Nova Rock Festival 2007 – Day 2

(text by: Sandi Sadar)

Day two. After the morning ritual of sun-soaking and the first liters of wine, beer and other liquid aids, the herds of music migrants started besieging the gates at half past eleven, and a few hundred of the most fired-up had tried to grab a Schumacher-style pole position in front of the first bands by standing at the iron gates for hours, from around eight o’clock or even earlier. The gates opened with Swiss, well, Austrian precision, and after a routine bag check and the confiscation of all superfluous “aids” like beer cans, bottles and pyrotechnics, dozens of security guards began letting the music-hungry onto both stages. On Saturday, too, the action kicked off on the Red Stage, where the sound guys had everything ready for the first show under an inhumanly hot, scorching sun.

RED STAGE:

(text by: Sandi Sadar) 
The first sonic offensive from the speakers hit a good hour later. The banner of the Los Angeles crew DevilDriver sprawled across the stage, an extreme groove metal outfit laced with death metal riffs, who came to Nova Rock to present the fruits of four years of work. The quintet is far from young and green, though. The main attraction of this Californian five-piece is without a doubt the singer, a tattooed demon exorcist and former mastermind of Coal Chamber, who finally broke up not long ago. To be precise: in 2002, when Bradley Dez Fafara left his original nu-metal band and went off to release his creative energy in a collective with Mike Spreitzer, Jon Miller, Evan Pitts and John Boecklin. They invited him to join after a chance meeting at some dinner where one word led to another. They asked him to a jam session, and after just a few bars it was clear that among these random passers-by, incredible creative currents and an energy that could not be denied or overlooked were flowing. After the first DevilDriver album (devil drivers are the little bells witches used to drive off the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub and all his helpers while casting spells), the guys had to fend off accusations that they were just an extension of Dez’s old band. To shut the mouths of skeptics, critics and naysayers for good, two years later they released the album The Fury Of Our Maker’s Hand, which struck the old influences out even more explicitly and poured even more Scandinavian darkness and hardness into the musical bag. And this year brings another offering, the album The Last Kind Words, which sums up the best of both predecessors. Before Nova Rock, only a handful of people had the honor of hearing the latest thunder of this hellish machine. The DevilDriver show kicked off with ‘Driving Down the Darkness’, and after a pretty explosive opening all barriers between stage and audience fell. Dez deftly manipulated the crowd and led them into a state of obedience and mosh pit submission. After the track ‘Grindfucked’ a proper circle pit broke out, and the clock had barely struck a little past noon. ‘End Of the Line’, ‘Hold Back the Day’ and ‘Fury Of Our God’s Hand’ were a bunch of “hits” from the second-to-last record, among the older stuff they served up the indispensable ‘I Could Care Less’, and there was no shortage of novelties either, as they presented the first single, ‘Not All That Wander Are Lost’. DevilDriver have freshness, yet also satisfy the need for the familiar and predictable. Honestly, there’s absolutely nothing to fault them for. Maybe Dez isn’t exactly Pavarotti or Freddy Mercury, but in his own rudimentary way he can be very convincing. Primal. Direct. Far from any notion of demigods. The rest of the band is tight and grinds on without pause or any sign of fatigue across the whole set. They’ve become seasoned craftsmen who, under the sign of the horns and with a provocative flirtation with quasi-satanism and the occult, soothe the hunger of the younger generations. Despite the fact that they’re not exactly a blockbuster band, they in no way deserve the opening slot. After a bit more than half an hour of intensity, during which the youngsters in the front rows risked sunstroke, dehydration and heart attacks, DevilDriver cut the set off abruptly and promised a quick return.

I really wonder by what key the running order was decided. After the post-thrashers and death metallers, it was the turn of whoever it is that loves glam pop, as at a quarter past one the Finnish youngsters Negative took on the heat. A sextet of oddballs with interesting names: singer Jonne Aaron Liimatainen is the least interesting of the lot, while Negative are rounded out by guitarists Larry Love and Sir Christus, bassist Antti Anatomy, who is supplemented on keyboards by Mr Snack/Näkki, and drummer Jay Slammer. I somehow couldn’t be bothered to listen to the pop collection of these Finnish weirdos, who are quite active, with three records under their belt already: War of Love (2003), Sweet & Deceitful (2004) and Anorectic (2006), but outside their Finnish homeland hardly anyone knows them (maybe a few enthusiastic groups of musical minorities who swear by The Finch and HIM). So I took a short break for some expensive watery beer and Asian goodies from the mobile stalls, and waited for the next dose of somewhat tougher sounds.

Around half past three, the post-apocalyptic performers took the boards of the Red Stage, masters of post-rock and post-metal and creators of top-quality modern avant-garde. Ladies and gentlemen: Isis. Their latest release, The Absence Of Truth, a fourfold rise above the horizons of the mental breakdown of the worldly into its prime factors, is made for all those connoisseurs who can tolerate a coherent mass of hardcore, metal and consistent ambientalism. A tough bite for mainstream freaks, but definitely a must in the collection of alternative fans and all worshippers of Patton’s label Ipecac Records. The Boston alliance of guitarist Aaron Turner, bassist Jeff Caxide, drummer Aaron Harris, guitarist Michael Gallagher and electronic wizard Bryant Clifford Meyer conjured up, in a set that mostly presented material from the latest record, an intense blend of hellish pounding and heavenly emotion (the same as the announcement of their concert in Slovenia, where they had played just the day before). A good enough reason to forget about reality and the scorching sun, close your eyes and not worry about whether you failed to recognize one of the tracks, because Isis are food not only for the ears but for the brain too. Their artistry and intellectualism follow Turner’s principle that he loves to preserve at least a scrap of mystery and enigma, and always has the band as a whole in mind, an organism that doesn’t deliberately strive for art like a rock monad, but for which art is merely a by-product of interpersonal interaction. Isis are transcendence. Isis are otherworldly. They give a huge amount, even without energetic jumping around or excessive direct dialogue with the audience. And after the show there were more thrilled and moved faces left than you’d actually expect from a multi-thousand-headed herd of sun-scorched bodies and alcohol-soaked brains.

After Isis came the Latino metallers Ill Nino, who sonically would pass as a mix of crossover, nu-metal (…) and at six the crowds were getting ready for the arrival of the Eurovision winners, a carnival of masks called Lordi. You’d expect at least an interesting show if not quality music, but the performance was, let’s say, below expectations. You’d had enough of them before the end of the first chorus, and in daylight the demonic masks look downright parodic and wretched. The pyrotechnic effects were laughable, and the slightly-more-than-lukewarm applause came for the last song, ‘Hard Rock Alleluya’. The question is whether it was because of the mediocre performance or simply because most of the audience was already sick of them (if I remember right, not many people at the festival were showing off Lordi shirts …).

After the blandness, time for a little stardust and pomp. Do you know Slipknot, and have you at least heard of singer Corey Taylor? The young man took off his mask and fed the gentler side of his musical demons, and a good few years before he put on the mask for the psycho metal screaming in Slipknot, he co-founded the Des Moines band Stone Sour. Some would file them under alternative, others under metal, others under both, and still others in the artificial little drawer of post-grunge, but they undoubtedly have a huge amount of material in stock from their 15-year history. When Corey and Stone Sour’s former drummer Joel Ekman (the current role of skin-basher is filled by former Soulfly member Roy “Ratta” Mayorga) founded the band in 1992, Shawn Economaki soon joined and picked up the bass. Sour South, as the band was called then, was not only alcoholic but also workaholic, and the guys built up a stockpile of more than 500 songs. Three years later guitarist James Root joined, with whom Taylor had already worked in Slipknot, and then they set about preparing the material we know today as Stone Sour’s debut, released in 2002. A Grammy nomination is reason enough for many to rest on their laurels, but Stone Sour busied themselves with musical progression, in which Taylor condensed more rage and poured it into the gentler structures of the album Come What(ever) May. Whatever Taylor takes on becomes a hit, and so Stone Sour became an all-American success and more than a suitable export product for Europe. They opened their 70-minute show in Nickelsdorf with the first single from the latest album, ’30/30 – 150′. Routine and flawless. The guitar duo Root – Rand mostly filled things in with massive distortion and solos, while the more fascinating thing was the bombastic rhythm of heavy-handed Mayorga. The audience watched the show enthusiastically on one side (I mean mostly a hundred or more kids with Slipknot shirts in the front row, right at the stage), while on the other side thousands of curious onlookers, posers, self-proclaimed music critics and husbands and wives who were there out of circumstance (read: because their partners came to see the gorgeous Corey without a mask…) came to satisfy their curiosity. Bizarre, but after the first few bars it was clear the show would be a masterpiece of cliché blabbering, and the Stone Sour guys did not disappoint. After the second hit from the latest record, ‘Come What(ever) May’, you could already hear the platitudes “Do you feel good?” and similar rubbish, and the crowd responded obediently like sheep. You know how it is: that feeling of importance bestowed on you by performers with flirting and blowing in your soul, even if you haven’t quite earned it, brings some people to a state of extreme erection … The run of tracks from the latest record is broken by ‘Inhale’, a rather gothic-sounding little ballad, whose dessert is Slipknot-style vocals. A pretty nice salve for grunge ears. Two songs later, an epic-sounding masterpiece of blabbering, forced states of despair and a heap of modern sounds: ‘Monolith’. The song ‘Sillyworld’ got its world concert premiere on European stages. Disappointed acoustic seekers could cry along to ‘Bother’, and the biggest surprise was the choice of cover for the show: Stone Sour tackled ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, which didn’t sound like a complete disaster. Corey has the voice. Corey has charisma and self-confidence. The rest of the Stone Sour guys are a kind of accompanying shadow to Mister Ego. The sampled madness of the song ‘Blotter’, with bass lines drinking from Faith No More and guitars stealing from Biohazard, was a blissful blessing that didn’t quite floor me, but the last two songs, ‘Hell & Consequences’ and the big finale ‘Get Inside’, were a hurried farewell and an explosion of taste. Corey was already running short of breath while singing, and visibly flushed, he tried to stir up a bit more screaming with interjections like “Are you there? Are you with me? I can’t hear you!”, and reaped only merciful applause and drunken salvos of inarticulate yelling. One last wave to the audience, and as they came, so they went, with Mayorga tossing his broken sticks, Root and Rand their picks, while Corey’s fans had to settle for a plastic bottle of water.

STONE SOUR setlist:
1. 30/30-150
2. Come What(Ever) May
3. Take A Number
4. Made Of Scars
5. Reborn
6. Inhale
7. Your God
8. Monolith
9. Sillyworld
10. Bother
11. Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd Cover)
12. Through Glass
13. Blotter
14. Hell & Consequences
15. Get Inside

The evening was entering its final phase, with the clock striking nearly half past nine. The next Red Stage attraction were the banner-bearers of Gothenburg melodic death metal, the Swedes In Flames, who, when it comes to conceptualizing the genre, can quite confidently be placed alongside Dark Tranquility and the legendary At The Gates. The long-haired dreadlocker, singer Anders Frieden, guitarists Jesper Störmblad and Björn Gelotte, bassist Peter Iwers and drummer Daniel Svensson put on a confident show on the Pannonian plains, backing the spectacle up with a decent dose of pyrotechnics. The first salvos of guitar cannonades and fiery sparks started erupting from the Red Stage at 21:20, when they opened the set with a track from the album reroute To Remain, ‘Cloud Connected’, after which the Swedish quintet dug a little deeper into the bag of old creations. The fast-fingered solos on ‘Pinball Map’ recalled the golden days of the record Clayman, and the slightly rustic aftertaste didn’t bother the crowd of burning fans at all, who filled up even the last patches of grass in front of the stage. A visibly in-the-mood Frieden owned the empty spaces on stage, and held a pose of devout headbanging through the whole hour and a half of In Flames exhibitionism. The more noticeable moments were undoubtedly those when they served the audience old stuff, while among the newer, slightly more polished material, ‘Trigger’, the near-ballad ‘Come Clarity’ and the anthemic ‘Take This Life’ stood out. The drum assault on the nerve endings with intense double bass pounding, the guitar expertise and the relaxed atmosphere were the reasons they can without hesitation be counted among the brighter points of the festival. The metal supermen were playing their trump cards for a place at the very top of modern metal. ‘Episode 666’ sounded even better than on the record, while on the song ‘System’ they started to slip up, probably from relaxation, fatigue or lack of concentration. At least in my opinion, they eased off slightly here and gave the eyes a shade more than the ears. The sound guys tried to work wonders in the open-air venue and squeeze the last drops out of a sonically nearly unsuitable auditorium, but the wind slowly carried off layers of the packed sound. In the back rows it was far too easy to chat, so for those who hadn’t come to listen to the band but to empty their mugs, pardon, plastic cups of beer, the show started losing its much-needed sharpness. The retrospective of seventeen years of creativity was stylistically perfect. The only thing that might bother you is that bands like In Flames have become much more active at festivals than at individual shows, but the performance was undoubtedly close to perfection. The show was over. One last “Thank You” and “Danke” and an announcement that we can buy the new In Flames record very soon: the album is being finalized, and maybe we’ll be able to buy it as early as Christmas or New Year.

IN FLAMES setlist:
1. Cloud Connected
2. Pinball Map
3. Leeches
4. Graveland
5. Trigger
6. Episode 666
7. Bottled
8. Egonomic
9. Colony
10. Crawl Through Knives
11. Only For The Weak
12 .Dead Alone
13. Touch Of Red
14. Come Clarity
15. The Quiet Place
16. Take This Life
17. My Sweet Shadow

We dug ourselves out of the flames. After a somewhat longer break, during which the techs hauled a pile of new gear onto the stage, everything was soon ready for the appearance of the Lord of the Grotesque, the clone of Alice Cooper, or rather his hellish alter ego in modern dress: Marilyn Manson. Mister Bizarre, Marilyn, sounded just like he looked: drained, tired and fed up. Posey and with no real substance or concept. I’d dare to use the words lost and desperate. After just a few songs I was pretty bored, and dissatisfied with the clichéd routine, the limp show and the approaching downpour, I headed back to the Blue Stage to look for happiness there instead, where the Seattle heavyweights Pearl Jam were getting ready.

MARILYN MANSON setlist:
1. If I Was Your Vampire
2. Disposable Teens
3. Hate Anthem
4. mOBSCENE
5. Sweet Dreams
6. Valentine’s Day
7. Just A Car Crash Away
8. Rock Is Dead
9. Heart Shaped Glasses
10. Tainted Love
11. Dope Show
12. Great Big White World
13. Fight Song
14. Beautiful People

BLUE STAGE:

(text for Across The Delta: Živa Viviana Doria)
On the blue stage on Saturday, we were first greeted by the locals Across The Delta. “Alles was das alternative Herz begehrt” (translation: everything the alternative heart desires, ed.) is the motto of their album Dancing to Architecture. With their alternative melodic rock, the guys really did warm our alternative hearts and proved that our northern neighbors have quality bands in this genre too. Sadly, Across The Delta only got the 25 minutes that the opening act gets. Then again, just being there at a festival like this counts for a lot.

 

(text for Hyseed Dixie, Hinder, Therapy?: Sandi Sadar)
Hyseed Dixie swam into different waters with heavy metal covers in bluegrass style and the instruments that go with it. The banjo and overalls are their essential gear. After seven years together and the same number of records, they headed into the afternoon heat with a good dose of humor and looseness. John Wheeler (known in the band as Barley Scotch), guitarist, vocalist and bearded provocateur, flanked by a man with a banjo, Don Wayne Reno, and with his brother Dale Reno matching him on mandolin, successfully chasing gaps in lightning-fast runs up and down the neck of the instrument, conjured up a half-hour marathon of alcohol and good old rock classics (the more notable ones being the AC/DC songs ‘Back In Black’ and ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, and other hits such as Motörhead’s ‘Ace Of Spades’). It says enough that quite a few people actually listened and sang along to the choruses, even though the mercury was dangerously close to a sweltering 35 °C… The bluegrass rock polka was over pretty quickly and painlessly: or to put it another way, Hayseed Dixie are a band for partying and listening live, and I doubt I’d really be burning to have any of their CDs on my shelf. Maybe the album A Hillbilly Tribute To AC/DC …

At 14:40 the American rock band Hinder, much anticipated by many (me included), were supposed to play. Unfortunately the American hard rockers had to cancel their show at the last moment. The reason was reportedly technical, at the border in Switzerland, so instead of Austria they traveled straight to the Netherlands toward new shows. Since a replacement is impossible to find at such short notice, the other bands of the day had their playing time extended.

In place of the canceled Hinder, the Irish oddballs, oldtimers to many but undoubtedly very vital and energetic, Therapy? took the stage. Alternative and metal poured into the same pot and mixed until unrecognizable. Hitmakers who sank into the alternative and managed to survive. I would have gladly watched the whole show, but after the song ‘Innocent X / Meat abstract’ I had to leave the stage because of interview obligations, and from backstage I was grazed every so often by waves of pleasure from the songs ‘Turn’, ‘The Knives’, ‘Trigger Inside’ and others.

 

(text for Sunrise Avenue: Živa Viviana Doria)
The Finnish blondes Sunrise Avenue, or we could just call them a “One Hit Wonder” band, are mostly known to us for the megalomaniac hit Fairytale Gone Bad, which sadly didn’t live up to their reputation, as they played it very averagely at the show. Even so, the Austrian audience received their set approvingly, and Sunrise Avenue were also delighted with their visit to Austria, giving their word and promising they’d definitely be back. We’ll be able to see them already this fall, as a series of their shows across Austria has already been announced.

 

(text for Frank Black and 30 Seconds To Mars: Sandi Sadar)
After Sunrise Avenue, a chubby little man with thick glasses stepped out into the heat, Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, better known as Frank Black. As a singer-songwriter he actively resists comparisons with what he did in the legendary Pixies, and this time he was on stage in prime time, a little before half past six in the evening. Black’s vocal range at this festival show again crawled along the spectrum between screaming and deep rumbling, and content-wise Mr. Black still stays close to surrealism, incest and depictions of violent scenes from the Bible, while pouring a bit of science fiction, surf culture and the neon lights so typical of American culture into the musical minestrone. During the short and rather monotonous set, the songs ‘Valvety’, ‘Headache’, ‘St. Francis Dam Disaster’ and ‘Nadine’ stood out. The applause fit the show: apathetic and limp … Frank Black on big stages? No, thanks. Some other time …

At 8 o’clock 30 Seconds To Mars climbed onto the stage. The Californian stars, sun-tanned spoiled brats and egocentrics, 30 Seconds To Mars grew out of a small family project that brothers Jared and Shanon Leto started as a hobby, and outgrew the confines of the home garage. I admit the music is potentially charged with energy, but if a redneck painted up in Native American colors, carrying himself like God himself, leaps onto the stage in front of you, then you can forget about qualitative judgments of the music per se. Jared is a star of the most obnoxious kind and winks at the audience accordingly, spits, chews and blabbers. All the lights must be fixed only on him, so you can forget about the details that matter to us Balkan folks: the guitarist of 30 Seconds To Mars is one of ours, and the guy’s name is Tomo Miličević. They’re hits only conditionally, but they played pretty much everything: ‘Capricorn (A Brand New Name)’, ‘Edge of the Earth’, ‘Attack’, ‘The Kill’, the very catchy little song ‘From Yesterday’, ‘Echelon’ and their latest brainchild, ‘A Beautiful Lie’. 30 Seconds To Mars try to put intellectualism front and center, but with the sky-high ego and the rapture of the main player, that’s practically impossible. After Mission: Impossible they reaped ovations and bodily fluids dripping from the teenage and twenty-something girls standing around, while the male half of the population drank and waited for the Grand Finale.

 

(text for Linkin Park: Živa Viviana Doria) 
One of the most eagerly awaited moments, not just of the second day but of the whole festival, was the Linkin Park show. The excitement at their arrival on stage was fiendishly stoked by the audience, who gave the band loud ovations. Linkin Park opened their show with One Step Closer, and you couldn’t have found a better choice for it. Chester is known for his fine vocal articulation, which can swing from a subtly sophisticated approach in the ballads to unexpected core-style outbursts of extremely screeching proportions. This time, too, he didn’t let us down on that front.

Linkin Park didn’t forget to play their biggest hits: Papercut, Crawling, What I´ve Done and Numb! The show deserves a superlative close to “perfection”, especially when it comes to building a tight energetic connection with the frenzied crowd during the set. Linkin Park are a band definitely worth experiencing live, since the performance of the studio material, with special intensity, hits the listener right in the heart! The guys delivered a solid and confident show, soaked in plenty of routinely well-rehearsed stage tricks that effectively kept the crowd glued to them. With the song Faint, Linkin Park left us in a trance, energetically unsatisfied and hungry for the continuation of the second part of the festival, which was heading toward its very peak, as everything was slowly being readied for the arrival of the night’s first stars, Pearl Jam.

LINKIN PARK setlist:
1. One Step Closer
2. Lying From You
3. Somewhere I Belong
4. No More Sorrow
5. Papercut
6. Points Of Authority
7. Given Up
8. Don’t Stay
9. From The Inside
10. Leave Out All The Rest
11. Numb
12. Pushing Me Away (Acoustic/Pianoversion)
13. Breaking The Habit
14. In The End
15. Crawling
16. What I’ve Done
17. The Little Things Give You Away
18. Bleed It Out
19. Faint

 

PEARL JAM:

(text for Pearl Jam: Sandi Sadar)
The clock had struck a little past eleven at night. The mass of lights and other stage clutter was replaced by vintage amps, and the techs were checking the tuning on an arsenal of dream Fender and Gibson guitars. A few minutes later the lights went out. The murmur of the crowd grew into chanting and cries of delight, as Mike McCready, the chubby short-haired guitarist, bassist Jeff Ament, bespectacled Stone Gossard and, behind the drums, Matt Cameron, formerly of Soundgarden, took the stage. A second or two later came a liter of red wine and the charismatic blue-eyed prophet of Generation X, who despite his short stature is bigger than the biggest: Eddie Vedder. He picks up a guitar and smiles mischievously at the audience, and after a neat bit of fumbling with the intro, one of the biggest hits from the album Vitalogy rings out, the optimistic-sounding ‘Better Man’. Seattle gave birth to the nineties and swaddled grunge. Grunge died. What’s left is memory, sentiment and a heap of good songs. Pearl Jam need no introduction, because the music speaks for itself. This tight five-piece has a helmsman named Inspiration. After Vitalogy they go back an album and speed up the adrenaline wave with the song ‘Go’, so I hoped for a repeat of the night before, when Smashing Pumpkins fittingly honored the memory of the golden age of greatest creativity. After eight full-length albums, Pearl Jam are armed with plenty of new things. After the crowd is let off the leash with ‘Save You’ and ‘MFC’, it’s time for the first climax. ‘Given To Fly’ in altered tuning sounds a bit clumsy, but that’s the charm of Pearl Jam. No literal reproduction of what you’ve already heard. The songs change. Vedder empties a bottle of wine and falls into a trance, and McCready – Gossard – Ament – Cameron chase after him. It’s delicate tightrope walking, and Pearl Jam are acrobats of stage looseness. Proof: ‘Dissident’ becomes a playground of sonic experiment, and after the song with one of the longest titles in the rock output of the nineties, ‘Elderly Woman Behind the Counter In A Small Town’, the energies are released even more. Eddie reads the lyrics in German and wraps up with the thought “Werzei mir für mein deutsch. Ich spreche deutsch schlecht aber besser wie president Bush sprecht Englisch…” Salvos of laughter and the continuation of a pleasure parade! My favorites were ‘Why Go’, the worn-out but so eagerly heard ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Rearviewmirror’. The lights go out. You’d think the show is over. Cries for an encore fill the void between ground and sky. It had started to drizzle from the clouds, and a storm was looming. Pearl Jam come back on stage and carry on with what was unfinished, with the song ‘Do the Evolution’, and after VS. ‘Blood’ they retrospectively return to their roots. To the beginning. To the record Ten, which put them on the throne of the musical Olympus. They don’t serve up the expected ‘Alive’, though, but play with the song ‘Porch’. Long solos. A drum solo and Vedder’s mumbling. It’s all part of the show. A tribute to their greatest idols, without whom Pearl Jam wouldn’t be what they are. ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’ and the moment in which you feel what it’s like when the adored adore someone else. Neil Young. Is it all just a show? Even the fact that during the playing Vedder leaves the safe shelter of the covered stage and walks past the security guards to the fans, who greet the gesture of warmth and affection with thunderous anticipation? Just a meter from my hand Vedder stops, waves at us and goes back on stage. To finish what he started and close the series of long-form solos with the last chorus. The rain started falling even harder, but the drops drove away only the whiniest. Pearl Jam drowned out the promise of fireworks and the suppressed wrath of the gods above the clouds. After a bow they leave the stage, and thousands of satisfied people turn their direction of travel toward the tents. To get out of the wet as soon as possible. The crowds rolled toward the campsites. The music nomads ignored the fireworks, which cost the organizers quite a bit of money. Unnecessary glitz. A pinch of kitsch too much. The second day came to a close. Soaked and chilled, we went into the tents to gather new strength for the last day of our stay on the plains of Nickelsdorf …

PEARL JAM setlist:
1. Better Man
2. Go
3. Save You
4. MFC
5. Given To Fly
6. Severed Hand
7. Dissident
8. Small Town
9. Corduroy
10. Even Flow
11. Light Years
12. Jeremy
13. Why Go
14. Rearviewmirror
15. encore: Do The Evolution
16. Blood
17. Porch
18. Rocking In The Free World (Neil Young)