Thundering Through Rage’s 25th Anniversary in Villach (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Parkhotel (Bambergsaal) / Villach / Austria
Concert date: 01.05.2009
Attendance: 200
Ticket price: €15.00 / €20.00

25 years is no small thing. A venomously crafted setlist meant for the band’s most fired-up fans is another fact you can’t get around. And ever since Slovenia wiped out its western, northern and eastern borders, nearby Villach has been a great alibi to drive over after work for an ice cream. Well, ice cream at the very least, if not a Rage show. Who’d have thought? To perennially boring Villach, at least when it comes to the gig lineup, the legendary German heavy metallers roll in to play a string of tunes and celebrate their first 25 years. 

The warm-up at the Bambergsaal hall in the Parkhotel Villach kicked off around eight in the evening. Pretty empty, naturally. The Sentimentalistic Bitches lads, who made no secret of how happy they were to be playing a bigger metal event than the local dives they’re usually used to, served up a sort of heavy metal that at times sagged toward doomy turns. Clean but morbid vocals leaning on a massive curtain of riffs, rolling rhythms in a mid or lower gear. Nothing outstanding and with plenty of room to grow, which the band will surely fill with more miles on the road.

A young German band, a quintet, that offered trendy touches built into a classic heavy metal template. You could sense a bit more attack and aggression in the singer’s outbursts than during the opening act’s set. The band wrestled with sound gremlins but somehow pushed its show through to the end. There’s a lot of generic stuff here, and it’s hard to pick out any traits that would put this band on the tracks of recognizability, which has to be the fruit of talent and your own songwriting ideas. Even the band’s stage look, outfitted in off-the-rack gear, is deliberately attention-grabbing. A farmer’s hat on the head and menacing clunky boots on the feet of the short-haired singer hint, before you’ve even heard a note, that Flight Delight are still seriously searching for themselves in the music world.

A quartet from Villach, formed in 2004, with their debut “Bleeding Earth”, released in 2008, in their pocket. Some of you may remember them as the rookies from the MetalCamp 2005 bill. The band plays an interesting style, mixing old-school Iron Maiden elements with something like early Slayer. In short, thrash/heavy! The band’s special something is singer Lidia, who drew attention especially with the growls she layered over the otherwise clean, melodic lines. The band is nicely tight and well coordinated on stage, though Lidia grabs most of the attention during the set with her confidence. Thytopia put on a really nice show, the home crowd gave them a warm, homey welcome, and the band proved that our northern neighbors, too, turn out an interesting metal band every now and then.

The little festival kept its symbolic local flavor going when Villach locals Madog crawled onto the stage. This is a band with a wealth of experience, since their beginnings go all the way back to 1991. The lineup has barely two studio albums to its name (the latest, “Fairytales of Darkness”, came out way back in 2001), and they can also boast of contributing a cover of Rage’s original The Crowling Chaos to the compilation “Back in Time – A Tribute to Rage”. Yes, the very same Rage who then followed Madog onto the Bambergsaal stage. Madog are melodic heavy metallers who cultivate a hardcore, old-school form of the metal tradition but upgrade it with power metal touches. The band edges toward German power metal, and fans of the likes of Stormwarrior, Gamma Ray and such could get their curiosity piqued by a Madog show. A tight, compact performance, very good vocals from singer/guitarist Hansi, inventive solos and of course a hailstorm of metal noise that got even the ever-reserved Austrians in the front rows to stretch a few limbs to Madog’s charge. The band stuck diligently to original material and effectively built an excellent platform for Rage’s set. Maybe the Iron Maiden cover Run To The Hills was one drop too many. The fact that the band is respected, known and popular with the Austrian crowd was also shown by the little hall, which filled up considerably during the gig.

Around half past ten in the evening we finally got Rage too. The legendary German power metal band, celebrating 25 years of existence this year, had been touring in April, and this “faraway” show on Labor Day came with a few peculiarities.

The first is that the set was cut by half an hour. The second is that there was no singer named Jen Majura on stage, nor the orchestra with which Rage played a bundle of songs from their repertoire in acoustic versions on this tour. Maybe the nicest peculiarity of this Rage show is that the advance ticket was just €15.00, and €20.00 on the day. Now, that low ticket price is the reason for the shortened set, and Rage are very reluctant to admit it out loud. They’d rather say they had to cut the set because of illness or too many support acts.

The trio of Peter “Peavy” Wagner (vocals/bass), Victor Smolski (guitar, keyboards) and Andre Hilgers (drums, ex-Axxis) delighted everyone there with an excellent setlist, in which we finally got a nod to the older Rage classics, which in the first decade of the new millennium, or rather since Rage became a classic hard-hitting trio again, from around 2000 onward, have been chronically missing from their live repertoires.

So we were truly in heaven when the ancient classics rang out: Nevermore, Firestorm in the middle of the show and The Pit And The Pendulum before the close, from the album “The Missing Link” (1993), or Enough Is Enough Is Enough (album “Trapped”, 1992).

The band hit the first beat with full force and had the whole room on its feet in an instant with the hit Higher Than The Sky (“End Of All Days”, 1996), shook out a shortened version of the ancient Don’t Fear The Winter (“Perfect Man”, 1989), and then the front rows, dutifully stocked with a handful of Slovenes and even three Croats, went wild when War Of Worlds (“Soundchaser”, 2003) went off.

The energy was outstanding and the atmosphere at a seriously high level, never mind the Austrian crowd’s passive attitude. Rage ground out classic after classic, and that was the tipping point that guaranteed a one-of-a-kind mood and experience. I’d say, going by my sixth time seeing this band, it was even one of their most compact, direct, crushing shows, without the obligatory pomp and the usual stage props (skulls and so on…), even though several of the factors described in one of the paragraphs above came together and took quite a bit of live steam out of this event (a longer setlist, an acoustic part, etc…).

Regardless, the trio, with their experience and unbelievably professional bearing, their cocky, well-oiled routine and the famous crushing relentlessness they unleash on stage, conjured up a fantastic experience that a true Rage fan simply had to be there for that evening. Attendance was certainly mandatory. And the sweetest reward for loyalty probably came after Set This World On Fire (“Unity”, 2002), when Rage blasted everyone back to the Avenger days and 1985 with Prayers Of Steel, then poured more oil on the fire with the classic Suicide (debut “Reign Of Fear”, 1986).

The trio is a tightly drilled crew that hardly ever makes a mistake. Rage served up very good sound and a nice helping of stage gymnastics, Peavy once again sweated “all there is to sweat”, and Smolski stunned with supersonic guitar escapades. Terrana remains the irreplaceable former drummer and you can hear it in the live sound. Rage definitely gave up some of their stage explosiveness, but the skill and technique of the otherwise excellent Hilgers are more than enough for Rage. Three people who know how to fill the sonic space perfectly at shows.

The show lasted a good hour and a half. Rage then quickly vanished behind the stage curtain and slipped off to the neighboring hotel where they stayed overnight. Smolski went straight to bed because he’d caught a cold and was very tired, while Peavy and Andre showed up in front of the reception, where the four of us, inconsolable Slovenian Rage maniacs, intercepted them and shot the breeze for a minute or two. On that note, I’d like to thank the concert organizer Albert Pernul, who gave us precise instructions after the show on where to “intercept” the band, and also for a brilliantly run event, lots of hospitality, kindness and all the support he offered the media. Let’s hope gigs like this become a regular thing in Villach and further enrich the live offering in metal and/or rock. And Rage, as said: they can’t and won’t disappoint in 2009 either! An excellent metal spectacle, then!

photos: Robi Lipej

Setlist

1. Higher Than The Sky 2. Don’t Fear The Winter 3. War Of Worlds 4. Set This Wolrd On Fire 5. Prayers of Steel 6. Suicide 7. Down 8. Nevermore 9. Enough is Enough 10. Firestorm 11. From The Cradle To The Grave 12. Innocent 13. Gentle Murders 14. The Pit And The Pendulum 15. All I Want —encore— 16. Carved In Stone 17. Soundchaser

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