Location: Sachsenburg Floßländ / Austria
Concert date: 02.09.2010
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: 55,00€ (three-day ticket)
With the summer of 2010 winding down, we’re chasing the last scraps of this year’s festival season! So the RockLine crew, cut down to a single person by a string of unlucky circumstances (and one whose finger on the camera trigger works far better than his hands on the keyboard when it comes to summing up concert impressions), set off on a three-day trip to the Rock The Lake festival! Destination: the sleepy, godforsaken little Drava-side micro-town of Sachsenburg in Austria. Thirty houses and… 64 bands in three days! Count in the free camping space that comes with a three-day festival ticket and Sachsenburg can grow into a metropolis!
And as a special bonus on top of it all, there’s the charming Drava valley! With the river included, of course, which at this stretch looks something like the Kamniška Bistrica near Domžale, except that, unlike the poor, trashed Bistrica, it’s far cleaner here. If the weather had still been right for swimming, Rock The Lake could have eclipsed Slovenia’s Metal Camp without breaking a sweat! Especially when you think about the much more wallet-friendly price of the three-day festival ticket (55,00€)!
The organizers christened the first day, with its shortened, late-afternoon program, “A Night To Remember”! And boy, were they right! Headlining the night, the German “power” metallers Rage came to fire us up. This multinational alliance of seasoned pros hit the stage at 23.30! Exactly as announced! Right on the dot! Despite their headliner status, though, Rage played barely an hour, which was a big surprise, if not an outright disappointment.
As expected, they dug into material from their newer records! Victor Smolski-era records! So one after another we got Edge Of Darkness, Soundchaser, Hunter And Pray, Into the light, Drop Dead, Empty Hollow, Higher, War Of The Worlds, Set This World in and, as expected, Down to close. Older fans of the band naturally missed the Rage material from the nineties and eighties. Even my buddy Bidovec’s slightly grim look gave it away (rock on, buddy!). But with the form this trio is in, there’s no doubt whatsoever that Rage could ever let you down.
What I really didn’t expect at a gig by these legendary German metallers was the reaction of the crowd below the stage. The partying turned into moshing and even a proper “wall of death”! But hey, this is a festival. One band doesn’t give you the full feel or picture of what the festival has on offer. Still, that scene during the Rage show hinted that the festival is packed with youngsters who’ve barely clocked two decades of life. Short as it was, Rage proved they’re venomous, relentless, and tear things up left and right! There’s no retreating for the Rage machine! The peak of the festival’s first day was behind us in an instant. Like a real storm. I just don’t get why the guys played for barely an hour. It probably has something to do with the fee, i.e. with whatever the organizer worked out with the band’s management. Even though the first day of a festival is proverbially the toughest, organizationally it was a complete success. The camp was only five minutes from the concert area. We also soon discovered that the festival’s food and drink prices were cheaper than in the nearby Austrian “pubs”. That’s certainly a big surprise, since prices for food and drink inside festival grounds across Europe are usually up to 50% higher than local offerings. I can’t remember another festival that stood out for such a quirk. Maybe Rock The Lake is truly unique in this respect, and that could be a very welcome trademark that lets the organizer compete successfully with other European festivals in the future! Another special thing about this festival is its wonderfully colorful palette of acts from all sorts of rock and metal subgenres, ranging from glam rock all the way to more extreme forms like hardcore, death metal and/or metalcore.
After a night’s sleep we woke up to a very cold morning on the second day of the festival. No wonder. We woke up on the Austrian end of Carinthia, and on top of that it was the end of summer! The first band that was supposed to warm up our rattling, frozen bones, Flying Age, dropped out! So at 13:45 Suzie Cries For Help took the stage, though our own fidgety Suza was in no way keen to identify with them. Modern melodic rockers in the vein of Nickelback, they made for a fitting opening to the festival’s second day. Luckily my buddy Bidovec occasionally turns into a true music guru, so Bojan “fatherly” asked me not to miss Vanity Ink. This Finnish band, lifted above the average especially by a wild, hyperactive frontwoman who, besides outstanding kinetic skills, also has a cheekily sweet voice, got people on their feet even more successfully than the band before. The band’s intense show proved so effective that even the spacious stage seemed too small for such an incredibly high-spirited group. The guitarist jumped into the photo pit a few times, spicing up the show by hanging out with the people in the front rows. Glam flirting included, and the band also showed great respect for The Beatles by tackling a cover of one of the legendary Liverpool quartet’s songs!
At 17.45 we headed over to check out the small stage! Latexx Teens were already goofing around there! Italians originally! And they of course love “sleaze”! That’s how the band looks, too! Looks aside, though, our music is a kind of stew of styles from Marilyn Manson to Sex Pistols. Interesting, right? A perhaps less convincing show, at least after over-mixing almost stylistically incompatible musical rhetoric, shot us back to the big stage, where we stood ready, breathing hard, waiting impatiently for the Swedish “rock n’ roll kittens” Crucified Barbara to hit the stage! And with Barbara, an unexpected novelty! We photographers in the front row were only allowed to shoot from the first row of speakers! No way were you allowed to move toward the center of the stage! Just 40 minutes for the hot, flirty Swedish rock n’ roll fillies! Add the time lost to tuning guitars and setting up drums, and the time with the band was far too short. As an all-female outfit, this lineup is truly one of the most convincing in the field of its dirty glam rock n’ roll variety! These chicks gave us a proper beating! The songs in the set went like this: Wasted, Don’t Play Me Hard, Rock And Roll Bachelor, Eurovision contender Heaven And Hell, Loosing The Game, I Need A Cowboy From Hell, and Going Down. An inspiring show, definitely, full of the eruptive energy these girls have in abundance. To close out the day we caught Austria’s Belphegor, who, apart from being Austrian, didn’t really have much in common with the festival itself. Well, at least not musically.
If the first day was a day of getting acquainted and the second a day of perfection, the third was marked by delays, swaps, technical problems and canceled shows. To our great sorrow, we learned that a whole pile of bands were dropping out: Forever It Shall Be , Devastating Enemy, Unzucht, Motorjesus and Illdisposed. Up to the third day the weather had been as kind to us as it could be! No rain and no overwhelming heat, that is. So we used the gap between the first canceled bands to visit the local village pub, where we also sat out the first weather conspiracy. Rain, that is! Under the stage we were once again face to face with Ass-tronavts. They’d been moved from 14.00 to 16.00 and 10 minutes! This melodically funked-up rock outfit blasted away fiercely and without compromise, making excellent use of the chance to introduce themselves to the festival crowd.
We also caught Kissin’ Dynamite, the German hard rock/glam metallers who later this year head out on a European tour as support for the German power metallers Primal Fear. I won’t be lying much if I say that, despite their relatively baby-faced look, Kissin’ Dynmaite came across as probably the band with the most charisma of the whole festival. The stage was simply too small for them, since Kissin’ Dynamite use every available centimeter of stage they’re given for their antics. Even the stage monitors didn’t escape unscathed. The opening theme from the movie Terminator was topped off with a bundle of home-grown rock dynamite, delivered by the songs Run For Your Life, Metal Nation, Steel Of Swabia, Metal Nation, My Religion and Supersonic Killer.
Right after the promising German quintet, Slovenia’s own Elvis Jackson came “barreling” onto the stage and managed to lift the already thrilled crowd to an even higher level with their shenanigans. Singer Buda was wound up to the max again! A real whirlwind, like the roadrunner being chased by Wile E. Coyote from Looney Tunes, never running out of energy reserves! The audience cracked up at all the daredevil acrobatics, the “pogo-ing” and the unique but really most authentic “crowd surf-ing”. As is their habit, Elvis Jackson once again dragged an inflated pool mattress onto the stage. They laid the first victim who was within reach, one of the festival’s crazed visitors, on it and floated him off onto the shoulders of the packed crowd below the stage! Elvis Jackson once again walked away with a tear-jerkingly perfect ten for their bravura show. The only flaw was that they threw the rolls of toilet paper at the end of the festival, when nobody really needed it anymore. Want some jazz? What jazz! The mockery never ends when they bust out a Slayer riff instead of the promised jazz! After enjoying some “home” music, we moved to the lower stage, where Neaera were supposed to meet us. But sadly, not without technical hiccups again. Twenty minutes were sacrificed to tuning problems. Neaera didn’t manage to solve the sound troubles. These followed them through the whole show, and the singer calmly commented on the awful sound problems with: “Fuck you all!”. Let’s hope that wasn’t aimed at the organizer, since everything went exactly according to the standards of a typical Euro festival. Neaera played for about an hour! They were overflowing with energy. During the show the fans of course put together a proper wall of death and, as expected, “mosh pit-ted”. A tiny space that was bursting at the seams with every volt of energy! In my opinion Neaera should have played on a bigger stage, since their excellent performance would have come across with far more impact! You could feel it most with the singer, who was massively held back by the small stage. So he came up with a solution and staged a few daredevil jumps into the crowd, on which he of course eagerly “surfed”. The German deathcore rascals are also brilliantly tight in general, and they sound masterful in their togetherness! This is a band that needs a big stage to spread its wings, as it should.
And so the third day wrapped up! Another curiosity of the festival was that you weren’t allowed to buy more than 10,00€ worth of vouchers at a time. That’s probably yet another way of marketing the festival’s environment- and nature-friendly trademark. A big plus of the festival was that the toilets were set up in containers with running water! As for the staff handling the festival’s logistics, this is one of the friendliest Euro festivals in that respect. For fans of various flavors of metal, alt rock, skate punk, as well as genres ending in “core”, a visit to Rock The Lake is a must in the future too. Despite the festival’s ecological bent, most visitors left their trash in the camp instead of collecting it in bags, so by the end the camp looked like a garbage dump. It was also a really interesting observation that the festival was very modestly attended by the Slovenian crowd. Despite the relative proximity. Sachsenburg is only 154km from the Slovenian capital. And the ticket price is downright incredible in its affordability! Rock The Lake is a real lesson for Slovenian festival organizers! Especially if you add the ecological angle, plus the sensible investment of capital into developing and promoting the tourism offer of this Austrian region. The feelings at the end of the festival were outstanding. Despite some technical mishaps that made bands late to the stage, a few canceled acts, and the rain on the last day of the festival, there are so many other positives the festival put forward that they tip the scales and will surely lure us back to Sachsenburg next year!
photos: Martin Prezelj
text edited by: Aleš Podbrežnik
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