, the first band worth checking out was the American speed/thrash metal outfit Toxic Holocaust. They delivered a proper slap in the face of hard-hitting thrash metal, spiced up here and there with elements of black metal. Toxic Holocaust is led by its only permanent member, the energetic Joel Grind, who gathers hired hands around him for live shows and probably sacrifices them to Satan after every tour, who in return blesses his thrash with »the blackest« black metal. The Americans gave this year’s Brutal Assault a lovely musical kickoff, and the Czech crowd proved once again that it’s probably one of the most loyal around. Toxic Holocaust was greeted at two in the afternoon by an almost full field, and the heated, lively crowd immediately kicked off circle and mosh pits and nonstop crowd surfing. And it was like that with practically every band!
Masha led us into completely different waters with her Russian pagan horde Arkona. The band is a familiar face on our stages, but their Brutal Assault set was even more epic, mostly thanks to the many Russian festival-goers. Arkona is today one of the few popular folk metal bands that take their job seriously and don’t come off as a pathetic (self-)parody (a la Korpiklaani, Trollfest and similar musical horrors), but as a sincere and fitting tribute to Slavic culture. Even though I’m not an Arkona fan, I have to admit they pulled off a great show, mostly thanks to a pile of fast, aggressive and epic-sounding anthems enriched by Masha’s powerful vocals. Slava!
Necks were snapped more aggressively and brutally by the legendary Swedish gore grinders General Surgery, who picked up their scalpels back in 1988 and so belong to the first wave of the genre that ruined music. The Swedish butchers marched on stage in medical-white coveralls, in keeping with their themes and lyrics, soaked in hectoliters of blood, and treated the ever-growing crowd to a glossary of obscure and disgusting surgical terms. The guys didn’t allow themselves the kind of excesses their genre relatives, Spain’s Haemorrhage, did last year (during the set frontman Lugubrious nibbled on a human thigh and some brains), but they did deliver an overdose of gore themes, snare-heavy cupa-cupa drums, gurgling vocals, and skin-slicing, bone-breaking riffs. Puke.
After the shitting and puking with General Surgery, we swam into the more serious, slower waters of the Mississippi with the pioneers of sludge metal and veterans of the NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana) scene, Crowbar. The band, led by the legendary bearded Kirk Windstein, practically stepped on stage straight from the airport, and so their set was sadly cut down to just half an hour. Crowbar couldn’t show everything they’re capable of; just as they’d covered us in the mud of the Mississippi delta, an alligator snapped at us after only four songs and ended a show that would otherwise have been one of the best of this year’s festival. Crowbar proved they age like a good Southern »moonshine« and opened with a sonic bomb, The Cemetary Angels, off the excellent comeback record Sever the Wicked Hand. The charismatic Windstein and crew pinned us to the ground with suffering, roaring and emotional vocals, while instrumentally Crowbar blew us away in a green cloud with a slowly rolling sound, deeply and heavily tuned guitars and a heavily distorted bass (the said substance was desperately searched for after the show by bassist Pat Bruders, whose knees could barely hold him upright after »a few« Czech beers, hehe). After All I Had (I Give) and High Rate Extinction, Crowbar crashed into planets for a way-too-early ending and, with slow, muddy-sounding riffs, finally pushed us into the muddy mouths of the rivers of the American South. Brutal, heavy, dirty, cathartic!
After Crowbar, the same stage went to a band from a pretty similar genre, the legendary CoC, Corrosion of Conformity. After almost five years of silence, the band came back to life with the excellent album Corrosion of Conformity, which has all the elements you can’t imagine CoC without. The guys played Brutal Assault as a trio, since bassist Pepper Keenan has obviously left the band for good and devoted himself entirely to Down. No big deal, CoC raised hell as a trio too and delivered one of the better shows of this year’s festival. Energy poured off the stage in streams; Mike Dean (bass, vocals), Woody Weatherman (guitar) and Reed Mullin (drums) clearly live for music and give themselves completely to the flow of the show, to the point where it all comes across as a sincere and wild jam session. CoC started their career as a crossover band combining elements of hardcore and thrash metal, and over the years they mixed elements of punk, sludge metal, heavy metal and southern rock/metal into their music, and live they served us a mixed grill too – one moment we were banging our necks to ultra-fast, aggressive D.R.I.-style crossover, and a few moments later we were lost in the American South, waving the Confederate flag and chugging Crown Royal to distinctly Southern-sounding rock, here and there inspired by heavy sludgy guitars. The band’s boss Dean spoke only once during the entire show, when he dedicated a song to Randy (Blythe, the Lamb of God vocalist who was sitting in custody on manslaughter charges after a Czech fan died following a fall from the stage in Prague last year). If that could count as a big minus for other bands, during the wild dance with CoC I didn’t miss a single word, because this time sincerity and the charismatic presence of all three members did the talking; Dean stomped over the bass strings like Geezer Butler, the perpetually smiling Woody served up a nice number of flowing solos, and Mullin completely melted into the unbridled, animalistic pounding of the drumheads.
A big peculiarity of Brutal Assault, besides the beer, the miles of food stands and the number of acts that’s slowly approaching a round hundred, is the exceptional genre variety; the performers cover practically all the more extreme genres of metal. This year we could hear everything from thrash (though a bigger name or two was missing), black (which, besides Norway’s winter Immortal, was fully represented only by Kampfar and Dimmu Borgir), doom, hardcore, death metal, industrial, avant-garde, modern and (over)popular djent and its many variants, metal/deathcore (there was too much of it this year for my personal taste, but at least it left time for a rest and a beer, two, three, more) and all the punk brats spawned by grind. After last year’s merciless assault, the »all-star« grinders Lock Up, gathered from all corners of the world – from Chile to Sweden – returned to Josefov this year as well. The foursome today consists of Swedish vocalist Tomas Lindberg (At the Gates and a small sea of others), Chilean guitarist Anton Reisenegger (mastermind of the excellent Chilean death/thrash band Criminal), bassist Shane Embury (Napalm Death, Brujeria) and the curvy drummer Nick Barker (I won’t list everywhere he’s played, because I’d wear out the keys on my keyboard; I’ll list where he hasn’t played instead; Nightwish, Amon Amarth, Alestorm, Šank Rock). From the supergroup we got exactly what we expected this time too; a shot of stormy grind that takes no prisoners, with lyrics critically spitting on social and political systems of every kind. Lock Up disappointed mostly because they offered practically the same selection of songs as last year, but it was nice to hear another tribute to the late legend Jesse Pintado (founder of Lock Up and Terrorizer, longtime Napalm Death member and father of the term grindcore, who died in August 2006 of liver failure) with the Terrorizer classics Storm of Stress and Fear of Napalm.
Swallow the Sun, up next in the late afternoon with their Finnish melancholic death/doom metal, somehow failed to create the right atmosphere; a rather uninterested set quickly drowned in oblivion beer, and the show by the Brazilian death metal champions fared no better, coming off as boring and generic despite a confident, energetic and, as always with Brazilians, sincere performance. Which doesn’t hold for the festival’s first headliners, the pioneers of industrial, Ministry. The band was dragged back to life from retirement (in 2008) by its iconic mascot and mastermind, the one and only Al Jourgensen, the grandfather of industrial metal. The sea of people in front of the stage proved Ministry were one of the most anticipated acts of the festival; I don’t remember a crowd that huge, and this was my fourth Brutal Assault in a row. Ministry rose from the grave with Ghouldiggers, Jourgensen’s »fuck-off« to the depravity of the music industry (»You know I was once told by an ex manager: Son you’re worth more dead than alive. ‘Cause when you’re dead we can sell you off in pieces!«) and, with excellent sound, took us on a trip through an ironworks where ten-ton hammers pounded at military march tempo, where sparks from welding set fires, and where the deep drumming was interrupted only by the high-pitched screech of cutting metal. I admit I knew the band only by name before the show, but the hypnotic, repetitive instrumental parts interwoven with almost »Slayer-like« riffs and solos, a mighty wall of sound that sounds like an iron mine and the Raven ironworks set to music at the same time, the many movie samples (and the ever-present Bushisms) that blend brilliantly into the musical backdrop, and the unique figure of the bandleader were without a doubt one of the festival’s highlights. Jourgensen, who marched on stage in a top hat, jacket and the obligatory Lennon shades, comes across in his vocal raging like a herald of revolution, a modern-day messiah, the Jesus of the 99% movement. There was no shortage of deep criticism of the US in the era of the elder and the younger Bush (Dubbya is an especially big thorn in Al’s side, having been given a whole trilogy of albums in Ministry’s discography) with LiesLiesLies and N.W.O. (a protest against the Gulf War and the politics of Bush senior), nor of the eternal anthems The Last Sucker, Psalm 69, Just One Fix and, to close, Thieves, a critique of political corruption (with samples of the character »Gunnery Sergeant Hartman«, unforgettably played by R. Lee Ermey in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket: »Get up! Get on your feet!« »You will not kill!« »I can’t hear you«)! It was like a ten-ton tow truck ran us over and pneumatic hammers tuned our eardrums.
The second headliners of the evening took the neighboring stage: Norwegian symphonic black metallers Dimmu Borgir, whom I watched with interest at first, but my interest faded after just three songs. The boring, predictable and artificially bombastic symphonic sheen just wouldn’t settle in my ears, though Dimmu Borgir certainly deserve credit for their high professionalism, stage command and theatricality. The pompous, epic pomp would have gone down easier without Shagrath’s tedious snarling, which is even more annoying in the new songs; the one who really shone was Galder (Old Man’s Child) with his phenomenal guitar lines, which build a better atmosphere than all the unnecessary quasi-symphonic clutter. Plus he’s got a krieg mustache!
My Thursday night ended with the Swiss veterans Samael, who at midnight managed to carry the state of consciousness off among the stars. Samael came with a high-energy show, otherworldly themes and, above all, the charismatic presence of Vorph, who once again held the crowd in his fists from the first second to the last without any trouble. Samael are still flying high on the wings of the quite successful record Lux Mundi, released last year, but they put together a set spanning practically the whole of the band’s career. My Saviour, Rain, Slavocracy, Soul Invictus and Baphomet’s Throne were the peaks of a set that Samael closed somewhat unpredictably with The Truth is Marching On from the new record, but the move proved effective, since the song is a pretty big and obvious tribute to the band’s black metal roots, even though those today blend successfully and generously with a hefty dose of electronic elements. Despite my great wish to also see Nile and Arcturus, my knees and eyes disagreed and dragged me off to a well-deserved rest in the tent to gather strength for the next day.
Setlist
ARKONA:
1. Az’ (Intro)
2. Arkaim
3. Ot serdca k nebu
4. Goi, Rode, Goi!
5. Slav’sja, Rus’!
6. Zakliatie
7. Stenka na Stenku
8. Yarilo
CROWBAR:
1. The Cemetary Angels
2. All I Had (I Gave)
3. High Rate Extinction
4. Planets Collide
MINISTRY:
1. Ghouldiggers
2. No W
3. Rio Grande Blood
4. LiesLiesLies
5. 99 Percenters
6. Watch Yourself
7. Life is Good
8. Waiting
9. Relapse
10. The Last Sucker
11. Psalm 69
12. N.W.O.
13. Just One Fix
14. Thieves
DIMMU BORGIR:
1. Spellbound (By the Devil)
2. In Death’s Embrace
3. Dimmu Borgir
4. Gateways
5. Ritualist
6. Vredesbyrd
7. The Serpentine Offering
8. Puritania
9. Progenies of the Great Apocalypse
10. Mourning Palace
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