Location: Tolmin / Sotočje / Slovenia
Date: Monday, July 22, 2013
Metaldays 2013! Nine (circles of hell above paradise) are behind us, and after nine comes ten. Yep, for the tenth year running, blackness has descended on Tolmin. And not the kind that comes from the clouds, but the human, metal kind. The tenth anniversary edition of the festival brought a lot of changes, and the most obvious one is, of course, the new name. Metalcamp is dead, long live MetalDays (which, thanks to the desperately large number of dudes in thongs, corsets and pink stuff, quickly earned itself the nickname MetalGays)!
But the name isn’t the only new thing, because the festival went through plenty of other, less visible but definitely important changes. The biggest and most welcome one is that the second stage was taken over by local gig stormtroopers Dirty Skunks, who pulled together a fantastic and varied lineup that easily rivaled or even outdid) the main stage picks. On top of that, long-time festival partner Rock the Nation is gone. Year after year they shoved bands from their “roster” down our throats, and we were all properly sick of it. There’s more new stuff, too: drinks and food are no longer paid for with annoying paper vouchers that floated around in both beer and the Soča, but with handy payment cards that sped up buying things quite a bit. Also welcome were the beer hall with a selection of foreign beers, a wider variety of food, and the festival’s overall relaxed and eco-minded vibe.
A week of leaving everything behind and escaping reality actually kicked off before the official start of the festival, since the warm-up nights with local bands took place on Saturday and Sunday. Despite our best efforts to catch the Sunday warm-up show, well… acclimatization took its toll. Driving past the gorgeous Most na Soči and rolling into the center of Tolmin, already swarming with metalheads, is unforgettable every single time, and Tolmin and the festival always conjure up that unmistakable feeling of home.
This year the second stage offered a solid bundle of interesting acts. First to wrap us in an old-school revival storm of old-school heavy and Euro thrash metal (Paradox and/or Vendetta come to mind) were the Greeks Chronosphere. The Athenian quartet of Spyros Lafias (vocals, guitar), Panos Tsampras (guitar), Kostas Spades (bass) and Thanos Krommidas (drums) isn’t as horribly generic as, say, their countrymen Suicidal Angels. The band isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but with an untamed half-hour charge through their own Hypnosis, War Infesction, Light Leading Maze and the title track of the album “Envirusment”, they surprised us in a good way and showed that with this kind of drive they can deliver plenty more quality live shows and original music to the masses in the future.
Next up were the Bosnian symphonic power metallers The Loudest Silence. The Sarajevo crew, fronted by singer Taida Nazraić in a bright blue neckline, served up original material that, as expected, pulled now toward Epica, now toward Within Temptation. You can tell the band lacks mileage and badly needs gigs like this one on the second stage of Metaldays. Bold on stage, but already heard and very generic. Anyway, congrats to the band for the heart! Still, the first two bands hadn’t actually managed to grab the real attention of our RockLine expedition to Metaldays 2013! That only happened with the next act.
This year our crew got deflowered by locals, the young Tolmin hopefuls Agan, who in the early afternoon, under the shade of the trees, already managed to gather a nice crowd on the second stage. Agan play atmospheric/folk metal fed mostly by the beauty of nature. Considering where the young band comes from, they won’t be running out of inspiration anytime soon. The band, whose members average a dewy sixteen years of age, got through their half hour tightly and without major trouble, helped this time by seasoned bassist Mitja Usenik from local folk metal veterans Brezno. Agan manage to build a slightly more mystical atmosphere with generous use of keyboards and growling vocals, and what stuck in memory was above all the epically ominous Tema. Given their youth, and the fact that they already had a ton of original material at the very start, Agan have a bright future ahead of them.
Then came a sprint (there were more of these this year than before thanks to a few awkward overlaps, though that’s also down to the excellent lineup) to the main stage to catch the Portuguese heavy metallers Attick Demons, making their debut on a Slovenian stage. The Portuguese stepped onto the main stage in the worst heat, yet still threw a dose of positive energy off it, mostly thanks to the quick-moving, good-humored vocalist Arturo, who filled the stage from the first note on, and glam moves like jumping off the drum riser with legs spread wide were not in short supply either. Attick Demons released their debut studio album Atlantis in 2011, on which they successfully combined heavy metal strongly influenced by Iron Maiden with power metal close to American acts like Pharaoh and Cage, and in a good half hour the sextet played a nice chunk of the album. That’s right, Attick Demons are a six-piece with three guitarists who (commendably) don’t just play the same guitar lines all the time, but manage to surprise with a few refined tricks. Unfortunately the third guitar misbehaved and the sound was worse, but Arturo’s excellent vocals still boiled to the surface, often recalling the greatness of Dickinson’s voice.
After the up-and-coming Slovenians Agan, the Croatian Avicularia took the front of the second stage. These extreme death metal brutalizers served up a mix of technically demanding original songs in which the clanging of the bloody knives of their meat grinder doesn’t hide a great deal of songwriting enthusiasm. The compositions are dynamic and tastefully tied together in terms of motifs, and with originals like Anthem To Arms, our southern neighbors prove that the standards of bands from Immolation to Quo Vadis are no longer out of reach. This is also confirmed by the group’s debut “Born To Be Vile” (2009), which was very well received in the international metal community.
A lot less interesting was the follow-up from the epic melodic death metallers Darkest Horizon from the area around the German city of Frankfurt. An almost cinematically directed, fairytale-wreathed odyssey of ultra-melodic arrangements where riffs are propped up by keyboards just as much, and death metal growls “grimace” over the top. You’d say Darkest Horizon are a band that will warm the hearts of freshly baked metal enthusiasts in particular. Pretty chilled out myself, I moved over to the hot sun of the main stage instead, where the Australian thrash metal revivalists 4ARM were raising hell. With no creative peaks of their own, and a mix of influences from Machine Head and Trivium, plus the occasional bit of Teutonic thrash, they presented their current studio album “Submission For Liberty” (2012) with the songs My Father’s Eyes, Blood of Martyrs and The Warning.
Kissin’ Dynamite are a quintet of potent young stallions that RockLine has been following since 2009, when they first appeared at the big Bang Your Head !!! festival. By the way, back then the now “miraculously liked by everyone” pirate bush-dwellers Alestorm played in the festival’s morning slot right before Kissin’ Dynamite. At the time, Kissin’ Dynamite presented themselves as typical revivalists of old-school German heavy metal. Both in how they arrange their songs and in their looks. They’re a crew from Reutlingen, near Balingen, who by their ID cards have barely passed the age of 20. Johannes Braun (vocals), his brother Ande Braun (guitar), Jim Müller (guitar), Steffen Haile (bass) and Andi Schnitzer (drums) are a true phenomenon in that respect. The band, which changed its name from Blues Kids to Kissin’ Dynamite (after an AC/DC song) in 2008, made its debut not just at Metaldays but in Slovenia with their third studio release “Money, Sex And Power” (2012), with which they stepped decisively from the genre field described above onto the field of sleaze, adding to the metal they play that element which, especially thanks to the new Scandinavian wave of bands, is again hugely popular in Europe today. Kissin’ Dynmaite dressed themselves up as a sleaze rock outfit and delivered an outstanding, dynamic show in the middle of the poisonous early-afternoon scorching heat, with “topless” vocalist Johannes Braun keeping the good vibes going the whole time. He treated us to a few ear-piercing screams from the highest registers. With Kissin’ Dynamite, Metaldays brought to the Tolmin meadows an act that, in genre and character, veers sharply away from the basic metal mission dictated by the former Metal Camp. A great gesture from the organizers, and let’s hope more hot sleaze rock or glam metal revival bands follow after Kissin’ Dynamite, if some rock ‘n’ roll dirtbags like Airbourne are already too expensive.
At the same time, the small stage offered a completely different musical experience, as the locals The Canyon Observer stepped onto it from another dimension and plunged us between high and low tide, a glass-calm surface and the merciless raging of hurricane nature off Cape Horn. The band opened its half-hour set with calm, melancholic and ethereal guitar sounds accompanied by Hopsy’s siren vocals, but they didn’t leave us swaying in meditation for very long. Instead they erupted with brutal volcanic ash that turned the crowd from dreamy zombies into headbanging animals. The epic And Drift Away served as an outstanding example of this duality, with mystical riffs, sawing chords and brutal, raw vocals complementing each other perfectly. The whole thing was this time superbly filled out by fantastic drumming (drumrolling), while Hopsy’s writhing and epileptic romping around the stage added to the show, and the fact that there’s no pointless yapping between songs adds to the atmosphere too. With The Canyon Observer the instruments do the talking (and the vocals, of course), and without a doubt their set was one of the first highlights of the festival, looking and sounding like a musical setting of a heart arrhythmia – now calm and dreamy, now brutal and adrenaline-fueled, and on in that (dis)rhythm.
Meanwhile, on the main stage the dolled-up Germans Kissin’ Dynamite were just wrapping up their set, and looking at the Mötley Crüe/Poison-style, underfed singer, I was glad that the sounds of their clichéd glam/hard rock never floated over to the other stage. It was a bigger pleasure, though, to welcome the Swedish heavyweights Soilwork to the stage, who with their freshly released, well-received double album, The Living Infinite, got closer to their roots. The Swedes took the stage in the worst of the afternoon heat, which showed above all on Björn “Speed” Strid, who was sweating and red in the face after the very first notes, though in that hellish heat we were sweating even when we just stood still. Speed also proved he’s in good vocal shape, even if for my taste he overdoes the softer, clean vocals. Soilwork did give the new album more of a nod, playing four songs from it, but sadly only went back furthest in history with the album Natural Born Chaos and the ultra hit Follow the Hollow. A great performance and an energetic show go hand in hand with Soilwork, but if anyone truly blew us away, it was the out-of-this-world drummer Dirk Verbeuren, who took our breath away with inhumanly precise drumming full of wonderful transitions, snapped-off moments and countless fines (no wonder Devin Townsend took him on as his own for the album Deconstruction). Soilwork ended their set with the hit Nerve, and after a hot gig (in one way or another) a cool-down in the emerald beauty of the Soča was very welcome. This year the program at the “Beach stage” also impressed with more variety, as they laid on topless badminton (yum), men’s volleyball in thongs (not so yum), a fiery evening show and the obligatory striptease. The music program was more varied too, and thank God it didn’t hammer us with countless repeats of the Metalcamp anthem this year, though there are always more than enough weirdos at Sotočje to choose from anyway.
The Nottingham thrash metal revivalists Incinery were almost overlooked, since most people at that time were rather moping on the meadow in front of the main stage, where Soilwork were offering them their “metal reconciliation” hand. It was actually a very solid and confident performance from a band that’s no more than four years old, even if it was for a dozen listeners. By the way, they’re tight as hell, even if hellishly hard to listen to! Bad luck followed for the interesting Slovenians Neurotech right after them, who had to end their set after a measly 10 minutes. One of their computers died. Experimental metal backed by lots of software matrices just can’t work on stage otherwise. So we’ll have to look forward to the band’s next gig. More sympathy, and more of my patience, went later in the program to the American post metallers Mouth Of The Architect from Ohio on the second stage. The quintet, with a richly layered sonic backdrop, successfully hypnotized listeners with their vision of esoteric drifting in a pool of hefty guitar effects, backed by plenty of delay tricks. A colorful plume of sounds and sonic solutions. Songs like The Other Son and Sharpen Your Axes, among others, sustained a bracing atmosphere that for half an hour turned the mood into a completely different musical dimension. The kind that would appeal to fans of Isis, Cult Of Luna, Neurosis and/or Pelican.
Plenty of younger visitors with painted faces made it clear early in the afternoon that Monday also promised a show from the heroes of “teenage” metal, Finland’s Ensiferum. It’s incredible how strong a fanbase this band has. Right at sunset they filled the meadow in front of the main stage and drenched the kids who go crazy for them. You can’t accuse Ensiferum of a bad show, as it was supremely energetic, warlike and excellently played, and charismatic bassist Sami and Petri’s growing beer belly (bier bauch) added their bit, but I’ve obviously become a hardened metalhead and just can’t find anything more worthwhile in Ensiferum. The guys and the keyboardist, who gave at least our eyes a rest, played the standard hits Guardian of Fate, One More Magic Potion (into which they wove a bit of the Metallica classic For Whom the Bell Tolls), Lai Lai Hei and Twilight Tavern, finally satisfied the kids with the classic Iron, and then left the stage to the legendary veterans of New York thrash metal, Overkill.
Before that, half an hour on the small stage was reserved for the Israeli death/thrash metal band Hammercult, where sadly the most interesting thing was that vocalist Yakir wore a shirt of the cult American band Manilla Road. Hammercult vaulted into the ranks of the more prominent bands from the Middle East in 2011 by winning the Wacken Metal Battle, but their debut Anthems of the Damned is a weak, poor copy of the likes of Dew-Scented and similar bands. The Israelis served up mostly generic riffs and boring, predictable songs, and Yakir was at times an overly pompous frontman who got nothing out of himself beyond monotonous screaming.
Overkill pulled a special guard of fans in front of the stage. A somewhat more mature one. Less naive. In line with their thrash metal birth certificate. With exceptional seasoning, Bobby Blitz subdued the audience and led it as if hypnotized. It obediently fulfilled his every wish. Bobby is an outstanding frontman. He doesn’t lack charisma and knows how to put it to good use. An incredible leader and a man who knows how to pick the right words at just the right moment. Of course behind him stood the loyal machinery of the instrumental part of the band, who approached the festival set as if in a trance. With a generous dose of fanaticism, even though for a band with this kind of mileage it’s “school drill”, passion, joy and great pleasure in performing still breathe from every riff and every move in 2013! Overkill are an exceptionally convincing live act that can’t miss. Red-hot heads in front of the stage and a hefty catalog of studio releases calling back to the golden days, when metal was still young, genuine, untamed and rebellious, guaranteed another unforgettable adventure with a band that irreversibly kicks and bites in only one direction and leaves no survivors behind. The very combination of the opener, the new Come And Get It from the current studio album “The Electric Age” (2012), and right after it Rotten to the Core, the classic from the debut “Feel the Fire” (1985), ran exactly that way, and Overkill only escalated their deadly march through an hour-long set toward the tail of the set list with a series of demanded and expected staples of their iron repertoire. A performance, then, executed in the manner of the best live acts in the world of metal!
The first awkward and unfortunate overlap of this year’s festival happened while the New York thrash dirtbags Overkill were tearing up the main stage and the veterans of British death metal Benediction took the small stage. Names like Mark “Barney” Greenway (Napalm Death) and Dave Ingram (ex-Bolt Thrower) have roared for them in the past, and since 1998 the vocalist spot has been held by Dave Hunt of Anaal Nathrakh, who hit the same stage three days later. Phenomenal sound wasn’t the only strength of the British death metal legends’ set, because they were in great spirits, brutal and fucking loud! For an hour Benediction pushed us into a vortex of devastating death metal, full of classic death metal riffs (spiced up with occasional hc/punk elements, which set Benediction apart from most death metal bands), solid and varied drumming and Hunt’s brutal growls. With Benediction he stays within the genre’s guidelines, since his roar is deep and raw, and he doesn’t slip in high-pitched screaming lines like with Anaal Nathrakh. But this time absolutely everything clicked for Benediction, not just the vocals: the guitars were fat, the riffs diabolical, the bass deep and Motörhead-style rumbling, and the drums tight, clear and groovy, their destructive power a solid backbone for the guitar riffs. Hunt’s brilliant, unrehearsed and (drunkenly) intelligent stage banter packaged it all into a perfect whole, and Benediction climbed onto the top step of Monday’s podium, and it seemed they’d manage to hold it. (Organized) chaos!
The main stage action on the first day of the festival was wrapped up by the veterans from Gothenburg, Sweden, In Flames. They feel good in Tolmin, and their Metaldays set isn’t their first at that very venue! In Flames are a well-oiled machine that burst onto the festival stage with full force. Considering that the album promotion has been going on around the world for a solid two years, and that we caught In Flames at the start of that very tour at CUK Kino Šiška at the end of September 2011, we could expect widespread changes to the repertoire. But we got precious few. “Sounds of a Playground Fading”, the band’s tenth studio album, got yet another stage realization as In Flames set the stage ablaze right with the album’s opening title track. The show took place under extremely powerful stage lighting, honestly almost blinding. There’s no doubting the quality of the performance. Practically without much effort, In Flames burned the first day’s festival grounds to the ground, and the fanatical crowd ate out of their hands no less fanatically. Anders Fridén (vocals), Björn Gelotte (guitar), Daniel Svensson (drums), Peter Iwers (bass) and Niclas Engelin (guitar), who permanently replaced the burned-out Jesper Strömblad in the lineup in 2011, routinely scattered napalm through a phalanx of newer marches, and the whole festival moved onto a sort of grooving tarp in front of the stage, whose springy suspension follows the band’s firm rhythmic vise in sync. The mix of solid rhythms backed by a plethora of trendy breakdown loops and a combination of melodic sequences with guitars in thirds and riff aggression once again proved a winning and tested move, with which In Flames easily justified their role as the festival’s headliner. Unfortunately, the PA flaw showed during their set too, with plenty of muddiness in the riffing of both guitars, but the whole phalanx of bands playing the main stage before In Flames was burdened with similar mishaps. In Flames didn’t conjure up much more than a feeling of routine. Anyone who hadn’t seen them yet could enjoy it unburdened, anyone who loves them could enjoy it all the more, and anyone who had “snooped” on them several times got what they expected. From In Flames in 2013, a lot of modern and little, if not nothing, of the classic. Even old classics like The Hive sound completely different in the new In Flames than in the golden days of their melodic death metal pioneering. Nice, correct, but without highlights and in line with expectations. The main thing is that the crowd got its heads thoroughly torn up, and that was the band’s basic purpose too!
The honor of closing the first festival day this time went into the right hands. For the first time in their long career, the American veterans, the legendary Pentagram with the iconic Bobby Liebling at the helm, stepped onto our stage. Until recently Pentagram were an almost forgotten and obscure band, rescued from oblivion by the brutal documentary about the band’s leader and only original member, vocalist Bobby Liebling, Last Days Here (I strongly recommend watching it). The band started out only a short time after Black Sabbath and so counts as one of the pioneers of doom metal, and in the seventies it had already achieved an enviable and visible “underground” status. But Pentagram were always just one step away from big success, and every time it was ruined by Liebling himself, a heavy drug addict for decades. Bobby recently shook off his demons (at least enough that he’s still alive at all), pulled the band together again and the year before last released the excellent “comeback” record Last Rites. Pentagram’s MetalDays set was thus a considerable exclusive and one of this year’s biggest attractions, and the band lived up to its reputation from the very first notes. The band was given a fantastic, clear, loud and crystal-clean sound, thanks to which absolutely every instrument shone, along with Bobby’s vocals, which hold up surprisingly well considering everything. Pentagram were a real time machine back to the past, already thanks to the very appearance of their leader – Liebling marched onto the stage with his trademark tousled gray hair, a shiny shirt straight out of the seventies and bell-bottom pants, and despite everything he put into his body over the decades (follow RockLine, an interview with him will be published soon), he obviously still has a brilliant ear, since he gathered excellent musicians around him. One of Pentagram’s more important players, guitarist Victor Griffin, is sadly no longer in the lineup (but check out his In-Graved), but in his place stands the convincing and outstanding left-handed guitarist Matt Goldborough, who delighted with accurate, precise doom riffing and spectacular soloing (during which Bobby always writhes unforgettably), while the incredible drummer Sean Saley also took our breath away. His drumming was a real feast for the eyes and ears – varied and diverse fills, generous and thoughtful use of cymbals and even the occasional blast on the double pedal raised the hairs on our necks. And Bobby? His talk between songs is hard to understand and mumbling, but he held up damn well during the songs! Mighty, reliable, convincing and sexy, Bobby thundered through the verses of the immortal classics Sign of the Wolf (Pentagram), The Ghoul, Forever My Queen, Relentless and the closing 20 Buck Spin, and the devastating songs from the current record Treat Me Right, Everything’s Turning To Night and 8 are proof that Pentagram are nowhere near ready for retirement. A phenomenal close to the first day, its peak, and one of the best moments of this year’s festival!
authors:
Rok Klemše:
– intro
– main stage: Attick Demons, Soilwork, Ensiferum
– second stage: Agan, The Canyon Observer, Hammercult, Benediction, Pentagram
Aleš Podbrežnik
– main stage: 4ARM, Kissin’ Dynamite, Overkill, In Flames
– second stage: Chronosphere, The Loudest Silence, Avicularia, Darkest Horizon, Incinery, Neurotech, Mouth of the Architect
photos: Nina Grad & Jerneja Jerak
THE CANYON OBSERVER:
1. Part I: As We Surrender To Lust
2. Part III: We Can Descend Into the Unknown
3. Part IV: And Drift Away
4. My Will
SOILWORK:
1. This Momentary Bliss
2. Weapon of Vanity
3. Follow the Hollow
4. Tongue
5. Spectrum of Eternity
6. Let This River Flow
7. Rise Above the Sentiment
8. Stabbing the Drama
9. Nerve
ENSIFERUM:
1. Symbols/In My Sword I Trust
2. Guardians of Fate
3. From Afar
4. Burning Leaves
5. One More Magic Potion (w/For Whom the Bell Tolls)
6. Lai Lai Hei
7. Ahti
8. Twilight Tavern
9. Iron
OVERKILL:
1. Come And Get It
2. Rotten To the Core
3. Wrecking Crew
4. Bring Me the Night
5. Electric Rattlesnake
6. Hello From the Gutter
7. Ironbound
8. Old School
9. Who Tends the Fire
10. In Union We Stand
11. Elimination
— encore —
12. Coma
13. Fuck You
IN FLAMES:
1. Sounds of a Playground Fading
2. Where the Dead Ships Dwell
3. Pinball Map
4. Alias
5. Trigger
6. Embody the Invisible
7. Cloud Connected
8. The Hive
9. Only For the Weak
10. Ropes
11. Fear Is the Weakness
12. The Quiet Place
13. Delight And Angers
14. All For Me
15. The Mirror’s Truth
16. System
17. Deliver Us
18. Take This Life
19. My Sweet Shadow
PENTAGRAM:
1. Sign of the Wolf (Pentagram)
2. Wheel of Fortune
3. The Ghoul
4. Treat Me Right
5. Forever My Queen
6. Review Your Choices
7. Everything’s Turning To Night
8. When the Screams Come
9. 8
10. All Your Sins
11. Petrified
12. Relentless
— encore —
13. Be Forwarned
14. 20 Buck Spin
