Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik, Jerneja Jerak
Location: Tolmin (confluence of the Tolminka and Soča) / Slovenia
Concert date: 09.08.2012
Attendance: 12,000
Ticket price: €107.00 (three-day ticket) / €142.00 (seven-day ticket)
Day four of this year’s Metal Camp 2012 had arrived, a festival we’ll never again cover under the »Metal Camp« name! Day four was really the only day of the festival when the weather threatened to turn on us. Around late morning the sky darkened, the clouds knitted into an impenetrable mass, and the grounds were blanketed in a gray that smelled dangerously of rain. And sure enough. A few minutes before four in the afternoon, right before the first act of the festival’s main stage, Austrian black/death metallers Warcult, stepped up, a downpour hit and just kept going and going. When the horizon over the Tolmin confluence closes in, it often happens that a cloud like that just wedges itself in and refuses to budge, despite the proverbial fleeting nature of summer showers. So I listened to the band from inside the tent, since my camera gear is far too expensive to expose to the deluge for the sake of Warcult. Warcult sound pretty generic to the ear, and it’s hard to pick out anything that smells even remotely authentic. A band that still lacks charisma in the songwriting department will have to spit in its hands a bit harder if it wants its gigs to leave a deeper mark on the mind of the average consumer of extreme metal.
Before Before the Dawn went on, the sound tech on stage joked around while testing the mics, in the best typical Scandinavian deadpan style: »Whay is it raining today?« Of course that was pretty funny, and worrying at the same time. But the rain eased off in the opening minutes of the Finns’ set, which meant the area in front of the stage filled up enough to give the band some real support. Before the Dawn, who spent years languishing in the Finnish metal underground as the solo project of bandleader and boss Tuomas Saukkonen, finally established themselves on the international scene after signing with the German label Nuclear Blast Records, which put out the album »Deathstar Rising« (2011). Fueled by a favorable turn of events, they finally grew into a four-piece that has the credibility to be a handy live act too, and this year Before the Dawn confirmed their great creative chemistry with a freshly released studio album, their seventh, called »Rise of the Phoenix«. A title that fits the band’s saga from its birth in 1999 to this day. At the festival, Before the Dawn proved they offer a neat mix of polished charisma and performance sharpness, with elements of melodic death metal and gothic and doom touches. They won us over with their tightness, crushing, heavy-rolling riffs and the excellent vocal brutality of Tuomas Saukkonen, who spent most of the set with his left foot on the monitor, »firmly chained« to the mic stand. All of it set against a backdrop of synth layers (e.g. songs from the set like Wraith and Pitch Black Universe). From what I saw and heard, Before the Dawn can be counted among the more interesting names that could still grow in the future and win more of the crowd’s support.
Grand Magus are walking a similar path to Before The Dawn, except they broke through a bit earlier. Mostly thanks to the album »Hammer Of The North« (2010), which put them on the world map. Especially after Grand Magus successfully made their way through the European festival circuit in 2010, followed by a stint as support for Motorhead on the iron trio’s European tour in autumn/winter 2010! »Hammer Of The North« gave us a few immortal marching anthems that became real live favorites. Emboldened, the band moved from Roadrunner Records to Nuclear Blast Records without losing their creative momentum, and this year they put out a new studio album, »The Hunt«, which they played plenty of at this year’s Metal Camp too. The trio from Stockholm, Sweden, led by charismatic vocalist and guitarist Janne »JB« Christoffersson, together with bassist Fox and drummer Ludwig »Ludde« Witt, once again impressed the crowd with their cheeky, direct dose of metal primordialism and rawness, conjured up by the point of a primal guitar phrase draped in the tradition of fossilized old-school metal guidelines. JB played Metal Camp in the exact same shirt he wore two years ago at Bang Your Head in Balingen, that is, a washed-out, tattered Rainbow shirt with the »Rising« album artwork, and he’s still wearing his classic »pilot« Ray-Bans. This time he’s let a beard grow, so with his thinning hair JB now looks like a friendly garden gnome, far from the angry grumpy-guy look the musician is presumably going for with his stage presence. The band opened with Kinglslayer (album »Wolf’s Return«, 2005), stepped up the warm-up with the opener of the album »Iron Will« (2008), Like The Oar Strikes The Water, and then moved on to the new studio album »The Hunt« with Valhalla Rising and then the great marching anthem Sword of The Ocean. The new record clearly sounds even more epic and bombastic than its superbly crafted predecessor »Hammer Of The North«, on which Grand Magus neatly merged elements of doom metal with the Scandinavian sense for melody and epic bombast in metal. The set list also included I, the Jury, Hammer Of The North and Ravens Guide Our Way, taken from the band’s celebrated previous album. The band left another outstanding impression with the whole performance and closed with Iron Wil. Grand Magus are an example of the exceptional firepower a three-piece can reach in any lineup. A classic trio, in other words. Their stage sound is authentically organic, raw, dense and full, and what convinces most is the extraordinary volume of that thick riff smear, superbly backed by JB’s vocal approach on one side and the dynamic rhythm section on the other. An absolutely ravenous show!
First up with a full one-hour set were the Finnish folk metal clowns Korpiklaani. As expected, the area in front of the stage was packed, in line with the trends. Once again a whole horde of all kinds of creatures in the crowd, painted up and dressed as every sort of apparition and monster. Among them, first prize surely went to Batman, who in his excessive drunkenness expertly crowd-surfed his way to the photo pit and stomped straight onto the author of this article’s right foot. Sorry about that. A sextet devoted to promoting alcoholic derivatives was of course a perfect alibi for the crowd to get absolutely hammered. The stands by the stage were jam-packed, the whole place reeked of beer, it flowed in rivers, and the number of grotesque sights around the festival grounds grew accordingly from minute to minute. Korpiklaani started raging with Hunting Song, followed by Cottages and Saunas. A predictably predictable show, with the humanitarian anthem Vodka, of course the obligatory Happy Little Boozer, and of course Beer Beer, and the attitude was backed up by Tequila, Wooden Pints, Kirki and the closing Pellonpekko. A tried-and-true, tight and confident performance, built on combining folk rhythms and melodies with metal punch. Despite promoting the new album »Manala« (2012) with songs like Rauta, Kunnia and Mätsalle, it was impossible to shake the feeling that Korpiklaani gigs are getting more and more predictable. But they undeniably drove the crowd completely nuts, and the band got the kind of craziness from the audience that you can only dream of! After the show, people mostly went looking for food at the stalls to balance out the alcohol gradient in their blood. The pizza stands at the back corner of the grounds, right by the main entrance, felt it the worst, since they literally ran out of supplies at that point.
Edguy were the festival’s only German representatives drawing on the tradition of classic European power metal. German, I say! And Edguy still try to invent some new style in metal, and in recent years they’ve deliberately been crossing it with melodic rock leanings, which, with their rather mediocre new release »Age Of The Joker«, does them more of a disservice than it maintains their hard-earned credibility. Still, this festival gig also confirmed that Edguy enjoy the crowd’s extraordinary goodwill. Euphoria in front of the stage once again! The interaction between the crowd and the band was simply exceptional. Knowing every verse kept the band, and singer Tobi in particular, flying high. Tobias didn’t have his best day vocally, and right at the start of the set he grabbed both his ears a few times, which meant he was having trouble with the monitors. Edguy remain a delightful stage attraction that always thrills with full-blooded attack, full use of the huge stage, and above all the character and sparkling, goofy zest for life of singer Tobias Sammet. The overture to the band’s jokey character was already supplied by the intro tape with the Wham song, the evergreen hit »Last Christmas«, no less! Then the quintet exploded onto the stage with Nobody’s Hero from the current album »Age Of The Joker«. The mood went up a few notches when the band followed up with Tears Of The Mandrake, which boasts an excellent build-up and a ravenous, melodic chorus that most of the several-thousand-strong crowd in front of the stage joined in on instantly. A thoroughly confident show, as expected excellent! No slip-ups! On the set list Vain Glory Opera hit hardest, while Lavatory Love Machine, Superheroes, the new Robin Hood, Ministry Of Saints and the closer King Of Fools were more or less the expected numbers. The band also allowed themselves a bit of fun, sending the adrenaline up again among the overheated heads when they wove the main phrase of the Iron Maiden classic The Trooper into Babylon. The band loves making fun of itself, saying it plays »pussy metal«, and despite a few sound hiccups and vocalist Tobi’s not exactly best form of the day, they brought one more thoroughly successful show to a close, backed by the tremendous response of power metal fanatics.
If Madball were the grateful warm-up for all fans of »core« bands on the second day, and The Black Dahlia Murder its escalation on the third, then with Hatebreed the festival hit its peak in that respect, and I’d even say one of the peaks among the acts at this year’s Metal Camp. The return of the quintet, after 2009 when they already played Tolmin, in a lineup of eternal frontman Jamie Jasta, original member Chris Beattie on bass, newly returned guitarist Wayne Lozinak, drummer Matt Byrne and guitarist Frank Novinec, who has been the newbie of the crew since 2006, brought a top-notch spectacle to Metal Camp on day four, one that nobody after them topped, not even Amon Amarth with their pyrotechnics – they played after Hatebreed as the headliners of the festival’s fourth day. The music Hatebreed play is simply built, with no tolerance for melody. It mostly builds on groove bounce and a one-dimensional napalm stampede of guitar riffs, leaving plenty of room for the raging show of Jamie Jasta, the band’s first icon and an exceptional frontman who is practically torn apart by eruptive energy. That very bluntness, the mix of aggression, stage madness and unstoppable fury born of pain and anger, conjured up a one-of-a-kind festival experience at the extreme of his daily stage rage. The crowd, which filled the green »plateau« in front of the stage to the last corner, jumped as one, made wide, gaping »circle pits«, and went on an unstoppable »moshing« spree up front. At Jasta’s command they pulled off plenty of »stupid« stuff, meaning they were blindly eating out of the singer’s hand. A storm of strobe lights, a full escalation of white and red spotlights firing off, fog effects, a smokescreen of dust kicked up by the stomping herd of an endless mass that had instantly lost all sense, left no survivors on this battlefield. No mercy! From the first bars of Defeatist to the closing Destroy Everything, which literally burned Metal Camp to the ground! The set list also included these Hatebreed gems: Hands Of A Dying Man, Doomsayer, Live for This, I Will Be Heard, Facing What Consumes You, Everyone Bleeds Now, Merciless Tide, To the Threshold, Last Breath, Preservance, Never Let It Die, In Ashes They Shall Reap, As Dieahard As They Come.
There’s hardly any need to waste words on the festival’s main fourth-day headliner. Eternal Metal Camp guests Amon Amarth, a band that truly can’t hide anything anymore, even if it wanted to. The name is taken from Tolkien’s »Sindarin« for the volcano »Mount Doom« of Middle-earth. They’re standard-bearers of melodic death metal, probably its most epic and bombastic version, one that would quickly turn into a power metal band if the growling were swapped for clean melodic vocals. But Amon Amarth are hellish. Devilishly fast, with most riffs riding on the ultrasonic rolling of double bass drum pedals. The show, packed with pyro effects, also presented the new studio album »Surtur Rising« (2011) – Surtr is a giant of Norse mythology, which the stage set, built around the content of the new album, announced right away. With the expected intro that wrapped the stage in solemn blue and then flowed into green, the quintet took the stage and flashed into the new War Of Gods, and the stage was engulfed by pyro flames and a host of strobes, rage that dragged the devil himself out of his lair, swarms of flies and all. The sound was excellent! After the fast start, once the band finished the second song of the set, Runes To My Memory, the incredibly charismatic singer Johan Hegg addressed the crowd thoroughly in a longer pause. First he thanked the audience for turning out in such numbers and asked if they were feeling good, then announced a venomous continuation of the show, with an equally venomous set list, and called everyone into the hellish whirlpool as the band launched into Destroyer Of The Universe. Headbanging by the whole crew in nonstop salvos! Hegg, who didn’t forget to strap on his famous Viking drinking vessel – the curved horn – is a master of solid communication. Eye contact, hyping up the crowd, repeated thanks in half-broken Slovenian, but still a respectable effort from the musician, as you could hear from the stage several times: »Hvala Slovinsku!« The bearded mountain man, who with the years looks more and more like the idyllic image of a hidden reserve for the most radiant Odin, is basically the core link between the band and the crowd, and despite the apocalyptic visions of the fairy-tale-inspired band, he keeps the Amon Amarth show interesting. »Skoll!«
The Swedes confidently ruled the giant stage and the role of the festival’s musical headliner, though it was hard to shake the feeling during the show that Hatebreed had completely stolen the cherry off the top of the evening’s sundae. The band kept the crowd firmly in its grip with a varied set drawn from the catalog of their discography, which strung together: Live For the Kill, Cry Of The Black Birds, The Fate Of Norms, The Pursuit Of Vikings, For Victory Or Death, Victorious March, the closing Twilight of The Thundergod and Guardians Of Asgard.
So Viking metal closed out the fourth day of the festival, which was among the less interesting ones as far as the main stage lineup goes. The second, smaller stage offered a few acts well worth checking out that day, such as Rijeka’s experimental oddballs Father, old acquaintances from the Saxon gig on 30.05.2010 in Ljubljana, the British Crimes Of Passion, and a first-class attraction, the legendary reunited NWOBHM metallers Hell, who, as headliners on the second stage, swept away all the competition of the day with a spectacular stage show that conjured up a real hell on stage.
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