Author: Rok Klemše
Concert date: 07/29/2007
Attendance: 16
Ticket price: 8,000/day
It was hard to believe a whole year could fly by that fast. It feels like I just got back from Metalcamp 2006 and was still nursing my post-festival depression, and here we are at Metalcamp 2007 already! Yep, on July 16 the first real metal vacation kicked off. We were back at the scene of the crime, the gorgeous idyll where the Tolminka and Soča rivers meet, hands down the most beautiful festival setting in the world! In just four short years, the biggest festival on Slovenian soil has built itself quite a name, so this year the campsite was a sea of flags from all over: Germany, Italy, Austria, Great Britain (Scots everywhere you looked), Ireland, Australia… and of course the Slovenian colors were waving proudly too. But at Metalcamp nationality doesn’t matter. Thousands of metalheads were united by nothing but a love of good music and a wild party. And even more than last year, the festival slogan, Hell Over Paradise, came true: in the heavenly nature around Tolmin we were roasting hellishly, all the way up to an impossible forty degrees Celsius. But let’s take it from the top.
After almost three hours on the train, when it finally chugged into Most na Soči, it began! We’d barely knocked back a refreshing hoppy beverage in T’min (the German thrashers Tankard would call it “nectar of the gods”) and the town, sleepy for most of the year, was already bursting with metal on every corner. Yep, Tolmin really comes alive during Metalcamp. Metalheads take over the bars and the Mercator, and the bartenders, thank God, take pity on our ears and their love of heavy sounds, so metal is spinning absolutely everywhere. This year the official concert part of the festival started on Tuesday, July 17, but Tuesday didn’t offer anything especially exciting, at least not to me. We scored a spot in the already very full campsite and the tent went up in no time… oh yeah, putting up a tent at forty degrees is a suicidal undertaking, so we slipped over to the Beach Stage, where the bartenders were already sweating. This year we got the same system again: the first beer costs 3€ plus 1€ for a plastic cup, which also gets you a badge or a lighter, and for every refill you hand the cup back, however mangled, and pay 3€ for your beer. Pretty steep prices by our standards, but compared to similar festivals abroad (let’s leave the Czech Republic aside), still a euro or two cheaper per drink. The number of bands playing this year’s Camp was truly huge, and for a small crew like ours seeing them all is simply impossible. What follows are impressions of the sets we managed to catch.
Tuesday, July 17
On Tuesday evening, on the smaller Talent Forum stage, which took over the job of the bigger Metal Stage, Deadsoul Tribe put a bit of a damper on things with their slow, boring music. The bitter taste was more than successfully washed away by the first day’s headliner, Sepultura. Even though for many people it’s no longer Sepultura without both Cavalera brothers (and hey, at times even I waver on whether it is or not), the guys, with the towering Derrick Green out front, proved that even Max’s band Soulfly might not hold a candle to them. True, Sepultura’s golden years are long gone, but these guys are still a hell of a live act. Green justifies the title of real frontman with his six-and-a-half-foot frame alone, and when he connects with the crowd and growls out the band’s biggest hits, all doubts are crushed! The Brazilians tore through a set in an hour and a quarter with smashers like Territory, Dead Embryonic Cells, Troops of Doom and Roots Bloody Roots, showed that the new album Dante XXI sounds good live too, and with the first verse of Orgasmatron reminded us that Motörhead were playing Metalcamp as well. Sepultura could be more than happy with their set, and we were nicely warmed up for four more days of hell!
Wednesday, July 18
For me personally, Wednesday was a real concert feast. It started on a rather dismal note, though, with some seriously average melodic death metal from Germany, Deadlock. The only thing setting Deadlock apart from the crowd of similar bands is the likable singer Sabine, whose vocals are good but a bit too sweet for this genre. Vreid made me forget the disappointment in an instant, though. The Norwegian black metallers delivered one of the best shows of this year’s Camp! The brilliant black metal quartet from Sogndal sadly only got an hour, but in that time they flawlessly blasted through a repertoire covering all three of their albums, from songs like Raped By Light and Pitch Black to the gems of the new record (Jarnbyrd, Under Isen and I Krig), and under the leadership of guitarist and vocalist Sture they also paid tribute to the cult band Windir (which sadly fell apart after the tragic death of frontman Valfar), whose members included Vreid (minus guitarist Ese). Vreid means wrath, and their set was exactly that furious. Unforgettable! If not the best, then at least the most fun set of Metalcamp 2007 came from the German folk metallers Die Apokalyptischen Reiter. Energetic frontman Fuchs built a real connection with the crowd, sang an entire song with a little girl from the audience on his shoulders and joked at the end, “You’re quite heavy,” drenched us with water, threw huge blue balls into the crowd and wrapped things up with a “battleship” competition, where he once again borrowed two fans who then crowdsurfed on their battleships (inflatable mattresses) from the stage to the mixing desk. Reitermania! But the folk madness wasn’t over yet, because the champions of folk metal, Finland’s Korpiklaani, were already on stage. The forest clan served up an hour and fifteen minutes of pure troll-and-beer folk lunacy. The view over a crowd dancing along to the anthems Beer Beer, Happy Little Boozer, Wooden Pints, Let’s Drink and Korpiklaani was priceless. The same madness going on in the crowd was happening on stage too. The guys were jumping all over the place, and Jonne kept egging on an already feverish audience. If you missed Korpiklaani at Metalcamp, don’t miss them in Ljubljana in October! Hail Korpiklaani! I couldn’t have pictured a better end to Wednesday night than the queen of heavy metal. Dorothee Pesch has reached an age where plenty of ladies would be groaning over countless ailments, but on stage Doro still comes across like a twenty-year-old. There’s a reason she’s the queen of heavy metal! For an hour and a half Doro sang flawlessly and looked so fresh it’s hard to believe she was born way back in 1964. The only letdown was the (too) long, boring, uninspired drum solo, which was forgotten the moment the classics kicked in: Warrior Soul, Hellbound, the Warlock classic Burning the Witches, the excellent All We Are, and a wild cover of yet another classic, Breaking the Law by none other than Judas Priest. All that was left was to grab one more beer at the Beach Stage, or one of the wide selection of cocktails, to cap off a great day.
Thursday, July 19
As far as concerts go, Thursday was a rest day for me. In the morning the Beach Stage was the perfect spot to cool off, and it was also time to check out the food. Grill, kebab, pasulj… a pretty varied selection at reasonable prices. For the first time this year vegetarians were well taken care of too, so nobody went hungry. A stand with mead was a nice addition as well. For those obsessed with shopping, the way to the Beach Stage led past the metal market, an apocalypse for your wallet. A great selection of albums, shirts, skulls… everything a metalhead’s heart desires. A little after seven, the show I’d been waiting for finally arrived. Angry Peter, with his Hypocrisy, is an old acquaintance of Slovenian stages, but this time he stumbled our way for the first time with his Pain. Pain’s latest record, Psalms of Extinction, is still fresh out of the oven, and they presented the excellent album really well on stage too. You could call Pain industrial/electronic metal par excellence, and thanks to Peter’s talent for writing great songs they go down well with Hypocrisy fans too. Peter and his band (this time In Flames bassist Peter Iwers was along as well) energetically set the place on fire for an hour and a half with songs like Same Old Song, End of the Line, Supersonic Bitch, Just Hate Me, Shut Your Mouth, It’s Only Them, On And On, Dancing With the Dead and presented the new album with the punchy Zombie Slam, Walking On Glass and Nailed to the Ground. A great choice of songs, an energetic performance, lights, a show, and the one and only Peter Tägtgren. All in all, one of the best shows of Camp 07! To close out Thursday night, every true thrasher was drooling a little. The elder statesmen of Teutonic thrash metal came back to Metalcamp, one third of the holy trinity of German thrash: Kreator. Last year’s Metalcamp 2006 gig stuck in my memory as one of the best, but this time Kreator disappointed me quite a bit. You couldn’t feel the real energy that flowed between Kreator and the crowd last year, and the sound wasn’t what it should have been either. Kreator mastermind Mille Petrozza’s vocals were only clear at the start, and Mille himself quickly stopped trying. Oh well, next time will be better, Kreator are becoming a fixture on our stages anyway. It was nice to hear, though, that a few people remembered the Edguy “ole, ole” prank from last year’s Metalcamp… Mille didn’t look exactly thrilled, heh heh.
Friday, July 20
The second-to-last day of the festival kicked off around five in the afternoon with another hard shot of energetic folk metal, or rather Celtic pagan metal. The stage was taken by the Swiss band Eluveitie, who have only one album behind them (Spirit, 2006) but are quickly growing their fanbase. There probably wasn’t a set all year with madness like the Swiss delivered during their hour. Dew-Scented also like coming back to us, and given that the killer German quartet gives it their all every single time, I’ll always welcome them with open arms. There’s not much death/thrash metal that good out there! The energetic and always entertaining frontman Leif took us from the peak of the heat to hellish temperatures with a set that stretched from the beginnings with Immortelle all the way to the latest album Incinerate. Oh yeah, they were on fire! It was nice to finally hear some progressive metal at Metalcamp too, and that honor went to the English pioneers of the genre, Threshold. Threshold played Metalcamp with their old vocalist Damian Wilson, since Andrew “Mac” McDermott decided he needed some rest (in the meantime it’s become official that Mac has left the band for good). So the guys focused a bit more on older material that Damian still sang, and for the newer stuff he relied on a cheat sheet, which he held awkwardly in front of him as an A4 sheet of paper. It was honestly funny to see the punchy Slipstream performed in that pose. Still, Damian sang unbelievably well. Let’s hope we get some more progressive metal at Metalcamp in the future. Next up was one of the bands I’d been looking forward to most, the Finnish vikings Ensiferum. I got a little nervous about their fate when the excellent Jari Mäenpää left, but with the new album Victory Songs the guys proved they can breathe just fine without him. Petri Lindroos proved to be a great replacement for Jari and showed the crowd of several thousand heads what a good frontman he is. The Ensiferum set opened with the intro from the new album, Ad Victoriam, and then the Finns blazed away uncompromisingly with a crazy setlist of nothing but smashers. Right at the start they completely destroyed me with the incredible Trecherous Gods. They kept up the adrenaline ride on the ghost train right to the end of the hour-and-a-half show, wandering through all three albums with songs like Hero in a Dream, the epic Iron, the gorgeous Lai Lai Hei and Tale of Revenge, and presenting the new album Victory Songs with the epic title track, One More Magic Potion and the folk hopper Ahti. After the Ensiferum show all you can say is, I want more! After Ensiferum came the by-now proverbial anecdote about the cantankerous little goblin of Cradle of Filth, Dani Filth. Not only is he a spoiled brat, he sang disgustingly badly, ended the show four songs early, and on top of that tossed a fan and microphones into the crowd. Dani had supposedly looked too deep into a glass, and the official statement was that he’d had a bad moment. Whatever it was, Dani should be damn ashamed for leaving down quite a few fans who came just to see his band. Personally, I sincerely hope we don’t see CoF around here anymore! But for me, at least, the whole festival had faded by then, because the moment I’d been waiting for most at Metalcamp was coming. Yep, you bastards, the legendary Motörhead! Metalcamp had never hosted such a big name, and the name Motörhead justified the crush in front of the stage and the impatient anticipation for the cult trio. A band that doesn’t need megalomaniac intros, just Lemmy’s unforgettable “Good evening. We are Motörhead. We play Rock ‘n Roll!”, and the crowd went off. The late hour didn’t show at all, the crowd was eating out of Lemmy’s hand, even though his banter could have used subtitles on the screens at the sides more than once. Well, at least you could understand Phil Campbell. There’s no point wasting words on Motörhead anyway, with them it’s always pure rock ‘n roll. I could maybe grumble a little about the setlist. Where’s anything from Bastards, Overnight Sensation, Another Perfect Day or 1916!? But let’s not be purists, you don’t see legends every day and the song selection was still damn good: Snaggletooth, Metropolis, Over the Top, Sword of Glory, Rosalie, Going to Brazil, Sacrifice… Orgasmatronic, heh heh. The guys finished the regular set with Iron Fist and a drum solo from Mikkey Dee that left me completely speechless. Mikkey is incredible! Then the lights went out and all you could see on stage was the glow of a cigarette. Yep, Lemmy, true to his old manner, strode onto the stage like a hobo with a butt in his mouth, joined by Phil and Mikkey on acoustic guitars, and they fired off a real bluesy surprise in the form of Whorehouse Blues. The indispensable classics Ace of Spades and Overkill closed things out, and Motörhead said goodbye with the words that this was the best crowd of the tour! All that was left was to preserve the incredible show in our memories with a glass, two, three… of whiskey and cola, “Lemmy style”.
Saturday, July 21
In the blink of an eye the last day was here, and for me it started at six in the afternoon with the legendary German Gravediggers. Grave Digger marched onto the stage to the loud support of their loyal fans, to the sounds of the intro The Brave from the album Tunes of War, an album they stuck with for Scotland United too. The guys were in great spirits, especially the always cheerful guitarist Manni Schmidt, who is every photographer’s dream come true. Frontman Chris Boltendahl was in a playful mood too, and thanks to the really great crowd he just couldn’t stop laughing. Sadly there wasn’t much time, so the guys quickly put together a “best-of” set of nothing but hits: Excalibur, Rebellion (The Clans are Marching), Morgane Le Fay, Knights of the Cross, the punchy opener of the new album Liberty or Death, the ironic The Dark of the Sun at forty degrees, and said goodbye far too soon with the eternal classic Heavy Metal Breakdown. Grave Digger, I bow to you! Let me also mention here that the kind-hearted security guys drenched us with hectoliters of water and so prevented a heatstroke or two. Yep, the Slovenian-Austrian security crew deserves nothing but thanks this year, all security at concerts should behave like that! At nine all the thrashers got their fix once again, as the second third of the German holy trinity (only Destruction was missing) took the stage, the legendary Sodom. The cult trio smashed everything with classics like Remember the Fallen, Agent Orange, Outbreak of Evil, Bombenhagel, The Saw is the Law and Blood on Your Lips, and spiced it all up with a cover of Ace of Spades. And that’s not all, because we’ll be able to check it out on the DVD Lords of Depravity Pt. 2! For me, though, the highlight of Saturday was Blind Guardian’s return to Slovenian soil. You see how loyal Guardian fans are right at the start, when they drown out the clanging of weapons and Sauron’s warning to Morgoth in the timeless intro War of Wrath, which tips over into the classic, punchy Into the Storm. Yep, that’s the best description of the Blind Guardian show. The road into the storm! The Metalcamp show was maybe even better than the one at Mediapark last October. Hansi and his bards were in great spirits, and Hansi’s incredible vocals served him really well too. In a 90-minute storm we heard truly timeless pearls of metal: The Script For My Requiem, Nigthfall, Born in a Mourning Hall, Welcome to Dying, Valhalla, and a trio from the new album: Fly, This Will Never End and Otherland. A real surprise was the excellent The Quest for Tanelorn from Somewhere Far Beyond (if only they’d played the title track too…), and then the regular set ended with the always indescribable, magical experience of several thousand heads singing The Bard’s Song – In the Forest! The Guardians came back uncompromisingly with the fantastic Imagination From the Other Side, another surprise in the form of the phenomenal Lord of the Rings, and said goodbye with the eternal closer Mirror, Mirror. Let me finish with the word Hansi uses when singing the Bard’s Song. “Beautiful!!!”
Since I’m not exactly a black metal guy, Metalcamp ended there for me, while the black metallers got a dream come true with the cult band Immortal. Well, what to say in closing? The fourth Metalcamp was perhaps the best one yet. The organization gets better year after year, big praise goes to the stewards, to the Dixies that were cleaned several times a day and were thus even cleaner than the restrooms in Tolmin, and to the crews who picked up trash nonstop. There’s really no major criticism to be found, so all that’s left to say is: see you at Metalcamp 2008!!!
Text: Rok Klemše
Photos: Jerneja Jerak
Lineup
METAL STAGE: ABORTED AMON AMARTH ANIMOSITY ARS MORIENDI BLIND GUARDIAN CONVERGE DEW-SCENTED DIE APOKALYPTISCHEN REITER DISILLUSION DISMEMBER DORO ELUVEITIE ENSIFERUM EVENTIDE FULL BLOWN CHAOS GRAVE DIGGER GRAVEWORM HATEBREED IMMORTAL KORPIKLAANI MOTÖRHEAD NOCTIFERIA PROSPECT SADIST SARDONIC SEPULTURA SODOM THE EXPLOITED THE VISION BLEAK THRESHOLD UNLEASHED
Photo gallery
