Location: Tolmin / Sotočje / Slovenia
Date: 08.08.2012
The third day of Metal Camp offered, without a doubt, the most genre-diverse and colorful lineup of the whole festival. With the arrival of this year’s biggest act, the Americans KoЯn, it even crashed headfirst into alternative metal territory!
Urgent business back home in Ljubljana that morning made this author late, so I missed Slovenian death metal quartet Doomed, led by vocalist Mraz (ex-Mora), on stage. The sun was beating straight into the stage when the American thrash metal revivalists – old school revivalists, we could even say, with parallels digging all the way into the legacy of speed metal bands – Warbringer took it. Old acquaintances from Ljubljana gigs, then, on the Orto Bar – Gala hala route. The band is by now well known and well accepted among metalheads in Slovenia, yet it failed to pack the crowd in front of the stage, with not even 1,000 heads watching the show – but the band impressed with its explosiveness! The quintet – brothers John (guitar) and Andy Laux (bass), the freshly minted members Carlos Cruz (drums) and Andrew Bennett, and vocalist John Kevill – presented the current album “World Torn Asunder” (2011) at this show too. After a European tour last fall that brought them to Ljubljana again (their second time overall), the guys pulled off a successful North American run on the co-headlining tour of Symphony X and Iced Earth, so there’s no shortage of dynamite and sky-high self-confidence on stage. The old-school package of bullet belts, spandex, jeans with “high pumas,” and a full-on war march and charge through flammable riffs laced with the poetry of war sermons that sticks to the band in the new songs Living Weapon, Shattered Like Glass, Wake Up… Destroy, as well as songs from the first two albums Severd Reality, Shoot To Kill, Total War, Living In A Whirlwind and Cobat Shock, was by itself enough to drive bodies into a wild mosh pit! Authentic thrash metal bombardment that left no room for a deep breath in or out! Just a shame the space in front of the stage wasn’t fuller.
A different situation greeted us in front of the stage for The Black Dahlia Murder, the American metalcore outfit with death metal influences laced with melodic passages. The angrily thrashing quintet, led by the seasoned vocalist Trevor Strnad (could he be a son of Slovenian soil?), took their name from Elisabeth Short, “lovingly” nicknamed Black Dahlia, who was murdered in unknown circumstances in 1947! A mass of some 3,000 heads hungry for moshing – which they had unknowingly missed with Warbringer – threw themselves into delirium. A determined circle pit during the song Miasma said it all. Once again a curtain of dust up to the sky. Trevor, showing off his beer belly and the “Heartburn” engraving, was in great form, effectively alternating between a screaming core vocal and a lower one that edges toward death metal growling! The band was caught in an ultrasonic sculpture of rhythmic blasts, torn apart by the breakneck groove breaks! Full brutalization! The band’s great mood resulted in quite a few compliments and thank-yous from the singer to the excellent crowd, whose responsiveness only fueled the band’s playing on stage even more. At Metal Camp the group presented the current album “Ritual” (2011), and besides the aforementioned Miasma, the band rocketed into the air A Shrine Of Madness, Moonlight Equilibrium, What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse, Malenchantments of the Necrosphere, Necropolis, Everyhing Went Black, On Stirring Seas Of Salted Blood, I Will Return and Funeral Thirst.
The show I was feverishly looking forward to at this year’s Metal Camp was the one by the occult American death metallers Nile. First, because I’d never had the luck to catch them on stage, and second, because this was a gig of huge expectations, full of atmospheric payoff in the re-creation of Sethian phantasmagoria! Welcome, then, to the valley of the kings, the kingdom of Egypt, its dark spheres of the occult and the mystic! When the godless Seth strikes, rising from his tomb, he brings to life a blazing horizon of cataclysm, laced with swarms of vermin and crawling scarabs, and raises all the other mummies who want to return among the living – evil is born! Nile are fantastic musicians, and they confirmed it once again in their hour-long set in the middle of this year’s Metal Camp. The only original member in the band’s current lineup, its leader and mastermind guitarist Karl Sanders, had the most trouble of the four on stage in the afternoon heat – fast American food claims its victims from a man of generous build – alongside the tall, shaven-headed, “Sethian” Dallas Toler Wade, both with “sharpened” Dean guitars, plus the brand-new addition, bassist Todd Ellis, and the one and only drummer George Kollias – the true embodiment of the perfect metal drumming “robocop” – so they fully created those sensations, the feeling of being right in the middle of the storms of a total war epic of ancient Egypt. Military rhythms, atmosphere implanted through oriental intro motifs, the dual faces of extreme approaches in the growling of Dallas and Sanders, who practically compete in spewing evil, the superb tightness of both guitarists in the harmonized parts of the guitar lines, the technical perfection of the repertoire, the vocals of Karl and Dallas backed by special echo effects from the mixing desk, and Dallas effectively firing up the crowd, often in the style of “You are amazing MetalCamp!” To get the full effect of all this, they should have been given the evening hours, when night descends on the Earth, and Nile should also think about bringing in special stage sets to turn the stage into the ambience of Seth’s pyramid, if not polish the stage costumes themselves. With his presence, Dallas would make an excellent embodiment of Seth. The godless and doomed grinding of Nile brought the following songs to Metal Camp: Kafir, Sacrifice Unto Sebek, Definig The Gates Of Ishtar, Ithyphallic, Supreme Humanism of Megalomania, Permitting the Noble Dead to Descend to the Underworld, Sarcophagus and the closing Black Seeds Of Vengenace! Huge turnout and fantastic crowd participation! For all this to really hit home, though, you have to catch the band’s own headline show in an enclosed venue. Nile remain a band that, through experimental challenge, still pushes the developmental boundaries of the death metal genre today.
For everyone who wanted to rest their eyes on something pretty and inviting, the set by Epica was more than welcome. After a third day of watching enraged virtuosos of metal lined up on stage, the lineup was literally screaming for something like this. Such gentle sights, doubled with a gentle-sounding course of events, were conjured up by Epica, a band that made good use of Nightwish’s less convincing career continuation after they sacked Tarja, although Nightwish nevertheless remain the biggest symphonic power metal band fronted by a female vocal. Epica, with the comely mezzo-soprano Simone Simons, is a band that knows just how to cunningly use the available stage space! Whether it’s big or small. The sextet is the devil. Dynamic switching of positions on stage, the arrangement of the musicians itself, firm eye contact with the audience, and above all singer Simone as the constant center of focus, instantly convince you and, by creating a distinctive atmosphere, carry the listener off into their musical world of fairy tales and legends. Epica once again drew a somewhat different crowd profile to the front of the stage, while also generating truly fanatical responsiveness, especially in the first few rows of the festival, where you could barely find a square centimeter of free air in the front rows. The band, with the freshly released album “Requiem for the Indifferent” in its pocket, opened its show in just that style with the recorded intro Karma, followed by the expected transition into the new song Monopoly On Truth, which brought the band physically onto the stage. And with it a completely new member, bassist Rob van der Loo, who replaced the band’s original bassist Yves Huts this year. The operatic gradient rose by the minute, crossed with excellent stage dynamics of metal punch, the incorporation of neoclassical soloing from keyboards and guitars, and above all, as already mentioned, most eyes during the set were constantly glued to Simone Simons, who kept sweetly caressing with her haughty angelic mezzo-soprano. The band was aware of the competition and offered an excellent set list, wrapped up by an epic from the second studio album, of the same name, “Consign To Oblivion”. Epica also played the songs Storm the Sorrow, Unleashed, Cry for the Moon, Martyr of the Free World, Sancta Terra and Serenade of the Self-Destruction.
Eluveitie, metal’s hardest-core defenders of “tootling on pipes,” confirmed with their set that they’re among the most popular and beloved bands in the folk metal genre. What euphoria in front of the stage, insane! Practically the whole Metal Camp festival was gathered on the plateau in front of the stage. I remember the band’s show in Zagreb, Croatia, in February 2009, supporting the evening’s headliners Kreator. Back then, very few people paid attention to Eluveitie. So over the last three years the band has really grown into a recognizable and leading name in its genre. The fifth studio album, once again released on Nuclear Blast Records, titled “Helvetios,” a concept album about the Gallic Wars, is considered one of the band’s heaviest records in its output to date. Hence the feeling that, of all the folk bands, Eluveitie unleashed the most distortion-hardened and backed-up decibels into the open space at Metal Camp and came off as the loudest of them, since the repertoire was almost 70% made up of songs from the new album! The octet really is a feast for the eyes. Besides an array of all kinds of traditional, authentically handmade instruments, such as bagpipes, hurdy gurdy, gaita, bodhran, mandola and various kinds of whistles, Eluveitie also polished a varied integration of singing styles. There’s Glanzmann’s brutal screaming, combined with his clean singing, with the female vocal lines of violinist Meri woven in. Infectious chorus melodies bent in harmony with traditional Celtic pastoral tunes naturally kept firing up the frenzied crowd one after another, which showed right away that the new album had already caught on great with the audience. Several times people in the crowd grabbed each other by the shoulders and jumped as one while the band set an unbridled concert tempo. During the show quite a few people sought medical help at the entrance to backstage, where a vehicle with medical care and handy staff stood, patching up noses and other damaged parts of fragile and delicate human bodies. From the first to the last beat. In an hour and fifteen minutes! A concert charged with extreme intensity, full of hellish band–crowd interplay, conjured up one of the hottest concert sessions of that day, as well as of the entire festival overall! Judging by the turnout and the intense reactions of the crowd, it even outdid the set by the headliner of Wednesday, the alternative American metallers KoЯn. Eluveitie, a team perfectly tuned for the stage, offered the following songs in the repertoire: Helvetios, Luxtos, Neverland, Bloodstained Gang, Meet The Enemy, A Rose Of Epona, Inis Mona, Alesia, The Uprising, Kingdom Come Undone, Havoc. The band opened the concert with the intro of the new record in the song Helvetios (Prologue), and after Havoc, its recorded outro (Epilogue) was played.
KoЯn, the biggest act of this year’s Metal Camp and the band that contributed a great deal to good festival ticket sales! The universally beloved “American nu-wave metallers,” who with their arrival kicked up dust on the scene and started shaking up the top of the charts especially at the turn of the millennium and the start of the new one with the albums “Follow The Leader,” “Issues” and “Untouchables.” KoЯn remain a band today that doesn’t set many genre limits for itself and often, in its own way, bridges the seemingly insurmountable barriers between metal, hip hop, industrial, grunge – in short, a band that can’t be stuffed into any little box, a band with the clearly marked trait of homegrown art charisma. Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu stayed home, since he and his wife are expecting a child, and it all started to unfold even faster than planned around the time of the band’s Tolmin show, so Fieldy stayed home by his life partner’s side. So stepping into his boots for the summer festival shows across Eastern Europe was Ryan Martinie, otherwise the bassist of Mudvayne. This left the impression that Fieldy’s trademark tearing, rattling bass sound couldn’t be restored by any means, while Martinie showed that he’s a slightly more sophisticated bassist, perhaps at times, if not equal, even more inventive when it comes to using the space to create greater melodic variety in the lines themselves. Martinie on stage looked like an evil demon. Especially in moments when bundles of strobes lit him from below and he bulged his heavily made-up eyes as he looked around. With a numb, icy stare and no facial expression, of course. The KoЯn crew are all extravagant musicians. Munky, with a facial ornament running down the middle of his face that resembles a zipper, built up a real sonic backdrop of his experimental guitar playing, and above all the exceptional drumming gourmet Ray Luzier confirmed his mastery, with whose arrival in 2009 KoЯn upgraded above all the groove attributes of their rhythmic rhetoric, as well as the provocative spirit of exploration that has always driven the band forward. No wonder, as Luzier has in the past worked with extraordinary masters of their craft, among them Billy Sheehan, Jake E. Lee, Van Halen alum David Lee Roth, Tracy G and so on…
The band split its set into three basic parts, or really four, counting the encore. KoЯn kicked off the first part with rarities. Jonathan Davis, in his typical fashion, shook as if he were plugged into 220 volts, pulled faces, raised his middle fingers high in the air, and didn’t hold back on the cursing as he delivered the verses in Divine, Predictable, No Place To Hide and Good God, into which the band also wove an extended jam on a variation of Porno Creep, from the album “Life Is Peachy” (1996). Here the instrumental half of the KoЯn crew once again drew attention to their great musical skills and talents.
Next comes the central part of the show, in which the band thoroughly presented its fresh studio effort “The Path Of Totality,” with the songs Narcissistic Cannibal, Kill Mercy Within, Chaos Lives In Everything, May Wall, Get Up! and Way To Far. It’s more than obvious that the band is happy with its new record, which is why it devoted generous attention to playing material from it. Even so, it started to bug me a bit that the band could have pulled something older from its arsenal and really blown some fresh air into its fans’ souls.
The sound was top-notch. No complaints. To ensure a full sonic picture and sonic authenticity, the band has two extra musicians on stage, a touring guitarist and another guy who handles sampling, keyboards and special effects. Davis was in a very good mood at the sight of the packed “front-of-stage.” As is only right, KoЯn built up the concert atmosphere minute by minute, and so in the third part – the closing one – they put forward their (expected) hits Here To Stay, Freak On A Leash, Falling Away From Me, and the regular part of the show was wrapped up with a cover of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall, all three parts “tied” together, KoЯn-style of course. Besides the intensity the band developed with its playing, whose theatricality was backed by truly excellent sound, the atmosphere was reinforced by generous stage visuals with projections on multiple screens and a play of spotlights, which left few people indifferent. Even so, the level of perfectionism is so high that the impression of being immersed and cut loose was getting lost, covered up by a feeling of routine, even though the band offered quite a few words of praise to the excellent crowd and delivered excellent playing!
The band opened the encore with the song Shoots And Ladders, which in its outro it spiced with the lead motifs of Metallica’s cult classic called One. That number was followed by Got The Life, and after an hour and a half KoЯn wrapped up their excellent set with the song Blind. Old school, then! A groove-voltage finale that even Rage Against The Machine wouldn’t be ashamed of in its opening riff and chorus, bathed in an atmospheric embrace of soundscapes – in short, a song that makes for the ideal ending to KoЯn concerts, because it once again points to the band’s roots and the constant exploratory streak that drives this band forward even today. Davis worked absolute wonders with his vocals, and across the sheer range the KoЯn repertoire demands, he didn’t slip for a single second. A bomb of a performance that, as expected, swept the competition away! The third day of the festival closed with the concert peak – a KoЯn spectacle!
The concert pulse on the main stage was cut short this time, though, because a few days before the festival began, the legendary Bay Area thrashers Heathen, who were supposed to play after KoЯn with a half-hour set, canceled their appearance. Apparently their whole summer festival tour of Europe went south, and the band cited its own financial deficit as the reason it couldn’t make it.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik & Jerneja Jerak
KoЯn:
recorded intro Serenity (JDevil)
—part one (“Old and Rarities”)—
1. Divine
2. Predictable
3. No Place to Hide
4. Good God (with “Porno Creep” jam intro)
—part two (“New Album”)—
5. Narcissistic Cannibal
6. Kill Mercy Within
7. Chaos Lives in Everything
8. My Wall
9. Get Up!
10. Way Too Far
—part three (“Greatest Hit’s”)—
11. Here to Stay
12. Freak on a Leash
13. Falling Away from Me
14. Another Brick in the Wall
—encore—
15. Shoots and Ladders / One
16. Got the Life (with drum solo)
17. Blind
