Author: Rok Klemše
Concert date: July 29, 2008
Attendance: 37
Ticket price: 12.000
The year flew by, and the first week of July brought the long-awaited Metalcamp 2008! This time the fifth consecutive edition of the biggest festival on Slovenian soil stretched over a hefty five days of concerts, or rather a killer week of metal vacation (“7 days of metal, hehe”). From July 3 to 9, Tolmin was once again the most beautiful metal town in the world! The fifth anniversary of Metalcamp promised even more than in previous years. We were supposed to get the biggest names of today’s metal scene, wild metal partying, beer flowing like rivers, soaking in the Soča, strippers at the Beach Bar and much, much more. But let’s take it from the top. Just arriving at the scene of the crime was a sign that Metalcamp keeps growing year after year. In previous years the campsite had never been so packed a few days before the festival, and with the parked cars came metal blasting tirelessly, genres from A to Z, “24/7”. Rolling into a campsite full of metalheads is a truly special feeling, one that probably everyone waits for impatiently all year long.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Thursday, July 3 kicked off the festival with a big party at the Beach Bar, which many of us didn’t make it to… We’d already run out of steam in front of the tents and were “resting” for the next day, when the concerts started. One of the first bands on Friday evening was Finnish flag-bearers Wintersun, already well known on our turf, since this was their third time playing here. Considering they have only one, albeit excellent, self-titled debut album behind them, and we’ve been waiting a good few years for the follow-up, Time (yeah, yeah, Chinese Democracy is this Time), Wintersun could easily have skipped this year’s Metalcamp. True, Jari and his crew played their repertoire confidently and excellently, but the setlist was completely standard with no surprises whatsoever. Starchild, Beyond the Dark Sun, Death and the Healing, Winter Madness, Sleeping Stars, and just like that nearly the whole Wintersun album spun by in front of us live. No doubt Jari and Teemu are a superb guitar duo who blend into one onstage, and Jari is strong both vocally and as a frontman, but hearing the same tunes again is getting a little repetitive. Well, Wintersun did surprise us a bit with an excellently played Painkiller, which in execution recalled the fantastic cover of the same song by the legendary Death from The Sound of Perseverance. As for the new songs, apart from ten seconds of teasing, not a peep. Jari, it’s high time to release Time, and then we can meet again! Friday went on in more brutal sounds with American death metal giants Six Feet Under. The band’s frontman is a name well known in death metal circles, since Chris Barnes made his name as the vocalist of another death/grind giant, those crowd-pleasers Cannibal Corpse. Six Feet Under started as Barnes’ side project, he neglected Corpse because of it, and SFU became his main band. They have a ten-year career behind them and it shows onstage, ruled by Barnes with his meter-long dreadlocks. When the guy whips them around, it’s no wonder he manages to keep his head on his neck at all. With a well-shuffled setlist, SFU warmed up the packed crowd in front of them and kicked off a mosh pit or two with some good groove/death metal. Chris Barnes did a great job as the designated pig/growler and proved himself a real frontman who knows how to fire up the crowd when needed. America, the Brutal!
Then came something a true headbanger only dreams of. The Metalcamp crew managed to lure a truly exclusive act to the festival, one of the hottest and most wanted bands of this year. None other than the reunited legends Carcass! If anyone can be called legends without a doubt, it’s Carcass, who opened the way for countless bands with their career, are considered among the founders of grindcore or goregrind, and with their last two albums, Heartwork and Swansong, were the biggest influence on the birth of the so-called Gothenburg scene, or melodic death metal. What seemed impossible just a few years ago was disproved last year by Michael Amott, who confirmed that Carcass had gotten together at a secret rehearsal and started preparing for the big reunion. And we can only write about it in big, golden letters, because Carcass don’t show their twelve-year absence from the stage one bit. This reunion is actually pulled off so well that you could easily think Carcass are promoting a freshly released Swansong, which came out way back in 1996. Jeff Walker is still strong on vocals, his growl is preserved unbelievably well, not to mention his bass playing and what it means to be a real frontman. Michael Amott and Bill Steer traded legendary solos like they had a bet going, and Carcass probably had the best sound of the entire festival. The setlist? A dream! Jam-packed with classics like Inpropagation, Reef of Putrefaction, Corporal Jigsore Quandary, Symphonies of Sickness, No Love Lost, Heartwork, Keep on Rotting in the Free World and so on. Maybe only a Black Star was missing, but that hour and a half will go down forever as one of the best concerts Metalcamp has ever seen. The guys also deserve credit for a really lovely gesture: former drummer Ken Owen accompanies them on the whole tour, while for the reunion shows he was replaced by Amott’s Arch Enemy bandmate, Daniel Erlandsson. In 1999 Owen suffered a severe brain hemorrhage that he barely survived, falling into a coma for almost 10 months. It left him with serious consequences, both physical and mental, and it’s clear that Owen is no longer capable of brutal drumming. But Owen is one of the most important parts of Carcass history: he’s a founding member, the writer of many riffs and most of the lyrics, and last but not least one of the most underrated drummers in the genre, since he was one of the first among a handful of drummers to invent and master the so-called blast beat. Owen joined his bandmates onstage for half a minute and played a short drum solo, creating one of the most heartwarming moments of the festival. A great personality like Ken is something we can only bow to! Carcass probably played the best show of this year’s Metalcamp. Keep on rotting! With their name and rich history alone, Carcass would have deserved the Friday headliner slot, but that honor went to Swedish giants In Flames. They owe a lot to Carcass, who were one of the obvious influences on their turn toward melodic death metal on the first albums… which were still listenable… let the many fans who can still stand the band’s newer output lynch me, since for fans of the older material it can only be a disappointment. The biggest one was probably served up by the new album, A Sense of Purpose. But I’ll try to be as journalistically objective as I can. The setlist itself was a letdown, since it was made up mostly of songs from the last two albums. The band is of course tight and precise instrumentally, but personally I badly miss the brilliant guitar harmonies and melodic solos in the new material, the ones that make albums like The Jester Race or Whoracle shine. And Anders Friden, sadly, keeps getting weaker vocally, his growl hasn’t been anything special for a long time, and the clean parts aren’t either. Maybe it’s even better that they no longer touch the older material, and the only surprise on the setlist was the long-forgotten Graveland from The Jester Race, which came off as average live. In Flames make up for poor song choices like My Sweet Shadow, Take This Life, Transparent and others with truly spectacular pyrotechnics, which were pure eye candy and so mighty that for a few moments they even knocked out the sound system. But sadly even that doesn’t outweigh the fact that In Flames were one of the festival’s bigger disappointments.
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