Part 2
Saturday at This Is Hardcore was full of kick ass sets, to a “special” surprises. I gotta say check out Ten Ton Hammer as soon as you can. It’s a very heavy band who definitely slays at their shows. They just released an album on Harvcore Records.Continue reading
There’s always that one destination festival people call home. For metal heads it’s Wacken Open Air in Germany. For cruise enthusiasts it’s 70,000 Tons Of Metal. For hardcore it’s This Is Hardcore. Many people I’ve talked to love this festival and call it like a place they can get together with friends and see bands they love.Continue reading
The date was September 10, 2016. I awoke from a sleepless night. Not from heartache or drama, but from anticipation. You know, a night rocking out to music, memorizing that last verse of your favorite song, looking up YouTube videos of opening acts. That utterly restless night lost in the imagination of the next days adventure. That’s right, that night before the big show. For me it is the ‘High Elevation Rock Festival’ at Fiddlers Green Amphitheater in Denver, CO sponsored by Monster Energy.
There’s always that one destination festival people call home. For metal heads it’s Wacken Open Air in Germany. For cruise enthusiasts it’s 70,000 Tons Of Metal. For hardcore it’s This Is Hardcore. Many people I’ve talked to love this festival and call it like a place they can get together with friends and see bands they love.
Part II
Saturday at Psycho Las Vegas was no less impressive and perhaps the best single day of the fest band for band, especially if you were still able to stand after the first few days. Starting off with the public première of the Melvins documentary, The Colossus Of Destiny, followed by a Q & A by the director, Bob Hannam; this set the tone for the day.Continue reading
Part 1
For the second year in a row, the US stakes their claim to holding a fest the equivalent of a Desertfest or Roadburn level of excellence in the form of Psycho Las Vegas. Last years’ inaugural Psycho California was a hit by all accounts, and therefore not a surprise that Vegas was the locale of choice for round two. Definitely the town is a bigger draw for the bands themselves and some party minded fans, although a few days is really all your should ever spend there at once.
How do you take a pretty kickass tour and make it more awesome? Make the last date of tour an all day festival at one of the best venues in California. The fully fledged Rockstar Energy Drink Taste of Chaos Festival assembled on a hot Saturday in mid-summer at The San Manuel Amphitheater, in the thick of a concert tour and festival season packed with options. Fans still gathered in droves for a show in which more than half of the bands could have headlined and sold out their own tours easily. Although tons of cool food trucks, countless craft beer options, and a carnival type atmosphere helped make it a fun day out, it comes back to being all about the music. It’s a testament to the organizers who put this bill together, but there seemed to be many heads in the venue for each band, all screaming along with every word. For fans of a certain age, this event was the holy grail of millennial teen angst and passion. Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday are two of the signpost bands of that era, and coupled with The Starting Line, Saosin featuring Anthony Green, Senses Fail and The Early November on the bill might be just too much for the hearts of early 2000s heartstrings to take. Add in 90s post-hardcore kings Quicksand, The Get Up Kids, Reggie And the Full Effect and many more, and you have an incredible day of live music. Captured for Ghost Cult by Melina Dellamarggio of Melina D Photography in her final assignment before passing away in August, you get sense of the spirit these bands still embody, of music that still matters, and a mutual love shared by fans of all kinds.
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Part 2
After a wobbly Saturday morning start, Akercocke carried on from where they left off a few years ago, improving and gaining/regaining fans as they went along. Rotting Christ sounded fantastic, The King is Blind completely owned the second stage for forty brutal minutes, and Fear Factory treated the crowd to all of 1995’s Demanufacture album while singer Burton C Bell tried his best to keep his voice from cracking. Paradise Lost played a set filled with heavier material, and Gojira stunned the majority of the audience with a set that not even headliners Mastodon could come close to touching. A typically eclectic set, the Atlantan four-piece struggled to get any momentum going, and even with the aid of some fancy video screens, only occasionally showed signs of being genuine headliners. A new version of old UK thrashers Acid Reign also managed to steal Mastodon’s thunder all the way from the second stage, playing one of the fastest and most enjoyable thrash sets of the festival while singer, ‘H’, looked resplendent in his shocking pink suit and top hat.
And so to Sunday, and to the wonders of Ghost Bath. Only possessing the vaguest of knowledge about this band, I was simply unprepared for the next forty highly confusing (and occasionally eye-wateringly funny) minutes. Imagine a Black Metal band fronted by the shrieking goat from YouTube and you’d have a good idea of what I witnessed that morning.
Although the pedigree of the members of Metal Allegiance is not in question, I’m afraid the same cannot be said of their collective efforts. Cover version after horrible cover version was mauled and discarded, as people turned to each other in disbelief and disappointment. Playing all of 1996 album Nemesis Divina in full, Black Metallers Satyricon put in one of the performances of the weekend, even in the blazing sunshine. Finland’s Whispered took to the stage in their Japanese costumes and make-up and proceeded to win over an entire tent of confused onlookers. Technical Thrashers Vektor followed and even more people left with smiling faces. Symphony X gave everyone on the main stage plenty to sing along to, but Anthrax obliterated their memory in seconds. The last time the New York outfit played here in 2013, it was all fairly average, maybe even disappointing. But not this time. They were on fire from the second they launched into ‘You Gotta Believe’ until they left the stage to ‘Indians’. Nobody even cared that they dropped a couple of favourites in order to showcase newer material.
Even headliners Slayer struggled to keep up. Again, like Anthrax, it was a much improved performance from 2013, but things seemed to go a little awry in the latter stages of their set. For some reason, ‘Hell Awaits’ became an instrumental after the first chorus, and Tom’s demeanour changed from happy and smiling to fairly disinterested around the same time. Still, when they came back out for the encore of ‘South of Heaven’, ‘Raining Blood’, and ‘Angel of Death’ everything was quickly forgiven and forgotten. It was left up to New Orleans band Goatwhore to close the weekend on the second stage, and they did so imperiously with one of the loudest, heaviest hours of the festival.
From the almost comical amount of crowd surfers (Acid Reign alone clocked 263 in one hour – an average of over four per minute) to the spontaneous chant of “MAN IN YELLOW”, directed to one of the security staff stood on the scaffolding before Slayer, to the glorious weather and generally contagious good feeling of everyone in attendance (even a lot of the campsite toilets were still usable by the Monday morning!), there was only one place to be last week.
There were a few odd little problems, of course. Since the festival ended, a story has emerged that a girl was sexually assaulted in her tent, and the amount of moshpit idiocy seems to be on the increase again. Not, this time, from the shirtless circle-pitters and kung-fu merchants, but this time from the people who stand on the barrier all day, doing their best to punch and deliberately tear clumps of hair from any crowd surfer (male and female) unlucky enough to invade their personal space as they get dragged over the front. Making sure at all times, of course, that security have a firm hold of their target first so that they can’t retaliate.
The worst thing this year though was the repeated loop of the same bloody music videos on the big screen all weekend. When I arrived in the main arena on the Friday, I said “hey, this new Wormrot song’s great. I’ll definitely be getting the album”. By the time Saturday evening came around, I never wanted to hear fucking thing again. And as for the constant exposure to the videos of Wakrat and Blackberry Smoke, let’s just say that if I ever meet either of those bands in person, then it won’t end pleasantly for either of them.
Overall though, and yet again, Bloodstock Open Air was a roaring success.
Roll on next year.
WORDS BY GARY ALCOCK
Part I
For those of you who may be unaware, Bloodstock Open Air is a UK festival which began at the Derby Assembly Rooms in 2001. After four successful years, the decision was made to turn one festival into two. One would remain at the same venue, while a bold, open air venture would take place at Catton Hall in nearby Walton-on-Trent. The outdoor festival proved to be a hit, the indoor show was subsequently dropped, and the annually held event has gone on to expand in both size and stature ever since.
Thursday’s festivities were kept fairly low-key as usual, with short, enjoyable sets from Karybdis and Sumer, with Ireland’s Psykosis left to really get the party started. The evening was rounded off by the newly renamed Phil Campbell and the Bastard Sons (formerly Phil Campbell’s All Starr Band), the former Motorhead guitarist ploughing through a selection of Motorhead covers plus ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie, ‘Sweet Leaf’ by Black Sabbath, and ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ by ZZ Top. Joined on stage by Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider and Pepper Keenan of COC for a truly memorable version of ‘Born To Raise Hell’, the band eventually brought things to a rousing climax with a cover of ‘Silver Machine’ by Hawkwind.
Friday is where the entertainment really begins at Bloodstock though, and you don’t get much more entertaining than songs about unicorns and space wizards followed by a battle cry of “We are Gloryhammer and we sing songs about hammers!” Evil Scarecrow followed, and you simply haven’t lived until you’ve held your pincers in the air and scuttled from side to side for the mighty ‘Crabulon’. Corrosion of Conformity played a typically crowd-pleasing set of which my only criticism would be ‘Clean My Wounds’ being used as the backbone for a rambling, ten minute long jam session. Venom‘s Legendary bassist/vocalist, Cronos, snarled and joked his way through their set, but the band let themselves down with a poor choice of songs. No such problems from Behemoth though, who played latest album ‘The Satanist’ in its entirety before finishing with a blistering encore of ‘Ov Fire and the Void’ and ‘Chant For Ezkaton’.
Britain has always held a special place in Twisted Sister‘s heart and it really showed in their last ever performance here. Drawing the biggest ever crowd for a Bloodstock headline act, it was the perfect send off for one of the finest American Heavy Metal bands to ever grace a UK stage. Diamond Head finished off the evening on the second stage in competent, if unspectacular style. At least they didn’t sound like a tribute act to themselves like they did the last time I saw them.
WORDS BY GARY ALCOCK
In the late 80s and mid 90s there was a legendary metalfest in the south of the Netherlands, which definitively put Eindhoven on the map as the epicenter of the dutch metal world, and it was called Dynamo. At it’s peak it boasted 70,000 visitors and the stories about it are still passed down wistfully to the younger generation. Sadly, the fest called it quits by the end of the nineties, and was no more. Until last year that is, when it rose like a phoenix from the ashes before, as Dynamo Metalfest. Things are still small-scale compared to the olden days, with 5000 tickets last year and 10,000 for this year, but I’m determined to go see if this little chick can still bring the heat.
Because the festival runs only one stage the first band is on before noon, and this early hour meant that I did not manage to catch them, but we roll into the relatively roomy Ice rink (now sans ice) just before Audrey Horne are about to take the stage. One thing we noticed all day was because of the shape of the ice rink venue, once you go off of the grass field in the middle onto the track, where the bars and shops are, the sound bounces a lot under the short roof. This however just gives us another excuse to stay in the sun and once there the sound is more than fine, because the wind can’t play with it in the enclosed rink.
The great thing about Audrey Horne is how much fun they’re having on stage, and even though they’re faced with a still very lukewarm crowd, they manage to get them a long in their catchy hard rock party tunes. The music reminds me of bands such as Thin Lizzy, but doesn’t sound dated, which in itself is a feat. But really the bands enjoyment of playing and playing together is what makes them a joy to watch.
After Audrey Horne we get treated to local greats Textures. Their particular style of technical death metal isn’t particularly my cup of tea, but is definitely very modern. It’s also quite impressive how they manage to keep their eclectic and at times confusing repertoire surprisingly catchy. At times the hooks really dig in, aided by the excellent vocal work, only to take you for a wild turn afterwards and leave you somewhat bewildered. They definitely wake up the filling field though, and what they do they do very well.
Now we got Obituary, filling in for Life of Agony who sadly had to cancel. These deathmetal staples decided they could do a quick show on their way from Sweden to their next gig. This did mean that they had to play in the afternoon, meaning we got a semi headliner in the middle of the day. These guys clearly play a lot, and do so very well. They always give a very good show and the extreme amount of stage miles this band makes shows. Today is no exception, even though the band is “just passing through” pummeling us awake and leaving us in awe just to continue on their way again.
Sacred Reich are possibly the most effortlessly presented band. They play their songs with very little up-smuck and play them very well, with an almost laid back air of experience. In between tunes they chat to the older portion of the crowd about the good old days of Dynamo Festival, and are clearly enjoying being back immensely. Though the band has an almost carefree stage presence, the crowd is possibly the wildest it was all day, with so many crowdsurfers coming in from all sides the security needs to grow extra arms to catch them all.
Powerwolf cause some controversy among metal fans. With their painted faces and very catchy power metal, they;re by far the most theatrical band on the bill, especially when you count in the twin golden eagle keyboard stands. Say what you will about them they give a very good show, where everything they do is on point. It may feel a tad orchestrated but it works and the field are loving it. They attract do attract a younger audience but fresh blood is very good for the scene. All in all I found them quite enjoyable, in a silly power metal fun way.
Metal Church are quite the comfortably confident showmen, and none of the show elements seem to take attention away from the concise and precise racket the band creates. The vocals take some getting used to, but are pretty spot on once you acclimatize to the height and sharpness of them. The band play expertly and the crowd replies with adulation; Metal Church is in service, praise be metal.
At the Gates are one of the progenitors of the Swedish melodic deathmetal sound and they clearly show they deserve the praise they get. Effortlessly they level the field, and after just having been taken to church by metal church we now get tossed into the churning masses. The band masterfully whip up the crowd into a moshing and crowdsurfing frenzy on the tides of hard-hitting blastbeats and scratchy screamed vocals, and gentle waves of melody between.
Anthrax; Never let anyone say hat all the big bands from the 80s have become old men and gone to shit. Anthrax still pack a punch that none of the other bands even manage to approach, keeping an incredible momentum going and driving the crowd wild with crowdsurfers and small pits even at the back of the field. The auditory pummeling this band provide chases me down the road when I sadly have to leave a little before the end of the show in order to catch my transit home.
In the end we can conclude that this little reincarnated show still knows how to bring the heat and melt your face off, and were very much looking forward to see it grow it’s flame. Rock on Dynamo.
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WORDS AND PHOTOS BY SUSANNE A. MAATHUIS