Location: Tolmin / Sotočje / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, July 27, 2018
Five days of non-stop metal, and the last day of the festival still showed up way too soon. Thanks to the wonderful atmosphere, top-notch organization and a really strong lineup, this one will go down in history as one of the best and most enjoyable Metaldays ever. After one last dip in the Soča, Swiss melodic black metallers Tyrmfar were calling people over to the Boško Bursać stage early in the afternoon. In half an hour they served up a dose of solid black metal sweetened with catchy, epic melodies. Tyrmfar didn’t deliver anything too earth-shattering, but they were perfectly good for a bit of headbanging while wolfing down some really tasty pizza next to the second stage.
Belgium’s Thurisaz carried on in similar genre waters, only they swapped Tyrmfar’s black metal melodies for a melancholic atmosphere, effectively captured in a blend of death and black metal. Thurisaz are Belgian veterans who’ve been going for a good twenty years with an almost unchanged lineup, and it really shows on stage. The tightness, confidence and powerful delivery let that thick atmosphere of darkness and depression come through even better. The clean vocals did get a bit lost next to the mighty harsh vocals, though they were performed perfectly decently, mind you.
Greek thrashers Chronosphere, who already played Tolmin a few years back, shifted up another gear. They sank into oblivion pretty quickly after that, but this time they left a somewhat better impression. They won people over mainly with excellent stage energy, exploding on stage like the Tsar Bomba, and that energy carried over to the crowd too. Because of the early afternoon and the lovely weather the crowd was on the small side, but a little mosh and a couple of circle pits popped up fast. Musically, Chronosphere impressed a bit less. There’s nothing to complain about in the performance, since the guys are tight, the riffs flow, the rhythm section is wrecking-ball heavy and the solos are typically thrashy, but the whole thing sounded pretty played-out and generic. So Chronosphere didn’t reach the level of their genre cousins Dust Bolt, who almost brought the BB stage down on the first day, and the misjudged look with matching red pants didn’t help either. They do get points for their dedication to their countrymen, though. Terrible wildfires were raging in Greece during the last day of Metaldays, claiming lives, and Chronosphere donated all the money from their merch sales to help the victims.
Carrion were first up on the main stage on the last day. Four Belgian guys from Ghent wrapped the grounds in death metal gloom, or nausea for the more demanding among us, since their riffs come across as pretty generic and well-trodden. Their second album “Time To Suffer” was the focus of the set, and the band cut loose with Ginger Grind from it, among others, while also not shying away from material from the studio debut “Revelations of the Death”, playing the track Revelations. The band is compact, solid enough and tight. On stage Carrion are confident, sharp and aggressive, just a little too predictable.
An atmosphere loaded with caustic acid then gripped the “forest stage” when France’s Monarch, from the city of Bayonne, stepped up. The band, active since 2002, staged a proper 40-minute doom metal orgy and a flawless funeral mass. It doesn’t get much blacker than this. The band leans heavily on exploiting all kinds of oscillations and feedback. Loads of extra squealing, “decorative junk” and droning, in other words! They carry a drone charisma while also developing moments that smell of sludge. Quite the quirky combination. Heavy, slow riffs, an absolute hypnosis of doom. An eccentric female vocal that shrieks ominously and slides with incredible skill through a striking array of vocal roles. With effects, of course! If you’re looking for the word “underground”, Monarch are definitely an extremely fitting personification of the musical underworld. A band that knows exactly what it wants, developing its own musical identity while constantly churning out new music. They already have eight studio albums under their belt, plus numerous EPs and “split” mini albums. A band that’s special to the bone.
Next up on the main stage was an attraction called Sisters of Suffocation, an all-female Dutch death metal outfit. This year the group did pick up a somewhat less attractive member with XY chromosomes on drums, but otherwise the girls handle both strings and vocals. Els Prins’ vocals are downright astonishing, since she pulls both an ultra-deep growl and high screams out of her vocal cords, the latter of which can grate a little, as at times she sounds like a rabid chihuahua. On record, that is, on the studio debut Anthology of Curiosities (2017), Sisters of Suffocation sound very solid, so expectations were pretty high. Unfortunately the performance was in places very sloppy, or maybe the girls were sabotaged by pretty bad sound that swallowed all the guitar riffs and pushed only the bass rumble, bass drum and Els’ vocals to the front. Her energetic performance and good work with the crowd made the Dutch women’s set come off in a better light than it otherwise would have, and the audience clearly agreed, since quite a few people gathered below the stage despite the heat.
Much, much faster, and with a heart skipping beats, things went on the BB stage, where Swedish death metallers Demonical cranked their HM-2 pedals up to eleven, and judging by what they showed, they even counted as one of the nicer surprises of the day. Demonical aren’t reinventing anything in Swedish death metal (they don’t have to, since most of the band are members of cult act Centinex, one of the vanguard of the early Swedish death metal scene), but what they delivered at Metaldays was devilishly good and living proof of how death metal should sound. Demonical mercilessly rolled over the unsuspecting crowd like tank treads and caused a proper war both on stage and below it. The guys basically ripped through track after track, blast after blast, but thanks to the varied riffing, earthquake rhythm section, “Kerry King-style” tremolo solos and mighty vocals they stayed fresh and relevant the whole time, never monotonous or repetitive for a second. The Swedes dedicated around half their set to the current album Chaos Manifesto, which was the right call, since the record is excellent and, with tracks like Towards Greater Gods, A Void Most Obscure and Unfold Thy Darkness, offers just the right mix of circular-saw guitar brutality and minimalist but refined melody. One of the best death metal gigs of Metaldays 2018.
After Bölzer, this year’s festival had another duo, Germany’s Mantar. The group, or rather duet, is made up of the little mushrooms (mantar means mushroom in Turkish) Erinc (drums, vocals) and Hanno (vocals, guitar), who play hellishly dirty sludge that sounds full, mighty and loud despite only two instruments. Even though there are only two people on stage, it wasn’t nearly as boring as it might sound, mostly thanks to Hanno, who filled the stage with animal energy, and the setup with the musicians facing each other creates an interesting dynamic that you rarely see on stages. In just under an hour Mantar played a set of high-octane punk mixed with devastating doom, with vocals that sounded now like suffering sludge and now like slicing black metal. The duo counts Motörhead and Melvins as their biggest influences, and with those two references they hit their beat dead on. Against expectations, Mantar played a gig that stuck in the memory, mostly thanks to adrenaline anthems like Era Borealis, with a chorus that just won’t leave your head (“This is death über alles / This is era borealis”).
The Netherlands’ Death Alley brought some of that revival groove that’s been so hot in recent years. They call themselves “New Wave of Dutch Loudness” musically, and otherwise they ride a lewd, old-school, sharpened and punchy rock’n’roll vibe while boldly venturing into psychedelic expanses. Lewd and unbridled, with that unbridled pose and performing power, they throw you back to the times when the legendary MC5 shook out their own hedonism. So there’s a bit of an alternative connotation, and the band could also be interesting to listeners who are into The Cult. On stage Death Alley are at the same time pleasantly “absent” and “stoned”, rolling through howling riffs that build up a satisfying wall of sound. The sound, which echoes tradition, is generated from Rickenbacker and Gibson instruments. The main magnet is the vocalist, who plays a bit of Robert Plant and a bit of Paul Rodgers. Rock’n’roll psychedelia. The closing Supernatural Predator, an ambitiously stretched composition of almost fifteen minutes with many shifting moods, is perhaps even the most successful track in characterizing the band’s image. In its performance especially, the hypnotic psychedelic jam in the very last stretch of the set stuck in the memory, where the guys seriously proved they have an exceptional stage sense and performing confidence. The band has two albums out, the current “Superbia” came out last year, and from it they played Murder Your Dreams, The Chain and Shake the Coil, alongside older ones like Black Magic Boogieland, Over Under and The Fever, taken from the studio debut “Black Magic Boogieland” (2015).
And yet, speaking of the “underground”… There’s also a porn underground! The genre variety and the sheer theater of how the last day of the festival unfolded were more than enviably, and thoroughly, lifted by Germany’s Gut. This is a legendary grindcore band that’s been roaming the planet since 1991. A quartet with a bizarre show, as befits “being grind”, or rather their so-called pornogrind. Latex masks, combined gurgling from the drummer and the vocalist. A whip on stage, proper porn folklore. With the exception of the bassist, the quartet is original. Before the show even started, vocalist Oliver Röder chugged water to bring his vocal cords up to proper working temperature, and even during the set he had to put out the fire in his throat a few times. Growling and squealing take their toll. But for all their theatrical bizarreness and morbidity, Gut are actually seriously fun, if only because of their pronounced grotesqueness and strangeness. On top of everything, the band members gave themselves hugely funny names. Vocalist Oliver is “Bukkake Boy”, and the rest of the “juicy-named” members are bassist “Pumpgun Messiah”, drummer “Organic Masturbator of 1000 Splatter Whores” and guitarist “Cuntshredding Electro Jesus”.
Probably the most unfortunate clash happened on the very last day, when you had to choose between New Orleans black/thrash/death metal band Goatwhore and the equally American crossover mutant party Municipal Waste. Since the latter haven’t been around our parts in a good while, I picked them, and I didn’t regret it. Even though Municipal Waste haven’t been what they were on their first two albums in the studio for a long time, live they’re still a pure slap in the face served up by the Toxic Avenger. The Americans won the crowd over before they even switched on their amps. Roaring enthusiasm swept through the audience when they unfurled a backdrop with a comic drawing of Trump blowing his own brains out, saving the world from Trumpisms, which are even worse than Bushisms. Led by the party thrash machine that is vocalist Tony Foresta, Municipal Waste then spun the grounds into a deadly waltz with the very first notes, and it didn’t let up until the closing anthem Born To Party. With excellent sound, Ryan Waste’s colorful riffing, Land Phil’s rattling bass, Dave Witte’s drum beatings and Foresta’s barking shone through with no trouble. Municipal Waste built the intensity of the gig up nicely, impressed mostly with evergreen tracks from Hazardous Mutation, and proved that “Municipal Waste is gonna fuck you up!” really is an apt description of their show.
Goatwhore are a band that has been sneaking around Slovenia pretty often lately, and they’ve played Ljubljana too, at least twice if my memory doesn’t fail me, in 2012 and 2014. We then caught them this year in Graz before Sepultura, and at the end of August they’re coming to our northern neighbors again, this time to Klagenfurt, where they play on a joint tour with Dying Fetus. In short, a band with over 20 years of existence, seven studio albums under its belt and non-stop stage activity definitely didn’t come to Metaldays to do some sightseeing. The “Goat Whore” cultivates a special, all-their-own musical blend of black and death metal, and the tracks are quite often driven by fairly elementary, even rockish rhythms, plus riffs that touch on old-school thrash or even swing sludgy to rock’n’roll, which only confirms that the band carries the swampy character of the New Orleans expanses inside it. The band brought its new album “Vengeful Ascension” (2017) to Tolmin and played the title track from it, among others, as well as Mankind Will Have No Mercy. Before the latter, charismatic vocalist Ben Falgoust, always “sharp” when it comes to a good stunt, came up with a way to get the crowd moving even more. He egged on a solid chunk of the audience to put an inflatable palm tree sculpture, which had been “wandering” around the crowd, in the middle and run a circle pit around it. That’s exactly what happened when the band hit that track, one of the faster songs on the new record, and got the crowd briskly running around the palm. By the end the poor palm was of course trampled flat. The band opened the gig with an older song, The Alchemy of the Black Sun, added the even more elementary and octane-soaked Baring Teeth For Revolt to the live set, and showed off its affinity for black metal gloom with the track Collapse In Eternal World. As a whole, Goatwhore are an incredibly cohesive and amazingly in-sync crew. Ben’s excellent growl, Sammy’s venomous, inventive and varied riffs, and the highly dynamic rhythm section of Zack and James. Yes. A quartet that is nowhere near needing two guitars. A singular experience and once again an extremely good show. The question is whether the band ever gets any criticism at all when it comes to live performances!
Cannibal Corpse are death metal legends. They were really the first and only band of the festival whose trash and death metal blasphemy, which they carelessly gobbled and crunched through in Tolmin as if devouring living bodies, provoked the heavens so successfully that it started raining during their set. The weather had held up extremely well all week of the festival. Until the set of “Corpsegrinder” and his comrades. But it was a pleasant drizzle that cooled the extremely overheated grounds and settled the hefty clouds of dust that Municipal Waste had kicked into the sky earlier. Old school! To the bone. Great atmosphere. All in all, the band fixed the impression that Cannibal Corpse left two years ago at Kino Šiška after a somewhat reserved, or rather lackluster, show. The guitar duo shone with an excellent dose of brutally jagged, lower-tuned riffs, exceptional cohesion and precision in the transitional passages, as well as in the “comedy” of solo excursions from the otherwise superb Pat O’Brien. The setlist was as expected. A presentation of the new album, plus evergreens. Cannibal Corpse started skinning the crowd alive with a three-song run from last year’s “Red Before Black”: Code Of Slashers (the opener), Only One Will Die and the title track Red Before Black. In the first half of the hour-long set they also played a fourth new track, Scavenger Consuming Death. The second half was all band classics, including the expected Kill or Become, A Skull Full of Maggots, I Cum Blood and Make Them Suffer, and they closed the gig in utterly breakneck fashion with the “iron-horned” classic favorites Stripped, Raped and Strangled and Hammer Smashed Face. The famous George Fisher effectively aired out the stage with his famous neck-vertebrae massage, hands propped on his knees (and occasionally one foot on the monitor), calling to mind a wind turbine (with extremely accelerated blade rotation, of course). The band plays a huge amount. All the time. They don’t lack routine and experience, and you could feel it during the set. And there’s something about it. Old school. In terms of expression and technical complexity (there’s still plenty of room for it especially in the rhythm section), they obviously won’t move much in the future either. So we won’t be seeing any creative leaps, and what you hear with the Corpse is what you see and get on stage. A constant that, thanks to its classic years of activity and musical innovations, effectively keeps its venerable and respected standing on the international extreme metal scene.
While Cannibal Corpse were brutalizing the main stage, dusk had just fallen over Metaldays, and we got the only half hour of rain in the whole week. The atmosphere was so perfect that German King Diamond “worship” band Attic took over the BB stage. If you’re looking for pure originality in music, turn away from Attic, but if you adore classic heavy metal with shrieking vocals, organs and creepy, occult, satanic themes, then you’ll be puking bile like Regan in The Exorcist all on your own. Where the goat is heading was already clear from the stage, which Attic had dressed up in candles and monastery-looking railings. Attic invited everyone into their cloister, where the nuns have even more fun, with the title crusher of the current album Sanctimonious, and the vocalist in corpse paint, Maister Cagliosto, ripped up eardrums right at the start with inhuman falsetto screams. Even though the venue was a bit deserted, Attic won it over instantly with top riffs, killer solos and top choruses. Unfortunately, bad sound and a guitarist who was clearly having a slightly off day, as he treated himself to a flub or two, spoiled Attic’s set quite a bit. But the Germans redeemed themselves somewhat by closing the set with a dedication to the late legend Warrel Dane (lump in the throat), with a decently played Sanctuary classic, I Died For My Sins. It sounded a bit odd with King Diamond vocals, but never mind, Attic showed how nuns have fun. My only complaint is that they didn’t play the best track from Sanctimonious, Die Englemacherin.
As this year’s festival slowly climbed toward its peak, the closing acts and the finale, and the moon in the sky slowly took on bloody shades, Dutch symphonic power metallers Epica took the stage. They drew a great crowd and in an hour-long set confirmed once again how excellent they are when it comes to live shows. For the intro they went straight into presenting their latest studio album “The Holographic Principle” (2016), opening the gig with the song Edge of the Blade. The show is carried by the group’s exceptional stage dynamics, which never let up during the set. At the center of all attention is of course the outstanding mezzo-soprano Simone Simons, who once again captivated with her vocal wizardry and sensual finesse. The rest of the band kept switching positions, running from left to right and so on… Through all this, Coen Janssen on keyboards once again took the lion’s share of attention. Not only did he grab a few interesting pieces of his instrumentarium and strap them on during the show, he literally wheeled them back and forth behind drummer Ariën van Weesenbeek’s drum fortress and spun around with them. The members also fired up the crowd by hopping off the stage into the photo pit a few times and shaking hands with the front rows. The epically bombastic drama show theater once again ignited as proven. With all the additional stage scenery and the fiercely fired-up approach, Epica came across as incredibly engaged and summery. From the new material the band also played Beyond the Matrix, and the set was otherwise nicely balanced across the discography, with Sancta Terra from the cult “The Divine Conspiracy” (2007) making the cut. From the previous album “The Quantum Enigma” the band played Unchain Utopia and The Essence Of Silence, and the setlist also found room for Storm the Sorrow (album “Requiem for the Indifferent”), Cry for the Moon from the studio debut “The Phantom Agony” in the middle, which tied in nicely with the emerging blood-red lunar eclipse, and the closing Consign to Oblivion, taken from the second, self-titled studio album. Epica are simply too experienced to miss the mark during a show. A bomb with Simone Simons on top, like the cherry on the cake.
The last strike of pure-blooded black metal at Metaldays 2018 came courtesy of cult German black metallers Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult, led by singer and guitarist Onielar, the only remaining original member. And that was really the only interesting thing about a band that plays completely classic black metal, deviating in no way from the strict guidelines of the genre, which is also why it quickly gets a little monotonous. Onielar’s grating, coughing vocals don’t help much, though it’s true that her look, a sort of monstrous bloody bride, made the band visually very striking.
The lunar eclipse headed for its zenith, the moon was bleeding more and more, and the bloody Mars was clearly visible beneath it. And on stage stood Finland’s Children of Bodom, who took their name from an event no less bloody. The headliners of the last day, then, performing the closing act on the Lemmy stage. The band, which is celebrating a hefty 25 years of activity this year, put on a show with an excellent setlist dominated by classics from the most acclaimed albums of its early era. The wild commander of the group, Alexi Laiho, small and scrawny as he is, still looks like a naughty little boy. And he remains incredible. Not only in the interpretation itself, where his guitar playing brims with perfectionism. It’s unbelievable what an accomplished musician Laiho is. His vocal growl still serves him extremely well, and he plays guitar more than fantastically. Watching him, you wonder how, while combining vocals with extremely fast playing (soloing, passages), he doesn’t miss a single tone, not one note. Devilish solo spots and the occasional jump into a fiery interplay with the exceptional keyboardist Janne Wirman once again took your breath away. Two classically trained musicians developing hellish speed in neoclassical, that is, baroque-embellished figures. New guitarist Daniel Freyberg also got a chance to join one of the passages in “triple” harmonizing and show off his talent, though it’s clear that in this situation he has to take a subordinate position. How many more neoclassical bits do Laiho and Wirman plan to weave into the compositions? The band plays songs that are already fast by design even faster on stage. A crazy sense of each other between the two musicians. The chemistry between them runs full-blooded. With all this speed we can’t skip drummer Jaska Raatikainen, without whom Children of Bodom could never pull anything like this off on stage. Children of Bodom work as a whole, impenetrably. The opening part of the gig went to a trio from the album “Are You Dead Yet?” (the title track, In Your Face, Living Dead Beat), followed by I Worship Chaos and Blooddrunk, and then it was a carousel of songs from “Hate Crew Deathroll” (Angels Don’t Kill, Hate Crew Deathroll, Needled 24/7), “Hatebreeder” (Bed of Razors, Downfall, Towards Dead End, Warheart) and “Follow the Reaper” (Bodom After Midnight, Everytime I Die, Follow the Reaper, Hate Me!) until the end of the show.
In the first part of the gig, during one of Wirman’s intro bits, there was feedback, and Laiho angrily flung his pick to the ground, spat furiously in front of him and visibly lost his temper: “What the fuck is going on…!?!?” Then he briskly stomped backstage to see what the hell was happening and chewed out his guitar tech. Not long after, he came back calmed down and the gig carried on successfully. Hate Crew Deathroll closed the regular part of the show, and the band came back for an encore and brought the atmosphere to a boil with the cult Bodom After Midnight and Towards Dead End. Laiho and company remain incredible. With such an excellent setlist and all the fierceness with which they jumped onto the stage, conquering the main festival stage was no trouble. The crowd was lit up, and all the festival folklore that embodies Metaldays shone fully in Tolmin one last time.
The very last farewell to Metaldays 2018 came courtesy of Irish veterans Primordial, and what a farewell it was! I admit that after last year’s exceptional finish with the devilishly good Death Angel, I was skeptical about whether Primordial could pull off something similar. Their music is only a bit more demanding for the average listener than Death Angel’s, admittedly superb, thrash. How glad I am that I was wrong. The Irish at least matched the 2017 finish with Death Angel. Probably Ireland’s biggest metal export has played Metaldays before, but at pretty unfavorable, bright moments of the day, where they didn’t really come into their own. This time the night and the BB stage were entirely theirs, and Primordial delivered the best show I’ve managed to see from them so far. The Irish arrived in Tolmin this time with a new album, Exile Amongst the Ruins, and boldly greeted a nicely packed venue with a nine-minute opening track from the album, Nail Their Tongues. They didn’t nail any tongues for us exactly, but jaws were nearly being picked up off the floor thanks to the outstanding performance. The crystal-clear sound let the unique chord progressions of the Celtic-inspired guitar work of the MacUiliam/O’Flynn duo come through beautifully, while all the attention was again stolen by the energetic and charismatic Alan Nemtheanga, who wowed with an exceptional vocal performance that even included a few screams taking us all the way back to the black metal beginnings of Imrama and A Journey’s End. With the unforgettable No Grave Deep Enough, Gods to the Godless, the “disco” bouncer To Hell or the Hangman, and the closing The Coffin Ships and the every-time-fucking-epic hymn to the fall of empires, Empire Falls, Primordial sounded downright magical and cathartic and so made for a perfect close to a pretty perfect week. The farewell with the anthemic Heathen Tribes came all too soon.
So if we draw a line under the whole week: 5 days (plus two warm-up ones) and about 150 bands on three stages. Incredibly lucky with the weather, which couldn’t have been more ideal. Excellent organization. All of it adds up to Metaldays 2018 being perhaps even the best of them all so far. The whole Metaldays crew deserves praise, first of all for the eco efforts that make the festival one of the cleanest around. Volunteers were constantly picking up trash, busy as ants, and care was taken to keep the portable toilets practically spotless and stocked with toilet paper the whole time. For Slovenian wallets, the high prices for food and drink are a little off-putting, but that’s how it is at festivals beyond our borders too. Comparing with the Czech Republic is just not on, if anyone’s fingers are itching, hehe. Still, the jumbo 0.75-liter cocktails, despite the high price, were a pure win. The culinary selection deserves praise too, especially the variety of food in the Slovenian village, and the pizza at the Boško Bursać stage venue was especially great. Since we’re on that stage, a big thank-you for the exceptionally high-quality lineup there, where even in the very early afternoon hours you could hear plenty of interesting stuff that we weren’t so used to in previous years. Personally I also welcome the New Forces stage, though a shifted timetable would be welcome so there wouldn’t be awkward overlaps with the other two stages. The sound engineers also mostly did a great job this year, as most bands sounded optimal. Even the festival beer Painkiller was much, much better this year compared to last year. Let me also take a swipe at the many costumes and inflatable unicorns, flamingos and who knows what else, at which “true” metalheads turn up their (OK, our) noses. Whatever, it’s metal vacation, where people let loose and bother nobody. Let them row to Alestorm on the main stage, they don’t bother me while I’m grim and kvlt under the BB stage, hehe. So yes, we’ll definitely see you at Metaldays 2019, for which Dimmu Borgir, Hypocrisy, Soilwork, Korpiklaani, Rise of the Northstar, Impaled Nazarene, Gaahl’s Wyrd, Alkaloid and Dornenreich are already confirmed.
Nina Grad (photos): Tyrmfar, Chronosphere, Sisters of Suffocation, Demonical, Gut, Cannibal Corpse, Municipal Waste, Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult
Sebastijan Videc (photos): Carrion, Death Alley, Monarch, Mantar, Attic, Epica, Children of Bodom, Primordial
Jure Olaj – aerial photos
Sebastijan Videc: video
Rok Klemše (text): Tyrmfar, Thurisaz, Chronosphere, Sisters of Suffocation, Demonical, Mantar, Municipal Waste, Attic, Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult, Primordial
Aleš Podbrežnik (text): Carrion, Monarch, Death Alley, Gut, Goatwhore, Cannibal Corpse, Epica, Children of Bodom
