Author: Rok Klemše, Aleš Podbrežnik, Primož Novak
Photos: Nina Grad, Sebastijan Videc
Video: Sebastijan Videc
Location: Tolmin, Slovenia
Concert date: July 23, 2018
Attendance: 12,000
Ticket price: €150.00 (full-week ticket)
Metaldays has put Slovenia on the map as a country with big metal festivals since 2004, and it’s always a pleasure to go back. Over the years it has become exactly what its slogan promises, turning Tolmin into a proper metal holiday for a whole week, and this year the festival sold out for the first time before it even started. The organizing crew tries out new things every year, mostly very welcome ones, and this time the Sunday view of a meadow jam-packed with tents was a gorgeous welcome. Once again the festival offered a »warm up« evening on Saturday, and on Sunday the first real festival day, with bands on the New Forces stage. We kicked off our concert-going on Monday.
We started Metaldays 2018 with a toxic assault from Bavarian thrashers Dust Bolt. The German four-piece doesn’t say anything new with their thrash, but with raw energy and a great performance they instantly won over a few hundred heads in front of the stage. In fact, it used to be rare for the first bands on the second stage to draw such a crowd, but this year it was more the rule than the exception. That clearly speaks to the high quality of the Boško Bursać stage lineup, and it’s also an obvious sign of how sold out this year’s Metaldays was. It all played into Dust Bolt’s hands too: they quickly whipped up a proper mosh frenzy in the pit, and everyone on stage was bursting with energy as well, since the headbanging around the guitar necks just didn’t seem to end. Genre-wise, Dust Bolt are very close to their countrymen Kreator, but they add Bay Area thrash influences and in places even hardcore. Any lack of originality is made up for with explosiveness and youthful ferocity, which among new-wave thrashers only the likes of Crisix and Lost Society come close to.
The Americans Pillorian took us into completely different musical waters. They’re led by John Haughm, former mastermind of the excellent American folk/doom/black metal outfit Agalloch. Agalloch split two years ago, Haughm moved toward black metal with Pillorian, and the other three members are continuing the Agalloch story in Khorada. At Metaldays, Pillorian presented last year’s debut Obsidian Arc in a dark light and proved they’re not just Agalloch 2.0. Haughm’s new baby is much more vicious, furious and contemptuous than its gentler predecessor. The dark heart of Pillorian beats to the rhythms of traditional black metal, though the Americans proved they’re easy to tell apart from completely classic black metal. The ghosts of Haughm’s musical past are very much alive, sneaking out mainly in the terrifying guitar melodies, the melancholic atmosphere and Haughm’s piercing, nihilistic screams. Another very pleasant surprise in a row.
The same can’t be said at all for the next act, Czech grinders Jig-Ai, who delivered exactly what you’d expect from a band that plays grind and on top of that comes from the Czech Republic. The Prague trio served up a blast of proper but rather generic goregrind, full of polka rhythms, blasts and d-beat drumming, spastic outbursts and sick ideas. Like their countrymen Spasm, Rectal Smegma or Gutalax, Jig-Ai offer a whole palette of, ahem, interesting ideas about ninja groupies, bukkake, bodily fluids and orifices. The lyrics would make feminists’ blood boil. They’re sung exactly in style, as if coming from the throat of a rabid boar from the woods. The Prague disgust was tailor-made for goregrind fans, but our own Prekmurje fuckers Vulvahtrone push it much better in this genre, and with more oomph.
Meanwhile, with things already happily boiling on the »forest« stage, the main stage finally woke up at half past four in the afternoon. That’s when Austria’s Moros climbed onto it. The band has more than a decade behind it and combines elements of death metal and thrash. They have only one studio album to their name, »Lakeside Terrorfrönt« from 2014. Last year they already played Tolmin, on the festival’s warm-up day. It was a tight, compact show. The songs Skeleton King, Lakeside Terrorfrönt, 7 P.M. and Psychotic Maniäcs grabbed you keenly and sturdily. The guys are confident, and while they don’t add anything particularly shattering to the metal alphabet, they do what they do with heart and devotion. Most entertaining was the sight of vocalist Mons: with psychotically darting eyes under a baseball cap in the midst of the afternoon heat, a bright red face and bulging neck veins, he announced through his growling that the Monday afternoon sun had uncompromisingly set upon the festival grounds.
The set by the Dutch Vuur had already drawn quite a few curious onlookers to the front of the stage. This is a band that came together two years ago around the (by now almost famous) singer Anneke Van Giersbergen (ex-The Gathering). She’s one of those artists whose voice many a performer would love to have on their studio record, and she’s especially well known to fans of Devin Townsend and Ayreon. Now Anneke has her own band, which also has a studio debut to its name, »In This Moment We Are Free – Cities«, released last year. Although the promo copy shoves them into the prog metal category, Vuur come across as a collective that isn’t all that interested in metal. The songs are layered and dynamic, and what stands out is of course Anneke’s vocal experimentation, as she really gives it her all this time and takes absolute freedom in her vocal expression and the overall result. Armed with a Gibson SG guitar, Anneke is the band’s main magnet thanks to her vocal charisma, though the music lacks just a bit more of its own identity, a more itchy compositional focus, which in other words means a bit more creative self-confidence as authors. Drummer Ed Warby, a familiar face from Ayreon and Gorefest, was especially impressive, wowing with his precision and versatility. So this is a band with creative potential for the future and a lovely addition to the festival lineup. Definitely a group that will grow artistically with new studio releases. The band also develops a concrete rhythmic groove which, paired with the welcome lower tuning of the massive guitar riffs, grabs you satisfactorily. The band presented their studio debut and closed the show with The Gathering’s Strange Machines.
Hecate Enthroned are legendary extreme metallers from Wales. Of the original lineup, the sextet today includes guitarist Nigel Dennen, followed closely in seniority by bassist Dylan Hughes and guitarist Andy Milnes. That trio forms the core of the band in its new era too, in which the black-metal-rooted band has started bringing more and more death metal elements into its music. Although they’ve been on the scene for a long time, Hecate Enthroned are rather lazy when it comes to albums. The latest, »Virulent Rapture«, came out in 2013, and almost a whole decade passed between it and its predecessor »Redimus« (2004). The band has been promising a new studio album for quite a while, and current vocalist Joe Stamps, who uses a rather special, let’s say »croaking« growl, said so out loud in one of the breaks during the Tolmin show. The band then launched into a completely new song, Revelations in Autumn Flame. With this song too, the band sticks to rudimentary, old-school riffs, which keeps it in touch with its roots while also nurturing the high musical caliber that generally characterizes their compositions. The band has shed all the black metal paraphernalia of glitz and kitsch that used to accompany it, and with which back in the day it successfully »provoked« its generational »fellow sufferers«, the much more notorious Cradle of Filth, for example. They touched on that era in Tolmin too, so among other things we got Dark Requiems and Unsilent Massacre, taken from the album of the same name, the band’s second studio record. The band showed a great deal of stage tightness and cohesion during the show, surely a reflection of rich experience and many miles on the road. The concert came with excellent sound and was almost exclusive, since it’s extremely hard to catch the band on stage these days.
The first visit to this year’s New Forces stage went by in a much more refined mood. We waded through the marsh fog late in the afternoon, after first taking a short trip to the idyllic Belgian cities of Ghent and Bruges, home to melodic death metallers Reject the Sickness. The five-piece released their second studio album The Weight of Silence this spring and presented it with great force in just under half an hour. The guys won people over on stage with their liveliness and bounce, a bit less so with their musical image, which can’t really be faulted for anything but at the same time doesn’t stand out in any way from the gray average of a flood of similar-sounding bands.
The fog of the Ljubljana Marshes was much more pleasant with Morost. In a good half hour the girl and guys once again showed, sadly to a rather small crowd, their vision of atmospheric death/black metal in a good light, marked by broken rhythms, atmospheric guitar parts, a dynamic rhythm section and Jonas’s raw, cutting vocals. The tracks from the debut Solace and Solitude convinced once more, the newer stuff like the progressively inclined The Conundrum even more so, a bit less so the weaker-sounding keyboards and the band’s hopeless stiffness, as they still stand on stage as if buried in the ground. Teasing us with new songs is already downright shameless though, and we’re waiting for the new album!
Jinjer is a Ukrainian metalcore quartet that last September opened for the notorious Arch Enemy at Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna, on the very day of the final showdown in which Slovenia beat Serbia and conquered all of European basketball. The black vocal panther wrapped in mystery, Tatiana Shmailyuk, who doesn’t look all that Ukrainian, is the band’s main source of attraction. Vocally she knows no unknowns. She goes from crystal-clear, softly dreamy delivery of verses to fierce, ominous growling. The band skillfully builds all of this into its toxic rhythmic groove kinetics. For a woman, it’s a convincing and sufficiently »robust« growl. In contrast to the static stage figures of the guitarist and bassist, Tatiana is a true »athlete«, using every nook of the stage with her dynamic running around. The band bets everything on the catchy melodic format of its songs. The tracks are built on a wall of lower-tuned riffs, backed by voluminous and constantly active, dynamic rhythm kinetics. A technically very accomplished band, which is why it carries development potential. Also into the fields of experimentation, though the question is how much they dare. The proven musical track they’re on opens up space for them with audiences right now, and after a convincing festival performance in Tolmin, its number of followers has surely grown. Among others, the band played: Words Of Wisdom, Who’s Gonna Be The One, I Speak Astronomy, Pisces, Outlander, Cloud Factory and Bad Water.
The absolutely nicest and most unexpected surprise followed when all six members of Monday’s New Forces stage headliners, the Americans Oubliette, crammed onto the stage. The French-sounding name means a type of dungeon, the only entrance to which is through a trapdoor in the ceiling, and true to the name, the Americans pinned some two hundred heads in front of the stage in place for three quarters of an hour with top-notch melodic black metal. The core of Oubliette is the married couple Mike (guitar; Inferi) and Emily (vocals) Low, and alongside them the band mostly features members of the black/death outfit Enfold Darkness. Oubliette released their second studio album The Passage right before Metaldays, presented most of it in Tolmin, and flat-out stunned with a superb performance. The girl and guys are close to bands like Thulcandra and Canada’s Frostbite, distinguished by Emily’s fierce yet clear and distinct vocals, a strong rhythm section and a rich atmosphere woven by no fewer than three guitars, which masterfully swing between tremolo brutality, epic riffing and skillfully constructed pentatonic melodies. Oubliette are proof that the US state of Tennessee isn’t musically just country-achy-breaky-heart, but evidently has a strong underground extreme metal scene. This was Oubliette’s very first show on European soil, and I strongly hope it’s not the last, because their Monday set stuck in memory as one of the nicest of this year’s festival.
With England’s Ingested on the second stage, followers of modern brutal music got their fill too. This is a band that uses elements of brutal death metal and deathcore. You could also describe them as slamming deathcore. Ingested served it up with fast guitars and drums, guttural vocals and of course breakdowns, which suited the warmed-up crowd at the front just fine, so a moshpit or two could form. Ingested may not be anything outstanding, but they definitely spiced up the festival lineup.
Poland’s Hate were described years ago as »baby« Behemoth, when they shifted from brutal death metal to blackened death metal, which was apparently more palatable to a bigger audience. The associations with Behemoth came up again this time, but there’s something more behind Hate, and it would be unfair to label them a pale copy of Behemoth. The band served up uncompromising death metal that also borrowed black metal tricks. A proven formula, and you could see the band has plenty of miles on the road. The tightness was more than solid, and drummer Pavulon (Vader, Decapitated) was catching up at times: he’s very fast, but occasionally lacked precision. The emphasis was of course on the latest albums, and for anything more you’ll have to catch the band in a club.
The main stage was still reserved for prog followers. Norwegian progressive rock outfit Leprous has become one of the most talked-about bands on the prog scene in recent years. They first won people over as the backing band of black metal bigwig Ihsahn, but it later turned out that Leprous have to work as an independent band because they’re too ambitious. Behind that ambition stands vocalist/keyboardist Einar Solberg, who showed exceptional vocal abilities. The band emphasized material from the latest album Malina (2017). With what they played, they also proved excellent cohesion and precision. The punchy rhythms were handled by young drummer Baard Kolstad, who never ran out of ideas for spicing up even the simplest parts of the songs. Besides the instrumental tightness, the flawless vocal harmonies deserve praise. With this performance Leprous showed they’re a hard-working band that will go the extra mile for every show.
After the »cerebral« Leprous, the Scots Alestorm completely »flipped the record« on the main stage. Like a few other bands at this very festival, they got their inventory number long ago, and so before the show started, battalions of party-hungry visitors poured unstoppably toward the stage. Alestorm enjoyed by far the biggest crowd on the main stage up to that point. That was expected. Their cliché power metal, which in terms of poetry could belong in some alcohol brand’s commercial jingle, has lately been going through almost a streak of self-parody. The band now drags a gigantic inflatable duck sculpture on stage, which it floats out over the crowd toward the end of the show. In the background hangs a banner with bananas from which two goose heads peek out. We witnessed something like that ten days ago at Germany’s Bang Your Head!!! festival, though that festival draws a rather different clientele than Metaldays. Alestorm are actually one of the »creators« of the Metaldays clientele. Their party march strung together beer-soaked onslaughts: Keelhauled, Alestorm, Mexico, The Sunk’n Norwegian, Nancy the Tavern Wench, Rumpelkombo, Hangover, Captain Morgan’s Revenge, Drink in Fucked With an Anchor. An amusement park of cynicism by short-pants-wearing Scottish power metal mockers. The crowd went wild, and if you didn’t realize it earlier, a show like this makes you aware of all the uniqueness generated by the energy and vibration of the double confluence in Tolmin, which gives Metaldays its stamp of uniqueness. So for the first time in the coming week of the festival, the folks blasphemously and boundlessly cut loose. Expected. In moves that are at times downright absurd, Alestorm conjure a moment full of goofing around and silliness, embodied by frontman Christopher Bowes himself. And that evidently ignites the crowd. Not only is Christopher a thoroughly average singer who knows it himself, with his constant stage activity he also likes to hit the odd wrong note on the keyboards, which simply belongs to the band’s stage quirks and habits. The man also drew attention with a white T-shirt reading: »I Got Lost in the Gay Dolphin«.
Three years ago the Americans Skeletonwitch delivered one of the more unpleasant pieces of news when they showed the charismatic bearded vocalist Chance Garnett the door, reportedly because of one too many looks into the bottle. The band’s fate hung by a thread for quite a while, but they picked themselves up and settled their ranks with new vocalist Adam Clemans (Wolvhammer). The fan base split in two: some can’t get over Chance’s departure, while others welcomed Clemans with open arms. Personally I’m on the side of the latter, though I don’t deny that Chance’s absence is strongly felt. He convinced you with just his look, like someone who crawled out of the woods into civilization after a few decades. Still, Adam bravely stepped into big shoes and has already recorded the strong EP The Aphotic Gloom with Skeletonwitch, plus the brand-new album Devouring Radiant Light, which came out only a few days before Metaldays. This Skeletonwitch show was therefore mostly in the light of the two releases with Clemans, who, like the whole band, convinced live with unbridled energy, even though with him Skeletonwitch come across as somewhat more »serious« and »mature« live, and with his vocals Clemans moves the band musically closer to the darkness of black metal rather than a raging death/thrash metal stampede. Even so, Skeletonwitch delivered one of the best energy blasts of the festival, the Garnette/Hedrick duo once again won people over with their galloping guitar work, and the new tracks, especially Well of Despair, Red Death, White Light, Fen of Shadows and Temple of the Sun, thoroughly tortured our neck muscles. Add classics like the two-and-a-half-minute blast Beyond the Permafrost and the eternal I Am Death (Hell Has Arrived), and the picture is perfect. Skeletonwitch undoubtedly wrote themselves in among the better acts of this year.
The area in front of the Boško Bursać stage filled up even more than it did for Skeletonwitch when Norwegian black metal veterans Carpathian Forest stepped onto it, a band that hasn’t visited Slovenia in an eternity. Frontman Nattefrost and his company delivered an hour-long show of primitive, three-chord black metal that, with punk and rock ‘n’ roll energy, set off a proper party in front of the stage. Even more delightful was the cult circus performer Nattefrost, who on stage acts like some kind of black metal kid. He marched onto the stage with an enormous upside-down cross, dressed in a black cowl under which, of course, he wore nothing. So we got an eyeful of bare thighs when he put his foot up on the monitors, and a bare ass was naturally not missing either. Even better were his wacky dance moves, the joking banter that had us laughing to tears, and the countless »ughs«. One of the more, to put it mildly, interesting shows of this year’s Metaldays. Ugh!
Much as with Alestorm (and later on that same stage (new this year) even Behemoth), the same goes for Swiss folk metallers Eluveitie: they’re a Metaldays »house band«, so to speak. Given how often they show up at the festival, I’d dare say Metaldays built their name and that Eluveitie consequently grew into a bigger band. In 2009, when they played in February as the opener on Kreator’s tour, nobody in Zagreb’s Boogaloo knew them, for example. Today they reap great popularity among the young guard of metal fans and fill big venues. The nonet didn’t deliver their best this evening, though. First of all, they didn’t seem in the best sync, and they didn’t deliver decent sound either. The band did draw a crowd of several thousand in front of the stage, as packed as when Alestorm had been horsing around there a little earlier, and with a somewhat reserved performance it could comfortably lean on past work and past triumphant epics at the Tolmin festival. Chrigel Glanzmann wasn’t quite himself, perhaps it shows that he had only just returned from the hospital, which made Eluveitie skip a few summer festivals. The band is also performing with a revamped lineup, but in the professional business Eluveitie are in, that shouldn’t be a reason for a less convincing show in Tolmin. Still, Eluveitie pulled out the essence and, on the wings of Your Gaulish War, King, Nil, Lvgvs, Quoth the Raven, The Call of the Mountains, A Rose for Epona, Thousandfold and the obligatory Rebirth and Inis Mona, made their numerous audience happy.
The first day of the festival was closed in grand style on the Lemmy stage by the Polish, well, behemoths, Behemoth. Stage setup took quite long, since Inferno was once again seated on a high platform with his drum kit, and the guitar trio each had their own podium and huge microphones decorated with Luciferian symbols, as is customary. Behemoth greeted Tolmin this time with Ov Fire and the Void, and the rest was again largely in the light of the rather boring The Satanist, with the exception of the supercharged Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer. Why the stage setup took so long was clear right at the start, since the Poles put together a real fire spectacle full of erupting explosions and jets of flame. The sight of the stage was truly spectacular, but unfortunately the hopelessly exaggerated posturing and over-the-top theatricality quickly came to the surface, at times bordering on parody. The experience was also somewhat spoiled by rather poor, thin and muddy sound and Nergal’s nonsensical banter. Behemoth did redeem themselves with the presentation of the new song Wolves of Siberia, which will find its place on the new album, though sadly it’s a rather average song, a logical continuation of The Satanist. The biggest surprise was thus the guest appearance of Niklas Kvarforth (Shining) on a cover of The Cure classic A Forest, which came out rather charmingly even though the vocals in particular were quite hard to hear. Behemoth thus closed the first day on the big stage with a solid, good show, but nothing more than that.
Closing out the second stage as the main draw were the legendary N.W.O.B.H.M. veterans Diamond Head. This is the band whose albums unwittingly shaped Metallica, today a global metal titan. Everything in the band today of course revolves around the only original member, guitarist Brian Tatler. The year before last the band released the comeback album »Diamond Head«, after settling in with a new screamer, the Danish vocalist Rasmus Bom Andersen. When Diamond Head come on stage, it’s clear what’s demanded of them. Eighties material. As much of it as possible. The band knew this well and delivered the bulk of its show accordingly. Among the new songs, from the otherwise very solid album »Diamond Head«, we heard Set My Soul On Fire and Bones in Diamonds, while the band heavily loaded its repertoire with material from the cult studio debut »Lightning To The Nations« (1980), from which, alongside the title track, we got: Shoot Out The Lights, Helpless, The Prince, the opening Play It Loud, and toward the end It’s Electric, Sucking My Love and the closing Am I Evil?, without which they might have faced a stage lynching. The band didn’t skip the album »Borrowed Time« (1982) either, playing In the Heat of the Night alongside the title track, and there was also a brief flash of the album »Canterbury« (1983) when the band performed To the Devil His Due. Diamond Head remain tight and bulletproof. They’re also announcing a new studio album for this year! Rasmus Bom Andersen wasn’t as gymnastically fired up as last year at the much bigger stage of the Bang Your Head!!! festival, where he could also make use of the spacious »catwalk«, but he still delivered a confident and correct vocal performance. The legendary quintet delivered plenty of nostalgic moments, and in the front rows you could count quite a few older fans who relived, along with the band on stage, the birth of the great metal boom at the turn of the seventies into the eighties. Priceless. A beautiful closing act for the first festival day.
Nina Grad (photos): Dust Bolt, Pillorian, Jig-Ai, Reject the Sickness, Morost, Ingested, Jinjer, Leprous, Skeletonwitch, Carpathian Forest, Behemoth
Sebastijan Videc (photos, video): Moros, Vuur, Oubliette, Hate, Alestorm, Eluveitie, Behemoth, Diamond Head
Aleš Podbrežnik (text): Moros, Vuur, Hecate Enthroned, Jinjer, Alestorm, Eluveitie, Diamond Head
Primož Novak (text): Ingested, Leprous, Hate
Rok Klemše (text): Dust Bolt, Pillorian, Jig-Ai, Skeletonwitch, Carpathian Forest, Behemoth
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