As noted last time, there was no way in hell that I was missing this, especially given the trend at the Palladium of booking shows into the downstairs, then moving them to the upstairs. I've bitched about this in the past, but anyone who bitches about Kreator and Voivod, especially when they were as on as they were this night, at contact range for a mere $23 is well overdue for an elbow in the face.
So I split straight from work, cursed the traffic, and ended up getting in and through doors exactly on time, because Lazarus AD was starting early, at least relative to the announced 7:00 doors, 8:00 bands. No complaints here; I was in, and an earlier start now means more Kreator and Voivod before the staff starts throwing people out the venue.
Lazarus AD [5/7]
Since I missed Testament's gig here last year, I hadn't seen these guys before; it's not so often that a band out of Kenosha gets to the east coast. They put up a decent set mixing late thrash and NWOSDM; good overall, if a little pedestrian in places, and well-matched to the bill. Those familiar with the criticisms people have of Kreator's stuff this decade, though, will see the issue; fortunately, this band is still coming up, still defining themselves, and there was enough different about this set that it's not set in stone that they're always going to be modern-Kreator-Jr-without-the-back-catalog. They'll probably be back again; interesting to see how they develop by then.
Evile [6/7]
This was Evile's debut US tour, though not, obviously, the first show, and they seemed to be genuinely impressed at the crowd reaction. Like a lot of thrash revival bands, there are probably questions about how original they are, and to what degree they're able to step away from being a heavier early Kreator, but what's more important in the context of shows like this is that they are fucking good at this shit, and the crowd response was completely predictable in the light of what the band delivered. Good stuff, and an extra reason to go to Overkill's tour next month.
Nachtmystium [6/7]
Between one thing and another, I hadn't seen this band since I think like 2007, a year that I saw them like three times. This being the case, I'm not sure how more or less psychedelic this outing was relative to the last time, but despite coming off kind of short, it definitely retained the rawness and a large measure of the mysticism that I remember from the band. I was about midway back, stuck after going nearly broke on merch, so I'm not sure what the reaction was like down front, but at least where I was standing, people appreciated both the dirty black metal and the weirdness, for their own sakes and in setting up the headliners still to come.
Voivod [7/7]
I hadn't actually seen Voivod before, but I'm pretty sure that I've seen Away on several occasions, just hanging out at Metalfest and the like. Maybe not, maybe so; doesn't matter, and what does matter is that several graying Canadians got onstage and played some amazing, brain-wrecking, heavy, complex, and generally bizarre music, and got people flying around through bizarre signatures and time changes, being, exactly as advertised, completely and utterly unique. In some ways I wish that I was ten years older, and had gotten the opportunity to see more of this from the band when they were younger, and the world younger as well, but what this set argues is that it's not necessary. Voivod still have it, still bring it, and all you need to do is show up and bring your head; the band will take care of twisting it into knots.
Voivod would have stolen the show, with this performance, from about 90 to 95 percent of other headliners. Maybe it Kreator had had an off night, they might have stolen it from them as well.
Kreator [7/7]
Kreator, though, decidedly did not have an off night, and delivered a headlining set of explosive intensity that is on the short list for the best performance I've seen indoors. It came close to, but did not top, the end of that Carcass-ATG-Kreator night on the rail at Wacken '08, and comes out beter than either of the other times I've seen them so far. This was rumored to be an "old-school" set in advance, and while there was a lot of older material, this was not strictly accurate; we got "Hordes of Chaos" and "Demon Prince" from the new one, and a surprising amount of Enemy of God material, including "Servant in Heaven, King in Hell", which they didn't do either of the two times I saw them touring on that record. Still, anyone who was there for the old-school material was going to be well satisfied -- "Endless Pain", which they do not bring out as often as you might think, and not only "Coma of Souls" but "When the Sun Burns Red" in the encore.
This is not a setlist because it's in no particular order (I was kind of thrashing till death and defending myself from dudes flying about, and not disposed to keeping track of such things), but Kreator did play at least the following songs on this gig:
Extreme Aggression
Endless Pain
Pleasure to Kill
Hordes of Chaos
Demon Prince
Servant in Heaven, King in Hell
Coma of Souls
Terrible Certainty
Enemy of God
Impossible Brutality
Phobia
(The Patriarch) -- playback
Violent Revolution
When the Sun Burns Red (encore)
Flag of Hate (encore)
Tormentor (encore)
No sooner had the last scream died than the security put the lights on and started shoving people out the door. By volume, we got about as much from two legendary bands putting out top performances as we were going to get, and anyone who left dissatisfied should really check why they listen to metal in the first place, not to mention why they bother going to shows.
Next up is probably not HammerFall tonight; I'm skint after supporting these bands and paying the Palladium's ticket prices. More likely, it'll be Darkwor's release show with Woe at Ralph's next weekend. In other news, I indeed got that long-ago-ordered Wacken ticket, so I start in the north this summer rather than the east, and finish in the east rather than in the south. The itinerary is still not set for this, but it'll be announced when it is.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Hinterlands Festivals - a guide to doing Euro metalfests more than an hour from a major airport
So right about now, winter is winding down, holiday bills are mostly paid off, and with NEDF on a one-year hiatus and NEMHF reaching new lows even for that long-humbled festival, some people may be thinking, "well, do I maybe take a pass on MDF this year and hit Party.San, Summer Breeze, or Extreme Obscene? Could I make that work?" Maybe others were planning a Wacken trip and are having second thoughts about the $200 ticket, Ill Nino and Motley Crue on the bill, and the news feeds from the organizers having to do with seemingly everything but metal, and thinking about other festivals as long as they're going to sink the money on flights. Maybe some people, like I was last year, are confident in their ability to handle a camp-in festival and are looking around at other options. Some of them may even have digested the Wacken guide and think that, well, this should suffice for about everywhere.
It doesn't. Wacken is unique in several respects among Euro metalfests, and hence I'm writing this separate guide for other festivals.
HINTERLANDS FESTIVALS
A BRIEF GUIDE TO DOING SMALLER EURO METALFESTS WITHOUT GETTING LOST, KILLED, LOCKED UP, OR LOSING ALL YOUR MONEY, PARTICULARLY CONCENTRATING ON GERMANY AND ESPECIALLY ON PARTY.SAN
1. YOU'RE NOT IN S-H ANYMORE
This guide is intended for the international audience, whose entree into the world of Euro festivals comes generally through one of two avenues: going to Wacken, or going to another festival in the company of locals who have been there before. In the second case, there is nothing to worry about, because your friends will know everything relevant in this guide and keep you out of trouble to the best of their abilities. In the first case, though, several salient points need to be mentioned that may escape the international traveler whose festival experience, to date, has begun and ended on a train siding in Itzehoe.
I) Wacken is uniquely enormous. At 70,000 festivalgoers, it is the largest metalfest of any kind in Germany and one of the largest music festivals of any type on the continent. Most metalfests are not that big; With Full Force outside of Leipzig, the next closest contender, is barely more than half as large, and after than there are a bunch like Summer Breeze, Rock Hard, and Party.San in the 10K-20K range. Smaller festivals may not have the problems of Wacken, but they also have less in the way of services.
II) Wacken is uniquely international. At other festivals, you have contingents from other parts of Europe and a sprinkling from around the world, but most of the attendees are going to be nationals if not locals from the state the festival is held in. More information is going to be in local-language only, because the assumption is that translating into English (the de facto international language in Europe currently) is not necessary.
III) Wacken is uniquely accessible. Less than an hour by bus and train from one of Germany's major air hubs, it is wicked simple, if you know what you are doing, to go from Hamburg to the W:O:A. The challenges involved to get to other festivals are, almost uniformly, much more difficult and will remain tricky even with experience.
2. TRAVEL
Wacken is easy to get to because of its proximity to Hamburg. Fly there, and you're golden. The rest of Germany, not so much, and preconceptions about the efficacy of the German rail network and the speed of German highways may contribute to the problem faced by international arrivees trying to navigate their way to a festival site that is often out in the boonies.
I) AIR
Germany is well-served by airports, but you need to fly into the right one for reasons that will become clearer in the sections on road and rail transit. It is a mistake to look at a map of Germany, decide that it's about the size and shape of Illinois + Indiana and has autobahns that you can drive at 100mph on and trains that go everywhere, and just fly in to Frankfurt because that's close enough. If you're going to be going to a festival in the south, like Summer Breeze, fly in to Munich. If you're going to be hitting a festival in the northwest, Dusseldorf is probably the best. Hamburg for Wacken and the north coast, Frankfurt for the central belt, and Berlin for anything at all in the former East Germany. Prague is a possibility as well for festivals in Thuringia and Saxony; check train fares in combination with your airline prices to be sure. Crossing the German/Czech border in a rental car is not advised (depending on your rental terms, the car can be subject to police confiscation), so if you're going to drive, you'll need to fly in to the country of your festival destination.
II) ROAD
I go by rail to festivals, because then I don't have to worry about a car getting stuck in the mud or accidentally getting its windshield broken by someone's beer bottle, and also because it doesn't make financial sense. However, because the rail tickets don't scale down to zero at group rates, there is going to be some break point where, if you go in a large enough group, it's going to be cheaper to go by car. Remember to include gas in your estimates; European cars as a fleet are somewhat more efficient than American ones, but you're going to be burning a fair bit if you have to do significant highway travel, either at speed or sitting in a Stau.
The great myth of Germany is that everyone zooms along at a hundred and twenty on the autobahn without a care in the world. The reality is that in the West and especially around cities, you run into a lot of congestion and speed zones, and in areas that are not backed up (the Stau referenced earlier is the general vernacular for traffic jam, but they tend to extend for miles), it is really fucking hard to drive at 100 miles per hour for a sustained period of time. The car that you are likely to get is going to usually have difficulties keeping the mandatory minimum speed (outside of urban areas) of 145kph (about 85 mph), especially with three or four metalheads and their gear loading it down. If you've got confidence in your lead foot and your high-speed skills, it works financially, you've got someone in the group capable of following a map and calling out exits (at 85mph minimum cruising speed, there are no snap exits on the autobahn; all are announced several km in advance, and the added lane for the offramp is usually about 1km long to allow adequate braking distance), and you are ok with the nuances of German road signs, go for it.
IIa) German road signs and other conventions.
There are better references for this elsewhere; this is essential survival information. First, if you see a little white sign with a yellow diamond on it as you come up to an intersection, you have the right of way, so you don't need to slow down and check for crossing traffic. If you DON'T see that little sign, though, definitely do slow down and check for crossing traffic, because they are not stopping for you and the last thing you need is to get siderammed by a giant Mercedes Laster doing 50.
Second, most stoplights will have a phase where they will go from red to red+yellow, before going on to green. This is your cue to put the car in gear and get ready to get moving, because the driver behind you is going to get pissed if you don't go at the exact moment the light turns green. F1 motor racing is a big sport in Germany, and between the autobahns and the racing starts at traffic stops, a large portion of the populace is being encouraged to think of themselves as Michael Schumacher, however constrained by the fact that they are driving a Renault Megane. Be aware that the placid old man/woman behind or next to you is going to drive like a maniac at the nearest opportunity, and is expecting you to do likewise.
Third, and reassuringly, in Europe, as in practically everywhere that is not its own island nation, people drive on the right like normal.
IIb) You and the traffic police.
Germany does not have much in the way of highway patrol, because, as you might expect, catching speeders in a nation that drives like fighter pilots outside of city limits and builds engines and autoframes to match is kind of a fool's errand. However, the resourceful, technically inclined, and not-nearly-as-afraid-of-surveillance-society-as-the-US Germans have implemented another system, based around the "Blitzer", a snappy and only vaguely threatening nickname for the automated speed camera. Blitzers are deployed on the autobahns wherever there is a speed zone (going through cities, lanes will often be restricted to 120/100/70kph going from inside to outside), and in concealed mobile emplacements along non-autobahn roads wherever the local police have gotten a complaint about too many speeders, or where they think might be a fruitful location to catch some traffic ticket fodder. Blitzer reports are a regular feature of German radio, but if you don't speak German or are instead pounding the Dismember back catalog rather than whatever crap neurock station is the least bad, you're not going to get them, so your chances of getting caught by a speed camera at some point are higher. You're probably not going to be in-country long enough for the ticket to catch up with you, but the rental car company will pass the ticket on to you, and if you don't pay it or if the offense is severe enough, you could end up losing your right to operate in Germany.
The other danger, besides speed cams, comes from the fact that you're a carfull of metalheads going to a place that a lot of other carfulls of metalheads are going to, and you may encounter a customs roadblock. This is particularly common at Wacken, less so as you go down the chain sizewise, and not overly pleasant. The Zollamt in Germany is a division of the federal police, and they will make it hard on you if they find contraband, most saliently but not limited to drugs, weapons, and NS materials. If you absolutely have to bring your own weed, a carving knife to hack up meat for barbecue, or a pile of CDs to hand out that you think might make an impatient and overworked police officer suspicious, it's probably easiest to send one guy with this stuff by rail, as the chance of getting "kontrolliert" is significantly smaller.
III) RAIL
The Deutsche Bahn is a marvelous system of interconnected national, international, and local train links that covers every corner of Germany. It is also a maze of disorientingly variant ticket schedules that can have a significant effect on how much you pay to get to point B, depending on whether you start at point A or point C and how many hours you are willing to spend in transit to get the job done.
As an example, consider that Bad Berka, the site of the Party.San festival, is only slightly farther from Munich than it is from Berlin. Nevertheless, the train connections from Munich take almost twice as long and are almost twice as expensive. This is, to put it mildly, rather dumb, and a consequence of a fifty-year-long bit of 'rather dumbness' known to history as the Cold War. Bad Berka is in Thuringia, which was part of the GDR, and Munich is in Bavaria, which has been part of the Federal Republic of Germany for as long as it's existed. There used to be a heavily defended national border between these two states, which are now part of the same country, and the motivation of keeping their citizens from running away kind of discouraged the East German government from building direct rail links to West Germany. Nevertheless, it's possible; I met a guy at Party.San last year who came up from Munich for about what it cost me to come down from Berlin, but he had to spend seven hours using local rail connections and buses to make the same connection that I did in three hours and change with exactly one change of trains.
On the rails in the hinterlands, some basic German, or good attention to herd behavior, is necessary. Announcements will seldom if ever be made in English, so get acquainted with what station you're going to need to get off at, or be sure that you're in the same car with other festival travelers so you can get off when they do. For this reason, I'd advise anyone not fluent in German or travelling with someone who is to buy a return ticket; it's something additional to keep track of, and will require you to get to the rail station at a specific time for departure, but saves you from having to buy a ticket in the podunk city closest to the festival, where the worker in the ticket office may not have perfect or complete command of English (or occasionally may be a confusingly-labeled machine), rather than in the metropolitan center you flew into. I can go one-way-all-the-way from Hamburg to Berlin to Bad Berka to Dresden, but non-German speakers probably should not be so confident in their ability to navigate the DB.
3. HOSPITALITY
As mentioned above, smaller festivals will have less in the way of services than bigger ones. You'll have latrines, still, but there will be fewer of them and in fewer locations. Cash points will be in the neighboring town or village, and you'll be responsible for keeping any electronic devices working (and not stolen) yourself. Those of us who can remember a time before lock trucks, onsite ATMs, and internet cafes at Wacken will not be inconvenienced; those who go to a small festival expecting such amenities will be in for a shock.
When the festival grounds are not open, you are generally expected to shift for yourself when it comes to food. This is the one thing I goofed on at Party.San last year: not having sufficient provisions for the day-and-a-half I spent on site before the infield opened. Hit up a supermarket either on the way in or on a shuttle bus run once you get to the festival, and pick up enough food and beer to suit, and enough water or other non-booze beverages to keep from getting dehydrated if the weather makes this a factor. The beerwagon was also not open on the first day, which was a bit of a bummer, but something to keep in mind for the future.
It's also worth going back and reading up on the Pfand-system at Party.San this past year, as something like that is likely to be employed at other small festivals to cut down on cleanup costs. Few festivals can afford to have the scads of durable cups badged that Wacken does, so more will use a chip system, as confusing as it can be at the start, to incentivize people to hand their cups back rather than chucking them on the ground.
There is practically no tent crime and very little pickpocketing at smaller festivals of the size that you're likely to be going to, but there is also next to nothing in the way of perimeter security. Kids or hobos will come out from the surrounding area to vulture up any recyclables (in Germany, nearly everything has a bottle deposit on it between 10 and 25 Eurocents), so if you leave your tent flap open and expensive stuff lying around in plain view, it is your fault if it gets nicked. The smaller attendance also fosters a feeling of community; at a larger festival, you could sit down randomly in the beer garden and never share a table with the same people twice, but at a smaller fest, you're going to see and interact with the same people over and over again. This cuts down on dickish behavior to a certain degree because, like in a small town, everyone knows everyone else.
In amidst all this stuff, it really helps to know the local language, or to quickly become festival buddies with someone who does, because while you'll be able to get prices at the supermarkets and order a beer at the beer wagon just fine, nobody wants to be eating cold Maggi ravioli out of a can because they couldn't read the setup instructions on a grill set, or the one guy staring blankly while the rest of the bar cracks up at some untranslatable joke. It's definitely possible to do hinterland festivals without knowing the language (well, as long as you have this guide at hand!), but it's more fun to be able to participate in the local festival culture too, in addition to watching the bands.
As noted above, it will be more difficult to get to an ATM. However, at smaller festivals stuff tends to be cheaper as well, so you don't need to go down the cash machine so often. If you watch yourself, you should be able to eat and drink all weekend on less than 200e, leaving any other funds for merch.
4. WHAT TO PACK
See the original Wacken guide for the basics; you will need all this stuff to do hinterland festivals as well. At Party.San, because the camping sites are in a sheep pasture on a hill rather than a cow pasture that tends to turn into a bog, there is less of an issue with wet ground, but you still need to be prepared for rain, and you still need boots.
If, like me, you're able to get sufficient time off to do multiple festivals, your needs increase; you need to have as many dropcloths as festivals, for instance, because if it rains, you're going to want to throw out the rained-on one. You'll also need to find a laundromat to wash your clothes during any layover in urban Germany; this is a challenge on its own for the uninitiated that is probably better handled elsewhere.
Definitely bring a P-38-type can opener and a camping spork. These will add practically nothing to your pack, and prevent you from having to eat bizarre internal German foods like I did. A can's useless unless you can get it open, and if you're skint and can't afford raw ingredients, these little things will make that Maggi ravioli ration accessible and a little more palatable. On a related note, leave room in or on (if you're using a frame pack, which is the smart way) your pack for food as well as merch, in case you need to carry it in on the initial trip in to the campsite. (If you like the idea of eating whatever you can find that doesn't require a can opener or any other preparation using just your bare hands, then, by all means, feel free to ditch the weight.)
5. POLITICS
As music gets more extreme, it gets more political. This is a simple fact; there are lots of non-political death metal and black metal bands and crust-punk bands, but the further you get out to the margins, the more likely it is that a given band is going to be politically radical, either to the left or to the right, and that their supporters are going to be also politicized. If you go to a festival that has a lot of black metal bands, don't be surprised if you run into extreme rightists, and if you go to a festival that has a lot of grind or crust on the bill, don't be shocked if you run into a bunch of anarcho-socialists.
This being said, it is probably not a smart idea to get into political discussions with random people. Europe operates on a different political continuum from the United States, where different things are taken for granted (say, that ensuring access to health care or health insurance is a proper sphere of action for government) and things that Americans across the political spectrum take for granted (say, an armed citizenry or fairly absolute freedom of speech) are outright rejected. This is a tricky minefield to navigate at any time, but especially so when you're half drunk, trying to communicate across first-language borders, and a stranger in a strange land. As an American in Europe, you will never be entirely able to get away from political stuff, but never start a political discussion or fight if you can help it. Yield points if people press you; there's no real point in saving face, and if someone is seriously giving you aggro about this, they're probably completely gassed and are going to forget it soon enough.
6. SURVIVAL GERMAN
As indicated several times before, a basic familiarity with the local language is invaluable. If all you have is this guide, though, here are some expressions to get you out of trouble, or to keep whatever trouble you got yourself into from getting worse.
I) Police
If someone yells "HALT!", or "HALTEN SIE!" (HALtin zee), or especially any combination of these with "POLIZEI!" (polleTSAI) around you, it means STOP, and you should STOP, and look around for the police officer who is doing the yelling, and make sure that they are not yelling at you. German police are not quite as often armed as American police are, and they are not trigger happy in general, but they still take a dim view of people they think are trying to evade arrest. If you happen to get stopped, the officer is probably going to ask for your identification with "Ausweis bitte" (OWSveiss bitta) or, if you're driving and you get pulled over or stopped at a customs roadblock, "Fahrausweis bitte" (FARowsveiss bitta). Hand the officer your passport, or in the second case your passport and your driver's license. US driver's licenses are not valid identification in the EU, so you should have your passport in an easily accessible pocket rather than stuffed in your pack. Most police, even in the East, have a pretty decent command of English, and will try to get whatever business they have with you done in English from that point on, on the assumption that as an American you're not going to be able to speak German.
The other occasion you're likely to interact with German officialdom is on the train, if you go by rail or subway at any point. Definitely on the train, and maybe on the subway, you are going to get "kontrolliert" by a ticket-taker who will mumble something like "Fahrkarte bitte" (FARkarta bitta). Since you should have a validated ticket, show it to him/her and you'll be golden. It is important in this regard to validate your subway/streetcar ticket after you get on; because of the way German urban public transit systems are set up, it's not really possible to have turnstiles to check that people paid on every streetcorner. You buy your ticket from a machine at the stop or in the train car, and then usually get it stamped in a box in the car. You'll see other passengers doing this, and be sure to do it as well, because if you get "controlled" on the subway and don't have a validated ticket, you can be hit with a spot fine of 40 to 50 euros, which is fucking expensive and completely not worth it.
II) Some dude giving you aggro
You're going to be at a metalfest, which is a place where a lot of people who don't know each other spend all day packed in close together getting colossally drunk. It doesn't happen a lot, but in such conditions, tempers can easily flare and people may give you aggro for reasons you can't understand, in a language you don't understand either.
I don't have a guide to common drunk complaints, but if someone is yelling at you in a threatening tone and you can't understand them, it may help to calm them down by saying something like "Sorry, mann, versteh' dich nicht, kannst auf Englisch?" (SOrri mon, ferSHTAY dish nisht, konnst owf ENNglish) [Sorry, man, I don't understand you, can you say that in English?] If they want to fight you no matter what, you're probably screwed, but it's equally likely that they'll be able to calm down and explain what the deal is in broken Germanic English, or that someone around will be less drunk and able to interpret in order to defuse the situation if necessary. This phrase is also a good standard response when someone at the festival just talks at you in German; in this and any other case where you use it, it's good practice to immediately follow up with the phrase in English, in case you're actually being jabbered at in Danish or Czech or Italian or something.
III) Ticket buying and train stuff
If possible, as noted above, buy a return ticket in your flight hub, where the DB clerk at the desk is significantly more likely to speak significantly better English. If you lose your return half, though, or decide that you are likely to lose or destroy any return half, or aren't going to be able to get back to the train station exactly on the mark on the Sunday, you are probably going to have to buy a ticket in the hinterland.
If you can, but a ticket in a ticket office going back to your intended destination. This usually will allow you to speak to a human person and get a ticket en bloc. Try to use English first, but if they look back at you confused, try "Einmal nach [city here] bitte?" (AYNmal nock [city here] bitta?) [One to [city here] please?]. This will be usually be followed up with some phrase including the word "Rueckfahrt", which sounds like "rickfaart" a lot of the time and should be noticeable. Most common is probably going to be "Mit oder ohne Rueckfahrt?" (mitt oda OWNa rickFAART) [One way or return?]; the proper response is "Ohne Rueckfahrt bitte" (OWNa rickFAART bitta) (One-way, please) unless you have the intention of coming back....and since you're outbound, that's going to be a no.
When talking to official people, or non-metalhead Germans who are not kids on the train, your get-out-of-jail phrase changes to "Entschuldigen Sie, koennen Sie das bitte auf English?" (ennSHULDYgen zee, kernen zee das bitta owf ENNglish). German has politeness levels, and if you speak the language, you will probably notice other metalheads not observing them, but you're a foreigner and don't have that luxury.
On any train to and from the festival, seats are going to be at a premium. Don't put your crap on them, and if there's an empty space next to you, someone is going to ask you to sit on it, usually with "Entschuldigung, ist hier noch frei?" (ennSHULDYgung, iss heer nock fry?) [excuse me, is this seat free?], which may get contracted as far down as "Hier noch frei, oder?" (Heer nock fry, oda?) [Nobody's sitting here, is there?]. You can use either of these to ask for a seat yourself, or "Entschudigen Sie, ist hier noch frei?" (ennSHULDYgen zee, isst heer nock fry?) if you're talking to a "civilian" older than about 18.
7. WRAPUP
At this point, some people may be having second thoughts about traipsing into the hinterlands, intimidated by the cost and difficulty of the transit system, overwhelmed by the survival German, unsure of their ability to find and access eatable food in a German country supermarket, and leaning towards just paying over the odds to do the festival-on-a-plate experience offered by Wacken, or not going over at all. This is ok: these are the people who would get on the wrong train and wind up in France or Austria or something before they realized they'd gone wrong, spend five minutes pondering out loud in English about how to operate an ATM rather than pushing the button with the UK flag next to it to select the English language option and end up coshed or knifed by some Turk with a neck tattoo, or get into a drunken political argument and have to spend half the festival getting the evil eye from rightists and leftists alike and glares from the bar staff when they try to get a beer; in short, people unequal to the challenge of what is, in comparison to what our soldiers go through on an average day in the hellholes that the last decade has gotten them stuck in, or on the civilian front something like Forbidden Railway, is really not that tough of an adventure.
It is, though, very rewarding, and the difficulty factor is probably exaggerated by the guide; this has to cover every worst-case scenario, and while any of the trouble points brought up here could happen, it is not likely that any of them will. If you can read a train schedule, read a map, keep to a budget, and keep a few basic phrases in memory, going to any hinterland festival will not be a problem. Small fests are often funner and cheaper than large ones, and the process of getting there will get you good stories over and above the bands and company encountered at the actual festival.
Anyone else with experience or questions is welcome to fire in; this is just my accounting of things, informed by five festival seasons' worth of traveling, but also potentially colored by the fact that I haven't done this as a stranger in a strange land with no language proficiency. I speak German well enough to be occasionally mistaken for a German national while in-country, and lived in Dresden, including bumming about on various transit systems, for the better part of a year, so I really don't have the experience of attempting to navigate the DB in English-only mode.
8. OK SO HOW MUCH IS GOING TO PARTY.SAN GOING TO COST FOR SERIOUS
Party.San is not quit-your-job-good this year, but it's pretty damn good, and this festival is the one that this guide was developed around, and probably the one it applies most to. It's also the biggest-extremest metalfest in Germany, with heavier bands than any other festival in the 10K+ class and a larger, more diverse, attendee population than smaller, often indoor or off-season festivals like NRW Deathfest or Mountains of Death. It's also, if you know what you're doing, surprisingly affordable.
Assuming you're flying from Boston (to the extent that anyone reads this, they are usually from New England or in rare cases already in Europe, as far as I can determine), a round-trip to Berlin on Icelandic is going to run you less than a thousand dollars (flights for the festival not actually bookable right now, wait a couple months, or until they fix their website), with a round-trip train ticket to Bad Berka another 80 to 100 euros ($120 to $160, depending on exchange rates) on top of that. This is about what you'll spend for gas if you drive that distance, so keep that in mind if you're traveling with multiple people. Sunk costs are going to be your ticket (about 40 euros or between $60 and $70, includes camping) and your passport, which, as noted in the Wacken guide, you really ought to get on ASAP, because the State Department can be kind of pokey.
At the festival, your food budget probably won't go much above 25euro per day; beers are 2 euro apiece with a 1 euro deposit you will pay up front and get back at some point, so do your own math on how much you're likely to swill down. You're also going to have some minor expenses for airport-to-train subway/bus connections, but all told, it's likely that you'll be able to do this trip on less than $1300 per person. It's definitely cheaper than Wacken, and depending on how you do your accommodations in Baltimore, might even be cheaper than MDF. And if you can do it, you get to see amazing heavy bands, one after the other, under the open sky with good beer and good company, and you'll reckon it cheap even at the price.
It doesn't. Wacken is unique in several respects among Euro metalfests, and hence I'm writing this separate guide for other festivals.
HINTERLANDS FESTIVALS
A BRIEF GUIDE TO DOING SMALLER EURO METALFESTS WITHOUT GETTING LOST, KILLED, LOCKED UP, OR LOSING ALL YOUR MONEY, PARTICULARLY CONCENTRATING ON GERMANY AND ESPECIALLY ON PARTY.SAN
1. YOU'RE NOT IN S-H ANYMORE
This guide is intended for the international audience, whose entree into the world of Euro festivals comes generally through one of two avenues: going to Wacken, or going to another festival in the company of locals who have been there before. In the second case, there is nothing to worry about, because your friends will know everything relevant in this guide and keep you out of trouble to the best of their abilities. In the first case, though, several salient points need to be mentioned that may escape the international traveler whose festival experience, to date, has begun and ended on a train siding in Itzehoe.
I) Wacken is uniquely enormous. At 70,000 festivalgoers, it is the largest metalfest of any kind in Germany and one of the largest music festivals of any type on the continent. Most metalfests are not that big; With Full Force outside of Leipzig, the next closest contender, is barely more than half as large, and after than there are a bunch like Summer Breeze, Rock Hard, and Party.San in the 10K-20K range. Smaller festivals may not have the problems of Wacken, but they also have less in the way of services.
II) Wacken is uniquely international. At other festivals, you have contingents from other parts of Europe and a sprinkling from around the world, but most of the attendees are going to be nationals if not locals from the state the festival is held in. More information is going to be in local-language only, because the assumption is that translating into English (the de facto international language in Europe currently) is not necessary.
III) Wacken is uniquely accessible. Less than an hour by bus and train from one of Germany's major air hubs, it is wicked simple, if you know what you are doing, to go from Hamburg to the W:O:A. The challenges involved to get to other festivals are, almost uniformly, much more difficult and will remain tricky even with experience.
2. TRAVEL
Wacken is easy to get to because of its proximity to Hamburg. Fly there, and you're golden. The rest of Germany, not so much, and preconceptions about the efficacy of the German rail network and the speed of German highways may contribute to the problem faced by international arrivees trying to navigate their way to a festival site that is often out in the boonies.
I) AIR
Germany is well-served by airports, but you need to fly into the right one for reasons that will become clearer in the sections on road and rail transit. It is a mistake to look at a map of Germany, decide that it's about the size and shape of Illinois + Indiana and has autobahns that you can drive at 100mph on and trains that go everywhere, and just fly in to Frankfurt because that's close enough. If you're going to be going to a festival in the south, like Summer Breeze, fly in to Munich. If you're going to be hitting a festival in the northwest, Dusseldorf is probably the best. Hamburg for Wacken and the north coast, Frankfurt for the central belt, and Berlin for anything at all in the former East Germany. Prague is a possibility as well for festivals in Thuringia and Saxony; check train fares in combination with your airline prices to be sure. Crossing the German/Czech border in a rental car is not advised (depending on your rental terms, the car can be subject to police confiscation), so if you're going to drive, you'll need to fly in to the country of your festival destination.
II) ROAD
I go by rail to festivals, because then I don't have to worry about a car getting stuck in the mud or accidentally getting its windshield broken by someone's beer bottle, and also because it doesn't make financial sense. However, because the rail tickets don't scale down to zero at group rates, there is going to be some break point where, if you go in a large enough group, it's going to be cheaper to go by car. Remember to include gas in your estimates; European cars as a fleet are somewhat more efficient than American ones, but you're going to be burning a fair bit if you have to do significant highway travel, either at speed or sitting in a Stau.
The great myth of Germany is that everyone zooms along at a hundred and twenty on the autobahn without a care in the world. The reality is that in the West and especially around cities, you run into a lot of congestion and speed zones, and in areas that are not backed up (the Stau referenced earlier is the general vernacular for traffic jam, but they tend to extend for miles), it is really fucking hard to drive at 100 miles per hour for a sustained period of time. The car that you are likely to get is going to usually have difficulties keeping the mandatory minimum speed (outside of urban areas) of 145kph (about 85 mph), especially with three or four metalheads and their gear loading it down. If you've got confidence in your lead foot and your high-speed skills, it works financially, you've got someone in the group capable of following a map and calling out exits (at 85mph minimum cruising speed, there are no snap exits on the autobahn; all are announced several km in advance, and the added lane for the offramp is usually about 1km long to allow adequate braking distance), and you are ok with the nuances of German road signs, go for it.
IIa) German road signs and other conventions.
There are better references for this elsewhere; this is essential survival information. First, if you see a little white sign with a yellow diamond on it as you come up to an intersection, you have the right of way, so you don't need to slow down and check for crossing traffic. If you DON'T see that little sign, though, definitely do slow down and check for crossing traffic, because they are not stopping for you and the last thing you need is to get siderammed by a giant Mercedes Laster doing 50.
Second, most stoplights will have a phase where they will go from red to red+yellow, before going on to green. This is your cue to put the car in gear and get ready to get moving, because the driver behind you is going to get pissed if you don't go at the exact moment the light turns green. F1 motor racing is a big sport in Germany, and between the autobahns and the racing starts at traffic stops, a large portion of the populace is being encouraged to think of themselves as Michael Schumacher, however constrained by the fact that they are driving a Renault Megane. Be aware that the placid old man/woman behind or next to you is going to drive like a maniac at the nearest opportunity, and is expecting you to do likewise.
Third, and reassuringly, in Europe, as in practically everywhere that is not its own island nation, people drive on the right like normal.
IIb) You and the traffic police.
Germany does not have much in the way of highway patrol, because, as you might expect, catching speeders in a nation that drives like fighter pilots outside of city limits and builds engines and autoframes to match is kind of a fool's errand. However, the resourceful, technically inclined, and not-nearly-as-afraid-of-surveillance-society-as-the-US Germans have implemented another system, based around the "Blitzer", a snappy and only vaguely threatening nickname for the automated speed camera. Blitzers are deployed on the autobahns wherever there is a speed zone (going through cities, lanes will often be restricted to 120/100/70kph going from inside to outside), and in concealed mobile emplacements along non-autobahn roads wherever the local police have gotten a complaint about too many speeders, or where they think might be a fruitful location to catch some traffic ticket fodder. Blitzer reports are a regular feature of German radio, but if you don't speak German or are instead pounding the Dismember back catalog rather than whatever crap neurock station is the least bad, you're not going to get them, so your chances of getting caught by a speed camera at some point are higher. You're probably not going to be in-country long enough for the ticket to catch up with you, but the rental car company will pass the ticket on to you, and if you don't pay it or if the offense is severe enough, you could end up losing your right to operate in Germany.
The other danger, besides speed cams, comes from the fact that you're a carfull of metalheads going to a place that a lot of other carfulls of metalheads are going to, and you may encounter a customs roadblock. This is particularly common at Wacken, less so as you go down the chain sizewise, and not overly pleasant. The Zollamt in Germany is a division of the federal police, and they will make it hard on you if they find contraband, most saliently but not limited to drugs, weapons, and NS materials. If you absolutely have to bring your own weed, a carving knife to hack up meat for barbecue, or a pile of CDs to hand out that you think might make an impatient and overworked police officer suspicious, it's probably easiest to send one guy with this stuff by rail, as the chance of getting "kontrolliert" is significantly smaller.
III) RAIL
The Deutsche Bahn is a marvelous system of interconnected national, international, and local train links that covers every corner of Germany. It is also a maze of disorientingly variant ticket schedules that can have a significant effect on how much you pay to get to point B, depending on whether you start at point A or point C and how many hours you are willing to spend in transit to get the job done.
As an example, consider that Bad Berka, the site of the Party.San festival, is only slightly farther from Munich than it is from Berlin. Nevertheless, the train connections from Munich take almost twice as long and are almost twice as expensive. This is, to put it mildly, rather dumb, and a consequence of a fifty-year-long bit of 'rather dumbness' known to history as the Cold War. Bad Berka is in Thuringia, which was part of the GDR, and Munich is in Bavaria, which has been part of the Federal Republic of Germany for as long as it's existed. There used to be a heavily defended national border between these two states, which are now part of the same country, and the motivation of keeping their citizens from running away kind of discouraged the East German government from building direct rail links to West Germany. Nevertheless, it's possible; I met a guy at Party.San last year who came up from Munich for about what it cost me to come down from Berlin, but he had to spend seven hours using local rail connections and buses to make the same connection that I did in three hours and change with exactly one change of trains.
On the rails in the hinterlands, some basic German, or good attention to herd behavior, is necessary. Announcements will seldom if ever be made in English, so get acquainted with what station you're going to need to get off at, or be sure that you're in the same car with other festival travelers so you can get off when they do. For this reason, I'd advise anyone not fluent in German or travelling with someone who is to buy a return ticket; it's something additional to keep track of, and will require you to get to the rail station at a specific time for departure, but saves you from having to buy a ticket in the podunk city closest to the festival, where the worker in the ticket office may not have perfect or complete command of English (or occasionally may be a confusingly-labeled machine), rather than in the metropolitan center you flew into. I can go one-way-all-the-way from Hamburg to Berlin to Bad Berka to Dresden, but non-German speakers probably should not be so confident in their ability to navigate the DB.
3. HOSPITALITY
As mentioned above, smaller festivals will have less in the way of services than bigger ones. You'll have latrines, still, but there will be fewer of them and in fewer locations. Cash points will be in the neighboring town or village, and you'll be responsible for keeping any electronic devices working (and not stolen) yourself. Those of us who can remember a time before lock trucks, onsite ATMs, and internet cafes at Wacken will not be inconvenienced; those who go to a small festival expecting such amenities will be in for a shock.
When the festival grounds are not open, you are generally expected to shift for yourself when it comes to food. This is the one thing I goofed on at Party.San last year: not having sufficient provisions for the day-and-a-half I spent on site before the infield opened. Hit up a supermarket either on the way in or on a shuttle bus run once you get to the festival, and pick up enough food and beer to suit, and enough water or other non-booze beverages to keep from getting dehydrated if the weather makes this a factor. The beerwagon was also not open on the first day, which was a bit of a bummer, but something to keep in mind for the future.
It's also worth going back and reading up on the Pfand-system at Party.San this past year, as something like that is likely to be employed at other small festivals to cut down on cleanup costs. Few festivals can afford to have the scads of durable cups badged that Wacken does, so more will use a chip system, as confusing as it can be at the start, to incentivize people to hand their cups back rather than chucking them on the ground.
There is practically no tent crime and very little pickpocketing at smaller festivals of the size that you're likely to be going to, but there is also next to nothing in the way of perimeter security. Kids or hobos will come out from the surrounding area to vulture up any recyclables (in Germany, nearly everything has a bottle deposit on it between 10 and 25 Eurocents), so if you leave your tent flap open and expensive stuff lying around in plain view, it is your fault if it gets nicked. The smaller attendance also fosters a feeling of community; at a larger festival, you could sit down randomly in the beer garden and never share a table with the same people twice, but at a smaller fest, you're going to see and interact with the same people over and over again. This cuts down on dickish behavior to a certain degree because, like in a small town, everyone knows everyone else.
In amidst all this stuff, it really helps to know the local language, or to quickly become festival buddies with someone who does, because while you'll be able to get prices at the supermarkets and order a beer at the beer wagon just fine, nobody wants to be eating cold Maggi ravioli out of a can because they couldn't read the setup instructions on a grill set, or the one guy staring blankly while the rest of the bar cracks up at some untranslatable joke. It's definitely possible to do hinterland festivals without knowing the language (well, as long as you have this guide at hand!), but it's more fun to be able to participate in the local festival culture too, in addition to watching the bands.
As noted above, it will be more difficult to get to an ATM. However, at smaller festivals stuff tends to be cheaper as well, so you don't need to go down the cash machine so often. If you watch yourself, you should be able to eat and drink all weekend on less than 200e, leaving any other funds for merch.
4. WHAT TO PACK
See the original Wacken guide for the basics; you will need all this stuff to do hinterland festivals as well. At Party.San, because the camping sites are in a sheep pasture on a hill rather than a cow pasture that tends to turn into a bog, there is less of an issue with wet ground, but you still need to be prepared for rain, and you still need boots.
If, like me, you're able to get sufficient time off to do multiple festivals, your needs increase; you need to have as many dropcloths as festivals, for instance, because if it rains, you're going to want to throw out the rained-on one. You'll also need to find a laundromat to wash your clothes during any layover in urban Germany; this is a challenge on its own for the uninitiated that is probably better handled elsewhere.
Definitely bring a P-38-type can opener and a camping spork. These will add practically nothing to your pack, and prevent you from having to eat bizarre internal German foods like I did. A can's useless unless you can get it open, and if you're skint and can't afford raw ingredients, these little things will make that Maggi ravioli ration accessible and a little more palatable. On a related note, leave room in or on (if you're using a frame pack, which is the smart way) your pack for food as well as merch, in case you need to carry it in on the initial trip in to the campsite. (If you like the idea of eating whatever you can find that doesn't require a can opener or any other preparation using just your bare hands, then, by all means, feel free to ditch the weight.)
5. POLITICS
As music gets more extreme, it gets more political. This is a simple fact; there are lots of non-political death metal and black metal bands and crust-punk bands, but the further you get out to the margins, the more likely it is that a given band is going to be politically radical, either to the left or to the right, and that their supporters are going to be also politicized. If you go to a festival that has a lot of black metal bands, don't be surprised if you run into extreme rightists, and if you go to a festival that has a lot of grind or crust on the bill, don't be shocked if you run into a bunch of anarcho-socialists.
This being said, it is probably not a smart idea to get into political discussions with random people. Europe operates on a different political continuum from the United States, where different things are taken for granted (say, that ensuring access to health care or health insurance is a proper sphere of action for government) and things that Americans across the political spectrum take for granted (say, an armed citizenry or fairly absolute freedom of speech) are outright rejected. This is a tricky minefield to navigate at any time, but especially so when you're half drunk, trying to communicate across first-language borders, and a stranger in a strange land. As an American in Europe, you will never be entirely able to get away from political stuff, but never start a political discussion or fight if you can help it. Yield points if people press you; there's no real point in saving face, and if someone is seriously giving you aggro about this, they're probably completely gassed and are going to forget it soon enough.
6. SURVIVAL GERMAN
As indicated several times before, a basic familiarity with the local language is invaluable. If all you have is this guide, though, here are some expressions to get you out of trouble, or to keep whatever trouble you got yourself into from getting worse.
I) Police
If someone yells "HALT!", or "HALTEN SIE!" (HALtin zee), or especially any combination of these with "POLIZEI!" (polleTSAI) around you, it means STOP, and you should STOP, and look around for the police officer who is doing the yelling, and make sure that they are not yelling at you. German police are not quite as often armed as American police are, and they are not trigger happy in general, but they still take a dim view of people they think are trying to evade arrest. If you happen to get stopped, the officer is probably going to ask for your identification with "Ausweis bitte" (OWSveiss bitta) or, if you're driving and you get pulled over or stopped at a customs roadblock, "Fahrausweis bitte" (FARowsveiss bitta). Hand the officer your passport, or in the second case your passport and your driver's license. US driver's licenses are not valid identification in the EU, so you should have your passport in an easily accessible pocket rather than stuffed in your pack. Most police, even in the East, have a pretty decent command of English, and will try to get whatever business they have with you done in English from that point on, on the assumption that as an American you're not going to be able to speak German.
The other occasion you're likely to interact with German officialdom is on the train, if you go by rail or subway at any point. Definitely on the train, and maybe on the subway, you are going to get "kontrolliert" by a ticket-taker who will mumble something like "Fahrkarte bitte" (FARkarta bitta). Since you should have a validated ticket, show it to him/her and you'll be golden. It is important in this regard to validate your subway/streetcar ticket after you get on; because of the way German urban public transit systems are set up, it's not really possible to have turnstiles to check that people paid on every streetcorner. You buy your ticket from a machine at the stop or in the train car, and then usually get it stamped in a box in the car. You'll see other passengers doing this, and be sure to do it as well, because if you get "controlled" on the subway and don't have a validated ticket, you can be hit with a spot fine of 40 to 50 euros, which is fucking expensive and completely not worth it.
II) Some dude giving you aggro
You're going to be at a metalfest, which is a place where a lot of people who don't know each other spend all day packed in close together getting colossally drunk. It doesn't happen a lot, but in such conditions, tempers can easily flare and people may give you aggro for reasons you can't understand, in a language you don't understand either.
I don't have a guide to common drunk complaints, but if someone is yelling at you in a threatening tone and you can't understand them, it may help to calm them down by saying something like "Sorry, mann, versteh' dich nicht, kannst auf Englisch?" (SOrri mon, ferSHTAY dish nisht, konnst owf ENNglish) [Sorry, man, I don't understand you, can you say that in English?] If they want to fight you no matter what, you're probably screwed, but it's equally likely that they'll be able to calm down and explain what the deal is in broken Germanic English, or that someone around will be less drunk and able to interpret in order to defuse the situation if necessary. This phrase is also a good standard response when someone at the festival just talks at you in German; in this and any other case where you use it, it's good practice to immediately follow up with the phrase in English, in case you're actually being jabbered at in Danish or Czech or Italian or something.
III) Ticket buying and train stuff
If possible, as noted above, buy a return ticket in your flight hub, where the DB clerk at the desk is significantly more likely to speak significantly better English. If you lose your return half, though, or decide that you are likely to lose or destroy any return half, or aren't going to be able to get back to the train station exactly on the mark on the Sunday, you are probably going to have to buy a ticket in the hinterland.
If you can, but a ticket in a ticket office going back to your intended destination. This usually will allow you to speak to a human person and get a ticket en bloc. Try to use English first, but if they look back at you confused, try "Einmal nach [city here] bitte?" (AYNmal nock [city here] bitta?) [One to [city here] please?]. This will be usually be followed up with some phrase including the word "Rueckfahrt", which sounds like "rickfaart" a lot of the time and should be noticeable. Most common is probably going to be "Mit oder ohne Rueckfahrt?" (mitt oda OWNa rickFAART) [One way or return?]; the proper response is "Ohne Rueckfahrt bitte" (OWNa rickFAART bitta) (One-way, please) unless you have the intention of coming back....and since you're outbound, that's going to be a no.
When talking to official people, or non-metalhead Germans who are not kids on the train, your get-out-of-jail phrase changes to "Entschuldigen Sie, koennen Sie das bitte auf English?" (ennSHULDYgen zee, kernen zee das bitta owf ENNglish). German has politeness levels, and if you speak the language, you will probably notice other metalheads not observing them, but you're a foreigner and don't have that luxury.
On any train to and from the festival, seats are going to be at a premium. Don't put your crap on them, and if there's an empty space next to you, someone is going to ask you to sit on it, usually with "Entschuldigung, ist hier noch frei?" (ennSHULDYgung, iss heer nock fry?) [excuse me, is this seat free?], which may get contracted as far down as "Hier noch frei, oder?" (Heer nock fry, oda?) [Nobody's sitting here, is there?]. You can use either of these to ask for a seat yourself, or "Entschudigen Sie, ist hier noch frei?" (ennSHULDYgen zee, isst heer nock fry?) if you're talking to a "civilian" older than about 18.
7. WRAPUP
At this point, some people may be having second thoughts about traipsing into the hinterlands, intimidated by the cost and difficulty of the transit system, overwhelmed by the survival German, unsure of their ability to find and access eatable food in a German country supermarket, and leaning towards just paying over the odds to do the festival-on-a-plate experience offered by Wacken, or not going over at all. This is ok: these are the people who would get on the wrong train and wind up in France or Austria or something before they realized they'd gone wrong, spend five minutes pondering out loud in English about how to operate an ATM rather than pushing the button with the UK flag next to it to select the English language option and end up coshed or knifed by some Turk with a neck tattoo, or get into a drunken political argument and have to spend half the festival getting the evil eye from rightists and leftists alike and glares from the bar staff when they try to get a beer; in short, people unequal to the challenge of what is, in comparison to what our soldiers go through on an average day in the hellholes that the last decade has gotten them stuck in, or on the civilian front something like Forbidden Railway, is really not that tough of an adventure.
It is, though, very rewarding, and the difficulty factor is probably exaggerated by the guide; this has to cover every worst-case scenario, and while any of the trouble points brought up here could happen, it is not likely that any of them will. If you can read a train schedule, read a map, keep to a budget, and keep a few basic phrases in memory, going to any hinterland festival will not be a problem. Small fests are often funner and cheaper than large ones, and the process of getting there will get you good stories over and above the bands and company encountered at the actual festival.
Anyone else with experience or questions is welcome to fire in; this is just my accounting of things, informed by five festival seasons' worth of traveling, but also potentially colored by the fact that I haven't done this as a stranger in a strange land with no language proficiency. I speak German well enough to be occasionally mistaken for a German national while in-country, and lived in Dresden, including bumming about on various transit systems, for the better part of a year, so I really don't have the experience of attempting to navigate the DB in English-only mode.
8. OK SO HOW MUCH IS GOING TO PARTY.SAN GOING TO COST FOR SERIOUS
Party.San is not quit-your-job-good this year, but it's pretty damn good, and this festival is the one that this guide was developed around, and probably the one it applies most to. It's also the biggest-extremest metalfest in Germany, with heavier bands than any other festival in the 10K+ class and a larger, more diverse, attendee population than smaller, often indoor or off-season festivals like NRW Deathfest or Mountains of Death. It's also, if you know what you're doing, surprisingly affordable.
Assuming you're flying from Boston (to the extent that anyone reads this, they are usually from New England or in rare cases already in Europe, as far as I can determine), a round-trip to Berlin on Icelandic is going to run you less than a thousand dollars (flights for the festival not actually bookable right now, wait a couple months, or until they fix their website), with a round-trip train ticket to Bad Berka another 80 to 100 euros ($120 to $160, depending on exchange rates) on top of that. This is about what you'll spend for gas if you drive that distance, so keep that in mind if you're traveling with multiple people. Sunk costs are going to be your ticket (about 40 euros or between $60 and $70, includes camping) and your passport, which, as noted in the Wacken guide, you really ought to get on ASAP, because the State Department can be kind of pokey.
At the festival, your food budget probably won't go much above 25euro per day; beers are 2 euro apiece with a 1 euro deposit you will pay up front and get back at some point, so do your own math on how much you're likely to swill down. You're also going to have some minor expenses for airport-to-train subway/bus connections, but all told, it's likely that you'll be able to do this trip on less than $1300 per person. It's definitely cheaper than Wacken, and depending on how you do your accommodations in Baltimore, might even be cheaper than MDF. And if you can do it, you get to see amazing heavy bands, one after the other, under the open sky with good beer and good company, and you'll reckon it cheap even at the price.
Witch Tomb with Black Pyramid, Darkwor, and Nachzehrer [O'Brien's, Allston, 2/12/2010]
Though work was wicked busy and I was unsure as to whether I'd get out on time for this, I went off on-call on schedule and was accordingly deshackled from my laptop. A brisk hike over a couple bridges later, and I was on the doorstep of O'Brien's, shortly after doors and just in time to have to watch where I was standing as Nachzehrer loaded in.
As usual on getting in early, there was a bunch of standing around drinking; I didn't need to get in this early, but the alternative was to maybe get stuck in traffic and end up missing bands or, having arrived in Boston, stand around pointlessly in the cold.
Soon enough, though, the music started.
Nachzehrer [5/7]
The second time I'd seen them, and maybe their second show overall, this presented a different side to the band: darker, heavier, and more first-wave black metal. With a wee bit of stretching, one might get to a heavier Bifrost minus the keys; this band is still, obviously, in the process of finding their feet, but there's not a lot of Low-Countries-derived black metal in this part of the world, and it'll be interesting to see how Nachzehrer's take on the raw and thrashy sound develops going forward.
Darkwor [6/7]
This was a shorter set than they had in Worcester, and one with a few more technical difficulties -- the guitars rather buried at the start -- but a good solid one. Of the three black metal bands here, Darkwor was the most expansive and 'epic', even with their raw bits, and they did a good job bringing that sound forward.
Unfortunately, I got mixed up and asked after a CD that the band didn't have -- but it is coming out for real, imminently, and if regular Darkwor shows in Worcester are something else, a Darkwor release show at Ralph's with Woe heading the bill will be something else again, and not to be missed. Mark your calendars for 3/13 -- it's not the Ides, but Metal Thursday is kind of constrained as to what day of the week it can happen on.
Black Pyramid [6/7]
The only thing "black metal" about Black Pyramid is that they are a "metal" band with "black" in their name, but regardless they were well-matched to this bill and well-received by the audience. This is partly because Rich Horror just plain doesn't book shows where all the bands don't flow with and set up each other in subtly awesome fashion, and partly because Black Pyramid is a fuckin good and fuckin heavy doom metal band. Not content to just revive Sabbath (though, admittedly, there are a lot of Sabbath riffs going on here), Black Pyramid substantially reinvents the progress of rock starting about 1978, taking first-wave blues-metal and NWOBHM as the foundation, then discarding everything after as irrelevant to their vision of metal. It was an awesome time at a crushing volume (making the case advanced by others who've seen them, that, despite not being remotely a death metal band, they would do well at MDF), and enthusiastically received by the peak audience; these people were up for the black metal portions of the bill as well, but truer-than-thou is a disease on the wane in Boston, as evinced by the diversity of the lineups on the last couple black metal shows documented here, as well as this bill itself.
Before Witch Tomb, people sadly and completely expectedly started to filter out; this is a consequence of MBTA policies, as noted on other O'B's shows in the past, rather than any reflection on the bands, and will likely continue until the T officils grow the stones to keep some kind of service running overnight -- and with the various anti-party ordinances currently in force in mind, this is not likely. It is, though, pretty amazing that the Boston DIY music scenes are able to continue to be so vibrant and productive in a town where the bars close before 1 AM on the weekends.
Witch Tomb [6/7]
As Witch Tomb goes, this was in some ways a down set. However, it really speaks to the quality and consistency of this band that even a relatively "down" set could be this good and this dominant, debatably the best outing on a very strong show. This performance was brutal first, last, and foremost, a powerful statement of urban yet never urbane black metal that, as with the band's tenuous antecedents in December Wolves, really needs to get out to more people. Witch Tomb's done better sets than this (mostly where a longer set time's afforded them more space to plow dissonant atmospheres into the abysal blasting, but this set was crushing and impressive in its own right, and a worthy capstone to another good local black metal show.
Things having closed up, it was time for the hike again, and though it was still freezing, it was not here, but the next night, somewhere in the process of getting wasted and sticking public pencils in my chop while doing karaoke in a dive bar, that I got sick. Hence the delay in getting this thing out. I'm still too dinged up to make it down to Bobfest tonight (the birthday celebration by and for Boston's most eclectic and enthusiastic DIY music fan, Wren "Bob" Leader), and sadly either on-call or busy with other stuff for Revocation's sure-to-be-memorable gig at the Cambridge Marriott, but there aint no such thing as too sick to go to Kreator.....even if it turns out to be IMPOSSIBLE! IMPOSSIBLE TO CURE!!!!!
As usual on getting in early, there was a bunch of standing around drinking; I didn't need to get in this early, but the alternative was to maybe get stuck in traffic and end up missing bands or, having arrived in Boston, stand around pointlessly in the cold.
Soon enough, though, the music started.
Nachzehrer [5/7]
The second time I'd seen them, and maybe their second show overall, this presented a different side to the band: darker, heavier, and more first-wave black metal. With a wee bit of stretching, one might get to a heavier Bifrost minus the keys; this band is still, obviously, in the process of finding their feet, but there's not a lot of Low-Countries-derived black metal in this part of the world, and it'll be interesting to see how Nachzehrer's take on the raw and thrashy sound develops going forward.
Darkwor [6/7]
This was a shorter set than they had in Worcester, and one with a few more technical difficulties -- the guitars rather buried at the start -- but a good solid one. Of the three black metal bands here, Darkwor was the most expansive and 'epic', even with their raw bits, and they did a good job bringing that sound forward.
Unfortunately, I got mixed up and asked after a CD that the band didn't have -- but it is coming out for real, imminently, and if regular Darkwor shows in Worcester are something else, a Darkwor release show at Ralph's with Woe heading the bill will be something else again, and not to be missed. Mark your calendars for 3/13 -- it's not the Ides, but Metal Thursday is kind of constrained as to what day of the week it can happen on.
Black Pyramid [6/7]
The only thing "black metal" about Black Pyramid is that they are a "metal" band with "black" in their name, but regardless they were well-matched to this bill and well-received by the audience. This is partly because Rich Horror just plain doesn't book shows where all the bands don't flow with and set up each other in subtly awesome fashion, and partly because Black Pyramid is a fuckin good and fuckin heavy doom metal band. Not content to just revive Sabbath (though, admittedly, there are a lot of Sabbath riffs going on here), Black Pyramid substantially reinvents the progress of rock starting about 1978, taking first-wave blues-metal and NWOBHM as the foundation, then discarding everything after as irrelevant to their vision of metal. It was an awesome time at a crushing volume (making the case advanced by others who've seen them, that, despite not being remotely a death metal band, they would do well at MDF), and enthusiastically received by the peak audience; these people were up for the black metal portions of the bill as well, but truer-than-thou is a disease on the wane in Boston, as evinced by the diversity of the lineups on the last couple black metal shows documented here, as well as this bill itself.
Before Witch Tomb, people sadly and completely expectedly started to filter out; this is a consequence of MBTA policies, as noted on other O'B's shows in the past, rather than any reflection on the bands, and will likely continue until the T officils grow the stones to keep some kind of service running overnight -- and with the various anti-party ordinances currently in force in mind, this is not likely. It is, though, pretty amazing that the Boston DIY music scenes are able to continue to be so vibrant and productive in a town where the bars close before 1 AM on the weekends.
Witch Tomb [6/7]
As Witch Tomb goes, this was in some ways a down set. However, it really speaks to the quality and consistency of this band that even a relatively "down" set could be this good and this dominant, debatably the best outing on a very strong show. This performance was brutal first, last, and foremost, a powerful statement of urban yet never urbane black metal that, as with the band's tenuous antecedents in December Wolves, really needs to get out to more people. Witch Tomb's done better sets than this (mostly where a longer set time's afforded them more space to plow dissonant atmospheres into the abysal blasting, but this set was crushing and impressive in its own right, and a worthy capstone to another good local black metal show.
Things having closed up, it was time for the hike again, and though it was still freezing, it was not here, but the next night, somewhere in the process of getting wasted and sticking public pencils in my chop while doing karaoke in a dive bar, that I got sick. Hence the delay in getting this thing out. I'm still too dinged up to make it down to Bobfest tonight (the birthday celebration by and for Boston's most eclectic and enthusiastic DIY music fan, Wren "Bob" Leader), and sadly either on-call or busy with other stuff for Revocation's sure-to-be-memorable gig at the Cambridge Marriott, but there aint no such thing as too sick to go to Kreator.....even if it turns out to be IMPOSSIBLE! IMPOSSIBLE TO CURE!!!!!
Monday, February 01, 2010
Cold Northern Vengeance with Sewer Goddess, Deathgod Messiah, and Vaettir [Anchors Up!, Haverhill, 1/30/2010]
So the other shows this week fell by the wayside for various reasons, but there was no chance that this one was going to suffer the same fate. CNV does not play out a lot (though hopefully this will change with them getting some more in the way of label support, and with the turnout alluded to below), and Vaettir is too good to be teetering in and out of existence/activity as they've been doing. So it was a brisk hike back from class to Green Street, with a few minor detours to get some food down and in an ultimately unsuccessful search for a spare car battery, and then the long run of 93 to 95 to 97 to get up at doorsish, stow the car deep in the T lot, and hike over to the venue the long way round to try to mislead the cop sitting right in the damn driveway about my misuse of MBTA resources.
As it turned out, I was one of the first non-band people in the door, which resulted in a fair bit of standing around, browsing Matt/Gemini's distro pile, and getting admiration and mock threats from Keith PanzerBastard over my Tankard sweatshirt. If there was any justice in this world, Gerre and co. would have been over here recently, playing a warehouse gig to a mixed bunch of fitba and hockey hooligans, but as it is, only frustration and vain hopes that eventually, I'll hit them on some festival or another.
Eventually, Vaettir started, and those in attendance, which at this point was still mostly just members of the other bands on the bill, went down the well to support.
Vaettir [6/7]
As noted above, I was pumped to see Vaettir back again, and the band didn't disappoint. Their sound had a more death-tinged edge to it than the last time I recall seeing them, resulting in an atmosphere strongly reminiscent of classic Emperor, but this may also be down to better acoustics here than at the Midway, standing straight in front of the band, and not being as gilled. (This was a dry, all-ages show, being a dry, all-ages venue that has to deal with the Haverhill PD and their dislike of DIY shows, which has been documented on several occasions here, mainly back in 2007.) The CNV and Sigh (especially) touches remained, but the final result was Vaettir establishing very much their own sound and their own identity as a band. Though they're still looking for a permanent bassist to let the vocalist concentrate on vocals, this lineup works pretty damn fine as well, and they can't get that demo out soon enough. This is what NEBM is: we are so deep in good bands around here that even the ones that flicker in and out of active phases like Vaettir are currently doing are worth tracking and listening to.
As Vaettir changed out and DGM loaded their gear in, more and more people started trickling in. Some of this has to do with the dry nature of the show, and people's desires to get a little lubricated before coming over (or to arm up their flask to stay buzzing covertly), but more of it, likely, has to do with this gig being a 7:15 start in Haverhill, well out of the normal catchment areas for metal in eastern New England. There are a lot of metalheads in Haverhill itself, and the local dudes did a hell of a job getting it shouted up, but more than a few of the attendees were either up from Boston or down from New Hampshire, and couldn't, obviously, get moving as early as I did. Price to pay, though; when shows go too late in Haverhill, the HPD get antsy, and that's not good for venue operators.
Deathgod Messiah [5/7]
I'd been jamming Apocalyptic Raids and Carnivore in the stereo on the way up by pure chance, so as immediate as the comparison was for me, it probably does the band a disservice to just come out with "Hellhammer playing Carnivore" as a shorthand for their sound, though an introduction to first-time listeners could be a lot worse. This was the other, urban, side of NEBM, raw, blasting, dirty noise from the streets and alleys of Boston, in contrast but also in complement to the colder and more mystic sounds from the NH-based acts on the bill; the distinction's pretty artificial, as those who know the provenance of Bone Ritual and Martyrvore will recognize, but it works for illustrative purposes here. This was a fairly short and kind of slack set, but still well-delivered, and the crowd, which was now filling up the venue, was definitely appreciative.
It was around here that the venue ops confirmed that turnout had met the 'success' threshold to Paul CNV; this was a good indication, as (as commented before the show) a good crowd here was likely to have a knock-on effect in terms of getting other Bindrune bands booked into here. CNV is going to be on the road in Europe this summer with Wodensthrone; a return match with them coming over here would be a draw and a half at this place.
Sewer Goddess [NR]
The floor crowd stayed fairly thick for Sewer Goddess, though it's an open point as to how many people, or to what extent, appreciated what they were doing. Though the recording lineup was supplemented with several members of Deathgod Messiah, this was still extreme chaotic industrial noise, power electronics rather than anything immediately distinguishable as metal, and thus not rated. I like Scorn and Thrones, and will listen to Eyescale and Terror Organ just as readily as Wormphlegm, so I dug this, but I'm not sure how many others this was true for. Their set was also rather short, maybe 15 to 20 minutes, tops, but I don't have a lot of experience with this band, or, really, power electronics in general, so I'm not sure if this was normal or cutting things off to be accomodating to an audience that was hearing the band, and perhaps the genre, for the first time.
More odd and dissonant sounds were provided by Keith's bass amp as CNV started setting up; with shades of Spinal Tap at the Air Force base dance, it independently started blasting salsa from a nearby radio transmitting tower while he was tuning up. ¡Ay, caramba! This generated its fair share of laughs as La Frija Venganza del Norte continued to warm up, but it also got dialed in by the time the band formed up, put their backs to the audience, and the lights went down.
Cold Northern Vengeance [7/7]
When you try to describe CNV these days, you generally end up with a word soup: adjectives that apply, but must be stacked in careful and precise order to build an approximation, a low-polygon skeleton model of a whole that is difficult to describe directly and concretely. You can say 'doomy cold thelemic blackened heavy metal', but this, like trying to describe a sphere by the isocahedron of closest volume, both undercuts and overruns the band, and does not mesh in with the actual experience of seeing the band live and being within that evocation. With the exception of "Black Metal Isolation", this was all Domination and Servitude material, and though there are rumblings about a new CNV record sometime in the near future, if this is the set that goes over the ocean, Europe will be just as strongly bound as this record store basement was. This was their night -- Paul/Heathen set up the show and booked the bill -- but they thoroughly made it theirs, as much as they've taken over at least the DIY portion of every bill I've seen them on. The future is indefinite as much for them as for any other band, but if the music can get out, the rest of the underground, not just us in the regrowth forests and on the rocky shores of New England, is going to have to pay attention.
Eventually, CNV wound "Heathen, Heretic, Scapegoat" down and the lights came back up, and folk started clearing out; I nabbed a shirt off Vaettir and pounded pavement back to the T lot in time to find my car neither towed not ticketed, which was a relief, and the ride back down the winding roads to the south ended up without incident. This update is late due to Robbie Keane signing for Celtic, and then not winning us the first game; between one thing and another, I'm on call for the next week, but this doesn't rule out Witch Tomb on the coming Friday. Missing Revocation at Unit 11 is going to suck, but such are the bargains I make to be able to go afield in the summer without having to quit my job every year.
As it turned out, I was one of the first non-band people in the door, which resulted in a fair bit of standing around, browsing Matt/Gemini's distro pile, and getting admiration and mock threats from Keith PanzerBastard over my Tankard sweatshirt. If there was any justice in this world, Gerre and co. would have been over here recently, playing a warehouse gig to a mixed bunch of fitba and hockey hooligans, but as it is, only frustration and vain hopes that eventually, I'll hit them on some festival or another.
Eventually, Vaettir started, and those in attendance, which at this point was still mostly just members of the other bands on the bill, went down the well to support.
Vaettir [6/7]
As noted above, I was pumped to see Vaettir back again, and the band didn't disappoint. Their sound had a more death-tinged edge to it than the last time I recall seeing them, resulting in an atmosphere strongly reminiscent of classic Emperor, but this may also be down to better acoustics here than at the Midway, standing straight in front of the band, and not being as gilled. (This was a dry, all-ages show, being a dry, all-ages venue that has to deal with the Haverhill PD and their dislike of DIY shows, which has been documented on several occasions here, mainly back in 2007.) The CNV and Sigh (especially) touches remained, but the final result was Vaettir establishing very much their own sound and their own identity as a band. Though they're still looking for a permanent bassist to let the vocalist concentrate on vocals, this lineup works pretty damn fine as well, and they can't get that demo out soon enough. This is what NEBM is: we are so deep in good bands around here that even the ones that flicker in and out of active phases like Vaettir are currently doing are worth tracking and listening to.
As Vaettir changed out and DGM loaded their gear in, more and more people started trickling in. Some of this has to do with the dry nature of the show, and people's desires to get a little lubricated before coming over (or to arm up their flask to stay buzzing covertly), but more of it, likely, has to do with this gig being a 7:15 start in Haverhill, well out of the normal catchment areas for metal in eastern New England. There are a lot of metalheads in Haverhill itself, and the local dudes did a hell of a job getting it shouted up, but more than a few of the attendees were either up from Boston or down from New Hampshire, and couldn't, obviously, get moving as early as I did. Price to pay, though; when shows go too late in Haverhill, the HPD get antsy, and that's not good for venue operators.
Deathgod Messiah [5/7]
I'd been jamming Apocalyptic Raids and Carnivore in the stereo on the way up by pure chance, so as immediate as the comparison was for me, it probably does the band a disservice to just come out with "Hellhammer playing Carnivore" as a shorthand for their sound, though an introduction to first-time listeners could be a lot worse. This was the other, urban, side of NEBM, raw, blasting, dirty noise from the streets and alleys of Boston, in contrast but also in complement to the colder and more mystic sounds from the NH-based acts on the bill; the distinction's pretty artificial, as those who know the provenance of Bone Ritual and Martyrvore will recognize, but it works for illustrative purposes here. This was a fairly short and kind of slack set, but still well-delivered, and the crowd, which was now filling up the venue, was definitely appreciative.
It was around here that the venue ops confirmed that turnout had met the 'success' threshold to Paul CNV; this was a good indication, as (as commented before the show) a good crowd here was likely to have a knock-on effect in terms of getting other Bindrune bands booked into here. CNV is going to be on the road in Europe this summer with Wodensthrone; a return match with them coming over here would be a draw and a half at this place.
Sewer Goddess [NR]
The floor crowd stayed fairly thick for Sewer Goddess, though it's an open point as to how many people, or to what extent, appreciated what they were doing. Though the recording lineup was supplemented with several members of Deathgod Messiah, this was still extreme chaotic industrial noise, power electronics rather than anything immediately distinguishable as metal, and thus not rated. I like Scorn and Thrones, and will listen to Eyescale and Terror Organ just as readily as Wormphlegm, so I dug this, but I'm not sure how many others this was true for. Their set was also rather short, maybe 15 to 20 minutes, tops, but I don't have a lot of experience with this band, or, really, power electronics in general, so I'm not sure if this was normal or cutting things off to be accomodating to an audience that was hearing the band, and perhaps the genre, for the first time.
More odd and dissonant sounds were provided by Keith's bass amp as CNV started setting up; with shades of Spinal Tap at the Air Force base dance, it independently started blasting salsa from a nearby radio transmitting tower while he was tuning up. ¡Ay, caramba! This generated its fair share of laughs as La Frija Venganza del Norte continued to warm up, but it also got dialed in by the time the band formed up, put their backs to the audience, and the lights went down.
Cold Northern Vengeance [7/7]
When you try to describe CNV these days, you generally end up with a word soup: adjectives that apply, but must be stacked in careful and precise order to build an approximation, a low-polygon skeleton model of a whole that is difficult to describe directly and concretely. You can say 'doomy cold thelemic blackened heavy metal', but this, like trying to describe a sphere by the isocahedron of closest volume, both undercuts and overruns the band, and does not mesh in with the actual experience of seeing the band live and being within that evocation. With the exception of "Black Metal Isolation", this was all Domination and Servitude material, and though there are rumblings about a new CNV record sometime in the near future, if this is the set that goes over the ocean, Europe will be just as strongly bound as this record store basement was. This was their night -- Paul/Heathen set up the show and booked the bill -- but they thoroughly made it theirs, as much as they've taken over at least the DIY portion of every bill I've seen them on. The future is indefinite as much for them as for any other band, but if the music can get out, the rest of the underground, not just us in the regrowth forests and on the rocky shores of New England, is going to have to pay attention.
Eventually, CNV wound "Heathen, Heretic, Scapegoat" down and the lights came back up, and folk started clearing out; I nabbed a shirt off Vaettir and pounded pavement back to the T lot in time to find my car neither towed not ticketed, which was a relief, and the ride back down the winding roads to the south ended up without incident. This update is late due to Robbie Keane signing for Celtic, and then not winning us the first game; between one thing and another, I'm on call for the next week, but this doesn't rule out Witch Tomb on the coming Friday. Missing Revocation at Unit 11 is going to suck, but such are the bargains I make to be able to go afield in the summer without having to quit my job every year.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Nile with Immolation, Krisiun, Dreaming Dead, and Scalpel [Worcester Palladium, 1/16/2010]
Atrociously late but still here, this is from more than a week ago now, but it was still a good show and worth the trundling out to. I was coming from class, so this meant parking in Boston rather than doing the train, and paying too much for garaging and the Pike going out of the city, but it paid off in being able to get out on time and end up at the venue only shortly before doors.
After freezing for a bit, they opened up, and I got in and paid my $25 for what turned out to be, surprise surprise, another show moved upstairs at no discount. With this bill, it wasn't a problem, but as noted before, this is going to start bearing on people's decisions to come out before long. Upstairs is a good experience, but traditionally the cost of the ticket scales directly rather than inversely with the size of the hall.
Scalpel [4.5/7]
First time I'd seen these guys, and they put on a good if somewhat generic brutal/slam death performance. They had a lot of people in to see them who provided some good chaos on the floor while the crowd was still filling in, and decent enough material for a local band in the process of coming up. It'll be interesting to see how they develop, and how they go on to find their sound; eastern New England has a fairly large supply of bands in this general style, so if they want to stand out, they're going to need to step it up a notch.
I know that I've seen several of the members of this band in other area bands before, but their metal-archives entry isn't the most informative, and my memory isn't that eidetic. We'll see if I can work out who played with who in the past.
Dreaming Dead [5/7]
This band saw a lot of expectations reset; given the volume of evidence, it is surprising when a band with two female guitarists comes out and plays hard-hitting thrashing death metal rather than some other style. It's also good, which is why, I think, you saw a lot of interest in this combo from attendees. I was more surprised, though, in hearing that they were from L.A.; poorly informed me didn't realize they were touring and thought they were from New Bedford or something. They drilled out a good set limited to some degree by the sound, and definitely impressed; if Paganizer ever makes it over, this would be a good band to open for them.
This was apparently their first real tour, at least supporting a package nationally; while they seemed to be doing decent business when I went to pick up a CD, it might have been better if they'd turned one of the CDs over as well, to show the Ibex Moon logo on the back. John McEntee doesn't mess about when signing quality death metal, and most fans both know this and will be willing to give bands that are on Ibex Moon a fair shake for that alone.
Krisiun [6/7]
Despite the venue, this was about as far back as I've seen Krisiun from in the last four years. The overall effect may not have been as good as immediately previous times, being right on top of the band, but this was a class Krisiun set regardless, and someone else got to have that experience due to me getting stuck at the back. The room was well packed at this point, and arguing by volume that this maybe shouldn't've been moved upstairs.
Immolation [7/7]
On a night of very good performances from the touring heavyweights, Immolation's was at the top of the heap. There's not a lot you can write about this band: they play uniquely brutal yet epic death metal, and they bring it live with impressive ferocity. Their new record isn't out till March, but it's going to be another strong disc from the sounds of it here. Just simply great all around.
As per the last time I saw Immolation, up in New Hampshire two years gone, they didn't play "No Jesus No Beast", despite people yelling for it. It's a good song, but so is their new material; if they want to emphasize that they're an active band still making good new music, that's their choice, but it's always someone's first Immolation show. Crappy argument, I know; maybe the solution is to book Immolation on more festivals where they're pinched for time and playing to a large number of known new audience.
Nile [6.5/7]
If you were also standing around as the techs milled about and Karl tweaked away at his rig, you might have wondered if the score was ever going to get to this level. Nile started off late, delayed by technical problems with what looked like an effects unit; it's due to stuff like this that people come up gnashing their teeth about simplicity in metal, but as the rest of the set demonstrated, it's useful to also have bands that are willing to take the risk of stuff not working in order to bring their studio sound out onto the stage live. When everything finally started working, Nile hit into a class set heavily balanced towards new material that neatly palliated everyone who had been yelling at them to get on with it. Not perfect, but crushing all the same, and a strong conclusion to a killer show.
People had been filtering out all through Nile, probably as a consequence of the delay in starting up, but I stuck till the bitter end, not wanting to miss out on anything that might go forward before the lights went up. I got full value out of my $25, and suspect that most who were in from the start did as well; Abigail Williams dropping off and good performances from the good bands that remained will tend to do that.
Next show is coming up in the next couple days -- Palladium shenanigans decided against the Arch Enemy/Exodus tour, but if I don't see Cynic in Boston Tursday, then it'll be Suffocation, Shining, and going home before Devildriver Friday -- and if not then, definitely CNV in Haverhill. Good stuff coming.
After freezing for a bit, they opened up, and I got in and paid my $25 for what turned out to be, surprise surprise, another show moved upstairs at no discount. With this bill, it wasn't a problem, but as noted before, this is going to start bearing on people's decisions to come out before long. Upstairs is a good experience, but traditionally the cost of the ticket scales directly rather than inversely with the size of the hall.
Scalpel [4.5/7]
First time I'd seen these guys, and they put on a good if somewhat generic brutal/slam death performance. They had a lot of people in to see them who provided some good chaos on the floor while the crowd was still filling in, and decent enough material for a local band in the process of coming up. It'll be interesting to see how they develop, and how they go on to find their sound; eastern New England has a fairly large supply of bands in this general style, so if they want to stand out, they're going to need to step it up a notch.
I know that I've seen several of the members of this band in other area bands before, but their metal-archives entry isn't the most informative, and my memory isn't that eidetic. We'll see if I can work out who played with who in the past.
Dreaming Dead [5/7]
This band saw a lot of expectations reset; given the volume of evidence, it is surprising when a band with two female guitarists comes out and plays hard-hitting thrashing death metal rather than some other style. It's also good, which is why, I think, you saw a lot of interest in this combo from attendees. I was more surprised, though, in hearing that they were from L.A.; poorly informed me didn't realize they were touring and thought they were from New Bedford or something. They drilled out a good set limited to some degree by the sound, and definitely impressed; if Paganizer ever makes it over, this would be a good band to open for them.
This was apparently their first real tour, at least supporting a package nationally; while they seemed to be doing decent business when I went to pick up a CD, it might have been better if they'd turned one of the CDs over as well, to show the Ibex Moon logo on the back. John McEntee doesn't mess about when signing quality death metal, and most fans both know this and will be willing to give bands that are on Ibex Moon a fair shake for that alone.
Krisiun [6/7]
Despite the venue, this was about as far back as I've seen Krisiun from in the last four years. The overall effect may not have been as good as immediately previous times, being right on top of the band, but this was a class Krisiun set regardless, and someone else got to have that experience due to me getting stuck at the back. The room was well packed at this point, and arguing by volume that this maybe shouldn't've been moved upstairs.
Immolation [7/7]
On a night of very good performances from the touring heavyweights, Immolation's was at the top of the heap. There's not a lot you can write about this band: they play uniquely brutal yet epic death metal, and they bring it live with impressive ferocity. Their new record isn't out till March, but it's going to be another strong disc from the sounds of it here. Just simply great all around.
As per the last time I saw Immolation, up in New Hampshire two years gone, they didn't play "No Jesus No Beast", despite people yelling for it. It's a good song, but so is their new material; if they want to emphasize that they're an active band still making good new music, that's their choice, but it's always someone's first Immolation show. Crappy argument, I know; maybe the solution is to book Immolation on more festivals where they're pinched for time and playing to a large number of known new audience.
Nile [6.5/7]
If you were also standing around as the techs milled about and Karl tweaked away at his rig, you might have wondered if the score was ever going to get to this level. Nile started off late, delayed by technical problems with what looked like an effects unit; it's due to stuff like this that people come up gnashing their teeth about simplicity in metal, but as the rest of the set demonstrated, it's useful to also have bands that are willing to take the risk of stuff not working in order to bring their studio sound out onto the stage live. When everything finally started working, Nile hit into a class set heavily balanced towards new material that neatly palliated everyone who had been yelling at them to get on with it. Not perfect, but crushing all the same, and a strong conclusion to a killer show.
People had been filtering out all through Nile, probably as a consequence of the delay in starting up, but I stuck till the bitter end, not wanting to miss out on anything that might go forward before the lights went up. I got full value out of my $25, and suspect that most who were in from the start did as well; Abigail Williams dropping off and good performances from the good bands that remained will tend to do that.
Next show is coming up in the next couple days -- Palladium shenanigans decided against the Arch Enemy/Exodus tour, but if I don't see Cynic in Boston Tursday, then it'll be Suffocation, Shining, and going home before Devildriver Friday -- and if not then, definitely CNV in Haverhill. Good stuff coming.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Korpiklaani with Tyr, Swashbuckle, and White Wizzard [Worcester Palladium, 1/8/2010]
I missed out on Razormaze's kickoff due to being on call, but the shift wrapped up at the end of the week, and I was able to get out to this gig, which has been roundly slated, both before and after, to a degree that it didn't really deserve.
Getting in on time was not really difficult, but it was unnecessarily expensive; this gig got moved from downstairs to upstairs (understandably; though for an upstairs show it was frickin packed, people would have been rattling around in the downstairs, especially since a lot of the people who go to shows like this are not going to be on the floor throughout), but the ticket didn't move down in price at all. $25, even at the door, is too much for a four-band show upstairs at this place, full stop. I still paid it to be able to see Tyr and Korpiklaani from contact range, but my patience for such antics is getting strained.
White Wizzard [5/7]
I think about fitba too much, so on seeing these guys, the first thought was of some unbalanced second-division side that you randomly see in a cup competition: some guys who are too good for where they're playing, and some that you scratch your head and wonder how they got this far. The second thought, of course, though, was "how did an Iron Maiden cover band get on this tour"? As their set went on, they put in more doom and '70s elements, eventually coming around to a better set, but there's a lot of Maiden in their sound still, and while the bassist was outstanding -- as any must be to clone Iron Maiden -- the guitar solos were disturbingly hit-or-miss for a band touring nationally. The liner notes for their record -- apparently a demo repackaging -- indicated that this was a new lineup, so maybe they're shaking out the bugs and will improve in the future. The room's definitely there, but hopefully they'll diversify the sound a little more as well.
Swashbuckle [7/7]
The score's a little iffy; this was more to the level of their killer New England debut than their subjugation of Germany in the summer, but it was still a top-class set and the score isn't supposed to be for perfection. They came (out to "Sharp Dressed Man", perhaps a reference to the beardism now sweeping across the whole band), they saw (the floor open up for multiple Waves of Death), they played headcrunching pirate thrash and invited up crowdsurfers and stagedivers. Was there a barricade down front before? There certainly wasn't this night, and the band and those getting riotous for them took full advantage.
This is, as mentioned, my fourth time seeing this band in five months, and the third month in a row that they have played upstairs at the Palladium in the first week. The risk of overexposue is certainly there, but props to the band for having the fortitude to go out and be road warriors to this degree, even (on this trip) doing the instrumental-tech and backline work for the tour as a whole. You don't really expect a pirate metal band to 'make it' in this day and age, so in that regard, working one's ass off is probably the optimal path to overcome those odds.
Tyr [6/7]
More new stuff and fewer doomballads in this set than the last time around, but even if the sound seemed a little off in places, this was a class performance. This was the first show of the tour, and a bunch of their equipment hadn't made it into Logan correctly, but Tyr gave a strong performance regardless. (It was armor and stuff that didn't make it in, not instruments, which made it that much easier; also New England is accustomed, at this point, to seeing Tyr just playing guitars and stuff with their shirts off.) They closed with a strong cover of "The Wild Rover" that may not play as well in other places -- not only folk fans salting the audience, but also a lot of Dropkicks fans and other plastic paddies, along with a handful of the next step up, plastic Provos like the twit who was yelling stuff about "the 'ra" at the end of this one; that's Boston for you, and you will not find that in many other places.
They mentioned a 9-year-old girl in the audience "tricked into a rock concert" by her parents for her birthday, which was entertaining; the reaction to grouse about "kiddy jig metal" or alternately, to expound on Metalnachwuchs, probably says more about the individual having the reaction than it does about the band, or the kind of parents who name their kid Freya.
Korpiklaani [7/7]
Korpiklaani looked a little uncomfortable at times the last time they were around; whether it was the more intimate setting, a full tour's worth of experience with American audiences, or less pressure not having to follow Primordial and Moonsorrow, this was a nonfactor on this outing. We got a nice long set of free-flowing humppaa metal, interrupted only briefly by crowd antics, that by the end slid down the slope to boozy DIY anarchy. The band was initially disturbed by the crowdsurfers -- not without cause, because five members on the stagefront makes the upstairs stage a hell of a lot more crowded than, say, Swashbuckle's two -- but after securing the mic stands properly, got into the game, passing out their free beers (often shaken up) into the crowd for drinking and spraying purposes. What did anyone expect from a band that starts with "Wodka" and closes out with "Beer Beer"? Certainly not solicitude of the security, who went onto high alert at the thought of alcohol being handed out in frangible glass bottles to random people in the pit. Nobody hurt or arrested, at least that I could see, so all good in the end.
As I was going out, I happened to overhear someone complaining that Korpiklaani was too loud, making them not as good as Tyr. It was very difficult to keep from mercilessly ripping into them: you went to what kind of concert and are complaining that bands are too loud? If this attitude is more generally shared, then and only then is the getoffmylawn griping about what kind of people this kind of metal attracts valid. Seriously, you go to a metal show and complain that the bands are too loud? Loud is kind of what this music aims for, if you have a problem don't stand next the damn speakers, idiot.
I did stand next the damn speakers, and my ears were ok. At least as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, I had to miss Summoning Hate last night, but the possibility is still on for Goreality tonight, and then the Palladium gig at the weekend -- unless it's upstairs, uninspiring, and too fucking expensive.
Getting in on time was not really difficult, but it was unnecessarily expensive; this gig got moved from downstairs to upstairs (understandably; though for an upstairs show it was frickin packed, people would have been rattling around in the downstairs, especially since a lot of the people who go to shows like this are not going to be on the floor throughout), but the ticket didn't move down in price at all. $25, even at the door, is too much for a four-band show upstairs at this place, full stop. I still paid it to be able to see Tyr and Korpiklaani from contact range, but my patience for such antics is getting strained.
White Wizzard [5/7]
I think about fitba too much, so on seeing these guys, the first thought was of some unbalanced second-division side that you randomly see in a cup competition: some guys who are too good for where they're playing, and some that you scratch your head and wonder how they got this far. The second thought, of course, though, was "how did an Iron Maiden cover band get on this tour"? As their set went on, they put in more doom and '70s elements, eventually coming around to a better set, but there's a lot of Maiden in their sound still, and while the bassist was outstanding -- as any must be to clone Iron Maiden -- the guitar solos were disturbingly hit-or-miss for a band touring nationally. The liner notes for their record -- apparently a demo repackaging -- indicated that this was a new lineup, so maybe they're shaking out the bugs and will improve in the future. The room's definitely there, but hopefully they'll diversify the sound a little more as well.
Swashbuckle [7/7]
The score's a little iffy; this was more to the level of their killer New England debut than their subjugation of Germany in the summer, but it was still a top-class set and the score isn't supposed to be for perfection. They came (out to "Sharp Dressed Man", perhaps a reference to the beardism now sweeping across the whole band), they saw (the floor open up for multiple Waves of Death), they played headcrunching pirate thrash and invited up crowdsurfers and stagedivers. Was there a barricade down front before? There certainly wasn't this night, and the band and those getting riotous for them took full advantage.
This is, as mentioned, my fourth time seeing this band in five months, and the third month in a row that they have played upstairs at the Palladium in the first week. The risk of overexposue is certainly there, but props to the band for having the fortitude to go out and be road warriors to this degree, even (on this trip) doing the instrumental-tech and backline work for the tour as a whole. You don't really expect a pirate metal band to 'make it' in this day and age, so in that regard, working one's ass off is probably the optimal path to overcome those odds.
Tyr [6/7]
More new stuff and fewer doomballads in this set than the last time around, but even if the sound seemed a little off in places, this was a class performance. This was the first show of the tour, and a bunch of their equipment hadn't made it into Logan correctly, but Tyr gave a strong performance regardless. (It was armor and stuff that didn't make it in, not instruments, which made it that much easier; also New England is accustomed, at this point, to seeing Tyr just playing guitars and stuff with their shirts off.) They closed with a strong cover of "The Wild Rover" that may not play as well in other places -- not only folk fans salting the audience, but also a lot of Dropkicks fans and other plastic paddies, along with a handful of the next step up, plastic Provos like the twit who was yelling stuff about "the 'ra" at the end of this one; that's Boston for you, and you will not find that in many other places.
They mentioned a 9-year-old girl in the audience "tricked into a rock concert" by her parents for her birthday, which was entertaining; the reaction to grouse about "kiddy jig metal" or alternately, to expound on Metalnachwuchs, probably says more about the individual having the reaction than it does about the band, or the kind of parents who name their kid Freya.
Korpiklaani [7/7]
Korpiklaani looked a little uncomfortable at times the last time they were around; whether it was the more intimate setting, a full tour's worth of experience with American audiences, or less pressure not having to follow Primordial and Moonsorrow, this was a nonfactor on this outing. We got a nice long set of free-flowing humppaa metal, interrupted only briefly by crowd antics, that by the end slid down the slope to boozy DIY anarchy. The band was initially disturbed by the crowdsurfers -- not without cause, because five members on the stagefront makes the upstairs stage a hell of a lot more crowded than, say, Swashbuckle's two -- but after securing the mic stands properly, got into the game, passing out their free beers (often shaken up) into the crowd for drinking and spraying purposes. What did anyone expect from a band that starts with "Wodka" and closes out with "Beer Beer"? Certainly not solicitude of the security, who went onto high alert at the thought of alcohol being handed out in frangible glass bottles to random people in the pit. Nobody hurt or arrested, at least that I could see, so all good in the end.
As I was going out, I happened to overhear someone complaining that Korpiklaani was too loud, making them not as good as Tyr. It was very difficult to keep from mercilessly ripping into them: you went to what kind of concert and are complaining that bands are too loud? If this attitude is more generally shared, then and only then is the getoffmylawn griping about what kind of people this kind of metal attracts valid. Seriously, you go to a metal show and complain that the bands are too loud? Loud is kind of what this music aims for, if you have a problem don't stand next the damn speakers, idiot.
I did stand next the damn speakers, and my ears were ok. At least as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, I had to miss Summoning Hate last night, but the possibility is still on for Goreality tonight, and then the Palladium gig at the weekend -- unless it's upstairs, uninspiring, and too fucking expensive.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
better late than never
Once upon a time, The Alien Blakk played a gig at the Skybar, and unfortunately packed up before I could pick up a CD. Not one to not support a touring band who bothered to come to one of Boston's shakiest venues (which was, in retrospect, even then in its death throes), I went online to order up the CD and a patch, and got duly charged for it. Then I waited, and the CD didn't come. I went to Wacken, and it still wasn't there when I got back. I shrugged and wrote it off; casual risk of doing business with the underground.
Fast-forward two and a half years and one apartment move. I get some extremely apologetic emails from the band to the effect that they are wicked sorry that this stuff never got sent, and they are sending it right away. Unfortunately, the notification that they've already mailed it out (to my old address) is in my inbox by the time I can reply to the previous one with an address correction. :headslap: It's a good thing that bands will go the extra mile to fill two-and-a-half-year-old internet orders, but this particular transaction just seems to be cursed. It would be super awesome and a bonus if this CD actually arrived in my mailbox, but after all this time I'm not going to get my hopes up.
Fast-forward two and a half years and one apartment move. I get some extremely apologetic emails from the band to the effect that they are wicked sorry that this stuff never got sent, and they are sending it right away. Unfortunately, the notification that they've already mailed it out (to my old address) is in my inbox by the time I can reply to the previous one with an address correction. :headslap: It's a good thing that bands will go the extra mile to fill two-and-a-half-year-old internet orders, but this particular transaction just seems to be cursed. It would be super awesome and a bonus if this CD actually arrived in my mailbox, but after all this time I'm not going to get my hopes up.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Morgirion with Shabti and Nachzehrer [Midway Cafe, Jamaica Plain, 12/19/2009]
Much like the last time I was down to this place for a matinee show, this was a good gig featuring killer black metal, good attendance, and a lot of beer. Unfortunately, because I got up too early in the morning to hack on some other stuff before class, it accidentally also ended up featuring me falling asleep on the train home and waking up in Rowley, then calling around to find someone awake and in shape to drive while hiking back towards somewhere to get picked up. That wasn't the most entertaining bit of business in the world, but while it's a significant contribution to why this writeup is late, it doesn't have anything to do with the show proper.
After getting out of my last class of the year, I hopped the trains over, still nervous about missing Nachzehrer due to previous experience, but despite rolling up about 4:30, nobody'd started playing yet. I went next door to get a horrible rubbery cheeseburger and some more-or-less decent fries (got to learn some Spanish to try and gull some decent food out of this place) and wait nervously to get burned again. Fortunately, didn't happen; unfortunately, this was because Bog of the Infidel, who were supposed to be headlining, dropped off, but I got to wolf down my takeaway, get in and processed, and put a beer or two down before Nachzehrer started up.
Nachzehrer [5.5/7]
This was their first show, and they came out all guns blazing. It's about as might be expected, from members of Unholy Goatfucker and Razormaze with an 26 Beers stalwart sitting in on the drums, but any time a band's playing their first show ever, there's usually some slack to be cut. In this case, not needed; they trailed off a little at the end, but played absolutely everything they had written (and a cover besides) over those five songs, and set the crowd going with true straight-up black thrash, which is rarer than you might expect around these parts. Someone's got to bridge the divide between the thrash revivalists and the dirty black metal hordes in Boston, and while the lineup difficulties and commitments in other active bands might make it difficult for Nachzehrer to take this full-time, it's a start, and good music at least; we'll see how this develops.
Shabti [6/7]
Shabti came down from Maine again, and again gave a stonnering performance, mixing black metal structures with tech-death elements. Sure, try to write it off to more beer, a closer environment, the band playing directly out of their cabs rather than through a PA, more time rehearsing since, whatever, but the fact remains that this was a definite step up from their set at Ralph's, and, as then, people living south of the Piscataqua should start recognizing that this is a really good band, who you need to see if and when they come around.
I think I got a CD off them, either after their set or at the end of the night; maybe it was off Morgirion, I was kind of drunk at the time and haven't gone through that bag since due to work commitments. Regardless, if I didn't, I need to get after these guys for recorded material the next time they show up remotely local and hope other people haven't looted them out of demos yet.
Morgirion [6/7]
Morgirion continues to impress; this time around, they finally had a bass player in the fold through Connor pulling double duty on bass and keys. Of course, he still had only his normal complement of arms, so this was bass or keys, not bass and keys, but the resulting performance was still on a high level all around. This band is also continuing to get better, so that while the leading lights of NEBM might not have been on this bill, those who were there got a definite earful of the wave behind them. We had an embarassment of riches three years ago, and it's only gotten better since.
Unfortunately, the crowd thinned out over the course of the evening, to the point where after Morgirion's set the place was dead empty. I hadn't been keeping track of time, so this more than anything else was the critical clue that Bog, who had been announced as headliners, weren't going to be showing up. Oh well. After some drunken bantering, it was for nowt except to hike back to the T to the train, and then inadvertently fall asleep going through Chelsea and wake up three towns too far north. For a killer, free-drinking, seven-dollar show, though, there has to be some karmic comeuppance at some point, and the hike back wasn't that awful, especially getting picked up barely an hour into it.
Next gig is uncertain; I want to go to Razormaze's tour kickoff, but that's on a Wednesday at Great Scott and I'm on call that week. Maybe worth chancing it, but we'll see how things shake out. This is, though, probably the last of the year absent some local stuff that may or may not qualify next week; that'll make only 25 gigs this year and 4 festivals, which is kind of disappointing. Of course, it says something when seeing north of 200 sets still qualifies as "need to get out more", but last year was 34 and 3 (ok, maybe I didn't get enough of NEDF to qualify and it's more like 35 and 2) and Boston is still Boston. We'll see about 2010; hopefully, I can make more local gigs, write more intelligently about them, and promote the northeast US better and more coherently at Party.San and whichever of Summer Breeze or Wacken ends up in the other slot.
After getting out of my last class of the year, I hopped the trains over, still nervous about missing Nachzehrer due to previous experience, but despite rolling up about 4:30, nobody'd started playing yet. I went next door to get a horrible rubbery cheeseburger and some more-or-less decent fries (got to learn some Spanish to try and gull some decent food out of this place) and wait nervously to get burned again. Fortunately, didn't happen; unfortunately, this was because Bog of the Infidel, who were supposed to be headlining, dropped off, but I got to wolf down my takeaway, get in and processed, and put a beer or two down before Nachzehrer started up.
Nachzehrer [5.5/7]
This was their first show, and they came out all guns blazing. It's about as might be expected, from members of Unholy Goatfucker and Razormaze with an 26 Beers stalwart sitting in on the drums, but any time a band's playing their first show ever, there's usually some slack to be cut. In this case, not needed; they trailed off a little at the end, but played absolutely everything they had written (and a cover besides) over those five songs, and set the crowd going with true straight-up black thrash, which is rarer than you might expect around these parts. Someone's got to bridge the divide between the thrash revivalists and the dirty black metal hordes in Boston, and while the lineup difficulties and commitments in other active bands might make it difficult for Nachzehrer to take this full-time, it's a start, and good music at least; we'll see how this develops.
Shabti [6/7]
Shabti came down from Maine again, and again gave a stonnering performance, mixing black metal structures with tech-death elements. Sure, try to write it off to more beer, a closer environment, the band playing directly out of their cabs rather than through a PA, more time rehearsing since, whatever, but the fact remains that this was a definite step up from their set at Ralph's, and, as then, people living south of the Piscataqua should start recognizing that this is a really good band, who you need to see if and when they come around.
I think I got a CD off them, either after their set or at the end of the night; maybe it was off Morgirion, I was kind of drunk at the time and haven't gone through that bag since due to work commitments. Regardless, if I didn't, I need to get after these guys for recorded material the next time they show up remotely local and hope other people haven't looted them out of demos yet.
Morgirion [6/7]
Morgirion continues to impress; this time around, they finally had a bass player in the fold through Connor pulling double duty on bass and keys. Of course, he still had only his normal complement of arms, so this was bass or keys, not bass and keys, but the resulting performance was still on a high level all around. This band is also continuing to get better, so that while the leading lights of NEBM might not have been on this bill, those who were there got a definite earful of the wave behind them. We had an embarassment of riches three years ago, and it's only gotten better since.
Unfortunately, the crowd thinned out over the course of the evening, to the point where after Morgirion's set the place was dead empty. I hadn't been keeping track of time, so this more than anything else was the critical clue that Bog, who had been announced as headliners, weren't going to be showing up. Oh well. After some drunken bantering, it was for nowt except to hike back to the T to the train, and then inadvertently fall asleep going through Chelsea and wake up three towns too far north. For a killer, free-drinking, seven-dollar show, though, there has to be some karmic comeuppance at some point, and the hike back wasn't that awful, especially getting picked up barely an hour into it.
Next gig is uncertain; I want to go to Razormaze's tour kickoff, but that's on a Wednesday at Great Scott and I'm on call that week. Maybe worth chancing it, but we'll see how things shake out. This is, though, probably the last of the year absent some local stuff that may or may not qualify next week; that'll make only 25 gigs this year and 4 festivals, which is kind of disappointing. Of course, it says something when seeing north of 200 sets still qualifies as "need to get out more", but last year was 34 and 3 (ok, maybe I didn't get enough of NEDF to qualify and it's more like 35 and 2) and Boston is still Boston. We'll see about 2010; hopefully, I can make more local gigs, write more intelligently about them, and promote the northeast US better and more coherently at Party.San and whichever of Summer Breeze or Wacken ends up in the other slot.
Friday, December 11, 2009
festival ambivalence
Wacken is currently doing a tedious one-band-a-day reveal of the 2010 lineup, going in to an alleged awesome super-secret band on the 25th. The lineup, so far, is good stuff for those who are making 2010 their first Wacken, or those who weren't there in 2007 (when Cannibal Corpse followed Immortal), or those who don't have to budget in airfare, but for me, it's still up in the air.
So far:
Arch Enemy - could be decent, would be the first time I hear them with proper sound if the PA doesn't fuck up again
Caliban - no interest
Cannibal Corpse - see below
Corvus Corax - interesting especially since I slept through their '05 set
Apo - like the 5th year in a row, when are people going to start bitching about them being the new Saxon?
Edguy - cool if their new album isn't as crap as Tinnitus
Endstille - good enough, though they just played last year
Ghost Brigade - no interest, their demo sucked
Immortal - good, but after '07 not a cross-oceans draw
Orden Ogan - never heard of
Stratovarius - mildly interesting, but more rubbernecking than actual draw
The Devil's Blood - interesting but see below
U.D.O. - again, rubbernecker interest; I saw Udo with Accept here five years ago, and doubt he'll do better with more years under his belt and worse material
W.A.S.P. (not on the page, but they're the answer to the quiz, so watch for tomorrow) - decent
All in all, pretty good, but you can understand why I don't have a ticket yet. The case is building, but I need to see at least two from the set of (Sodom, Kreator, Hypocrisy, Slayer, Necrophagist, (some New England band I know people from)) to push this to a must -- and should Metallica be announced, that'll push the calculation significantly in the other direction.
The quiz answers, so far, have produced the following string as a clue to the secret band:
DATECORW
No ideas so far, especially since each unique letter may stand for multiple letters in the band name. Also, no time to run an anagram generator and check the results against Metal-Archives.
Contrast with:
Party.San bill, so far. Most of the bands I'm actually interested to see at Wacken, plus Aura Noir, Manegarm in the conditions that were so peak for Moonsorrow this past year, and Watain in a context with absolutely no limits (as long as they don't suddenly go NSBM). Hell yes. More draw on fewer announced already; get a few more in, and this will be the main reason to go over.
Summer Breeze is also looking promising. This will mean crossing the old East-West border (as advised against by Sturmi at Party.San last year, who spent 7 hours on local trains going from Bavaria to Thuringia to save money), but even that can be an adventure as well. The guide for doing interior German festivals -- as opposed to Wacken, where you can practically get off the plane and back without having to read a word in German -- will be along sometime this winter, but will probably get tweaked based on these results if I end up doing that this summer.
So far:
Arch Enemy - could be decent, would be the first time I hear them with proper sound if the PA doesn't fuck up again
Caliban - no interest
Cannibal Corpse - see below
Corvus Corax - interesting especially since I slept through their '05 set
Apo - like the 5th year in a row, when are people going to start bitching about them being the new Saxon?
Edguy - cool if their new album isn't as crap as Tinnitus
Endstille - good enough, though they just played last year
Ghost Brigade - no interest, their demo sucked
Immortal - good, but after '07 not a cross-oceans draw
Orden Ogan - never heard of
Stratovarius - mildly interesting, but more rubbernecking than actual draw
The Devil's Blood - interesting but see below
U.D.O. - again, rubbernecker interest; I saw Udo with Accept here five years ago, and doubt he'll do better with more years under his belt and worse material
W.A.S.P. (not on the page, but they're the answer to the quiz, so watch for tomorrow) - decent
All in all, pretty good, but you can understand why I don't have a ticket yet. The case is building, but I need to see at least two from the set of (Sodom, Kreator, Hypocrisy, Slayer, Necrophagist, (some New England band I know people from)) to push this to a must -- and should Metallica be announced, that'll push the calculation significantly in the other direction.
The quiz answers, so far, have produced the following string as a clue to the secret band:
DATECORW
No ideas so far, especially since each unique letter may stand for multiple letters in the band name. Also, no time to run an anagram generator and check the results against Metal-Archives.
Contrast with:
Party.San bill, so far. Most of the bands I'm actually interested to see at Wacken, plus Aura Noir, Manegarm in the conditions that were so peak for Moonsorrow this past year, and Watain in a context with absolutely no limits (as long as they don't suddenly go NSBM). Hell yes. More draw on fewer announced already; get a few more in, and this will be the main reason to go over.
Summer Breeze is also looking promising. This will mean crossing the old East-West border (as advised against by Sturmi at Party.San last year, who spent 7 hours on local trains going from Bavaria to Thuringia to save money), but even that can be an adventure as well. The guide for doing interior German festivals -- as opposed to Wacken, where you can practically get off the plane and back without having to read a word in German -- will be along sometime this winter, but will probably get tweaked based on these results if I end up doing that this summer.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Ensiferum with Ex Deo, Blackguard, and Swashbuckle [Worcester Palladium, 12/4/2009]
Almost a full month between gigs. That's what being on call the only week people are playing out during Thanksgiving month gets you. Anyway, more than past time or not, this was Ensiferum playing upstairs at the Palladium, which made up for the somewhat uninspiring lower part of the bill and Hypocrisy cancelling due to, as I've heard anyway, visa problems. This was another struggle to get out to after work, but I made it up shortly after the announced start, and while I may have missed Under Lying Truth, I did get in just after Swashbuckle started, which would suffice for the bands I actually had the expectation of seeing.
Swashbuckle [5/7]
Since I came in late for these guys, I was back by the upstairs mixing desk, then the bar, which in both cases are the furthest distance I've ever seen Swashbuckle from, which is a little odd considering that the upstairs is usually the intimate version of the Palladium. Chart it: on top of the band at O'Brien's, first row the first time they played in this building, three rows back on the Medieval Stage this summer, three rows back in this room a month ago. This was also the fourth time I'd seen them this year, which is fucking weird for a gimmick metal band that isn't actually from this area (hell, a touring band at all), and when they come back next month with Tyr and Korpiklaani it'll be five times in nine months. More power to them. Their fill-in drummer (what, you didn't know Crashride couldn't get into Canada? tour following fail) did a good job, and the band blasted out a stand-up set of brutal pirate thrash despite getting a little jobbed by the soundboard (Justin's mic didn't appear to be on for the majority of the set), without the inflatables or fuckaroundery that they've had on previous gigs. Probably just as well; too much of that and they run the risk of overexposure and gimmick fatigue. No doors knocked down with this set, but a solid opening performance.
Blackguard [4/7]
In all fairness, this band got a great response from the crowd. I just can't figure out why. Are North American Children of Bodom fans that desperate, seriously? I mean, the band does tour on this continent pretty regularly. Blackguard, as last time, put out a technically satisfactory performance of extremely artistically limited material, including an older song that showed them as a slightly better if much more transparent imitation of CoB back when they went under the name Profugis Mortis. I'm not sure progress has been made. I can understand, in 2001, starting a Children of Bodom cover band on the theory that they're on fucking Spinefarm and unlikely to ever tour outside Europe, but then they break through and your career path then becomes to be Maurizio Iacono's pocket Bodom, trotted out to collect the acclaim of high schoolers and pelters from surly guys in kuttes whenever he can't book a better opener in this style. Yes, it's tough to even get up to average as a metal band, and this style is obviously working for them, but this was the definite low point of the night musically, and it's difficult at this point to envision a Blackguard set where a) this is not the case, and b) I actually decide to show up based on the balance of the bill.
The most entertainment during this period probably came from the Swashbuckle dudes storming the stage, still in costume, during "This Round's On Me" to spray the crowd with beer and hold up hobo signs parodying the singer's expressions. It's not really a natural drinking song out of the box even to the extent that something like Ensiferum's "One More Magic Potion" is (let alone, say Korpiklaani or Tankard's repetoire), but it got almost to that point with the fun add-ons.
Ex Deo [5/7]
I hadn't heard this band before, but was somewhat aware of the pedigree; after seeing Kataklysm tats on, like, everyone, I checked into it and found that this is basically Kataklysm hiding out in the Teutoberger Wald to get away from idiots like me who say stuff like "what the fuck is this, where's the hyperblast" about their recent material. This is fine by me; if Maurizio wants to fold Kataklysm's tents and play meat-and-potatoes death metal with black touches and Roman themes, I'll show up and give full support. Less decaying modern Kataklysm, more vital and inspired imperial crunching. Ex Deo put out a good long set that was more solid than superlative, but executed the concept without coming off as overly gimmicky, justifying the decision to pick up their record earlier. Good stuff, and while this would have been better leading into Hypocrisy, it definitely filled the RDA of death metal on the night, and it'll do a good job raising interest and expectations the next time they come around.
Ensiferum [7/7]
No "Token of Time", but no injuries either. Call it a mixed bag -- or, really, a typical Ensiferum set, blending epic humppaa metal with gonzo floor action and stretching out to take full advantage of being the sole headliner on the bill. They played just absolutely as long as the venue allowed them (modulo the obligato pretend off before the encore that really needs to start getting cut in favor of MOAR by the bands that do this crap to fap their egos), weighted a little more to the new stuff but still covering their whole catalog, and after having the crowd pick "Iron" as the closer, decided to jam "Battle Songs" (the other option) in after it to take full advantage of the remaining time until the lights went back on. I didn't know they were slotted for nearly two hours, nor did it feel like it on the floor; just a splendid performance of kickass music by probably the best current exemplar of the accessible side of viking metal, and an incredible headliner to a good solid show.
Out on the sidewalk as I was leaving, Eric CSDO was doing promos.....of what looked like porn DVDs, but probably also including drag racer and old-school thrash content. Eric Paone, ladies and gentlemen. This wasn't really a "scene" draw, so hopefully those intrigued by this stuff will outweigh those weirded out and the deep underground gets a bonus shot of new blood as a result.
Next gig: same bat-time, same bat-station (almost); Municipal Waste, Brutal Truth, Phobia, and Cauldron Tuesday. This is a knee-brace-or-upstairs show -- and hell, Brutal Truth and Phobia, even upstairs isn't guaranteed safe.
Unrelated: I'm wearing my Swashbuckle "Splashzone" shirt for the second Saturday in a row, and for the second Saturday in a row Celtic have run riot over the opposition. Correlation is not causation, but this is a streak worth trying to sustain.
Swashbuckle [5/7]
Since I came in late for these guys, I was back by the upstairs mixing desk, then the bar, which in both cases are the furthest distance I've ever seen Swashbuckle from, which is a little odd considering that the upstairs is usually the intimate version of the Palladium. Chart it: on top of the band at O'Brien's, first row the first time they played in this building, three rows back on the Medieval Stage this summer, three rows back in this room a month ago. This was also the fourth time I'd seen them this year, which is fucking weird for a gimmick metal band that isn't actually from this area (hell, a touring band at all), and when they come back next month with Tyr and Korpiklaani it'll be five times in nine months. More power to them. Their fill-in drummer (what, you didn't know Crashride couldn't get into Canada? tour following fail) did a good job, and the band blasted out a stand-up set of brutal pirate thrash despite getting a little jobbed by the soundboard (Justin's mic didn't appear to be on for the majority of the set), without the inflatables or fuckaroundery that they've had on previous gigs. Probably just as well; too much of that and they run the risk of overexposure and gimmick fatigue. No doors knocked down with this set, but a solid opening performance.
Blackguard [4/7]
In all fairness, this band got a great response from the crowd. I just can't figure out why. Are North American Children of Bodom fans that desperate, seriously? I mean, the band does tour on this continent pretty regularly. Blackguard, as last time, put out a technically satisfactory performance of extremely artistically limited material, including an older song that showed them as a slightly better if much more transparent imitation of CoB back when they went under the name Profugis Mortis. I'm not sure progress has been made. I can understand, in 2001, starting a Children of Bodom cover band on the theory that they're on fucking Spinefarm and unlikely to ever tour outside Europe, but then they break through and your career path then becomes to be Maurizio Iacono's pocket Bodom, trotted out to collect the acclaim of high schoolers and pelters from surly guys in kuttes whenever he can't book a better opener in this style. Yes, it's tough to even get up to average as a metal band, and this style is obviously working for them, but this was the definite low point of the night musically, and it's difficult at this point to envision a Blackguard set where a) this is not the case, and b) I actually decide to show up based on the balance of the bill.
The most entertainment during this period probably came from the Swashbuckle dudes storming the stage, still in costume, during "This Round's On Me" to spray the crowd with beer and hold up hobo signs parodying the singer's expressions. It's not really a natural drinking song out of the box even to the extent that something like Ensiferum's "One More Magic Potion" is (let alone, say Korpiklaani or Tankard's repetoire), but it got almost to that point with the fun add-ons.
Ex Deo [5/7]
I hadn't heard this band before, but was somewhat aware of the pedigree; after seeing Kataklysm tats on, like, everyone, I checked into it and found that this is basically Kataklysm hiding out in the Teutoberger Wald to get away from idiots like me who say stuff like "what the fuck is this, where's the hyperblast" about their recent material. This is fine by me; if Maurizio wants to fold Kataklysm's tents and play meat-and-potatoes death metal with black touches and Roman themes, I'll show up and give full support. Less decaying modern Kataklysm, more vital and inspired imperial crunching. Ex Deo put out a good long set that was more solid than superlative, but executed the concept without coming off as overly gimmicky, justifying the decision to pick up their record earlier. Good stuff, and while this would have been better leading into Hypocrisy, it definitely filled the RDA of death metal on the night, and it'll do a good job raising interest and expectations the next time they come around.
Ensiferum [7/7]
No "Token of Time", but no injuries either. Call it a mixed bag -- or, really, a typical Ensiferum set, blending epic humppaa metal with gonzo floor action and stretching out to take full advantage of being the sole headliner on the bill. They played just absolutely as long as the venue allowed them (modulo the obligato pretend off before the encore that really needs to start getting cut in favor of MOAR by the bands that do this crap to fap their egos), weighted a little more to the new stuff but still covering their whole catalog, and after having the crowd pick "Iron" as the closer, decided to jam "Battle Songs" (the other option) in after it to take full advantage of the remaining time until the lights went back on. I didn't know they were slotted for nearly two hours, nor did it feel like it on the floor; just a splendid performance of kickass music by probably the best current exemplar of the accessible side of viking metal, and an incredible headliner to a good solid show.
Out on the sidewalk as I was leaving, Eric CSDO was doing promos.....of what looked like porn DVDs, but probably also including drag racer and old-school thrash content. Eric Paone, ladies and gentlemen. This wasn't really a "scene" draw, so hopefully those intrigued by this stuff will outweigh those weirded out and the deep underground gets a bonus shot of new blood as a result.
Next gig: same bat-time, same bat-station (almost); Municipal Waste, Brutal Truth, Phobia, and Cauldron Tuesday. This is a knee-brace-or-upstairs show -- and hell, Brutal Truth and Phobia, even upstairs isn't guaranteed safe.
Unrelated: I'm wearing my Swashbuckle "Splashzone" shirt for the second Saturday in a row, and for the second Saturday in a row Celtic have run riot over the opposition. Correlation is not causation, but this is a streak worth trying to sustain.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Vader with Decrepit Birth, Warbringer, The Amenta, Augury, and Swashbuckle [Worcester Palladium, 11/5/2009]
The great dilemma: work prevents you from seeing the shows you want to, but if you don't work, you don't have the money to go to them and get in the door. I had to take a pass on the first large, ill-matched tour at the Palladium this week, and cut this night's excursion short rather than go the few streets over to see Metal Thursday, but it was a good night of metal all told, despite some extraneous stuff, and the rest of the winter touring season is looking to be shaping up pretty well.
This was another direct-out-from work special, but I timed it right to get through the bullshit on the Pike and up to the venue right about at doors. I also remembered to bung the knife in the car before leaving it, but this was not enough for the security. Twits stole my fucking pen again. It's fucking ridiculous, first that they do this and second that they don't do it frequently enough that I know to grundle it in advance. It was in the process of dying, sure, but stealing people's pens isn't fucking cricket. Not cool; however, they did let me take my phone in to make digital notes with at the price of looking like a lamer. And I still could have easily brought a knife or chisel in undetected to do much more serious vandalism, if that was the point. Paying customers unreasonably inconvenienced, nothing actually blocked or averted; security theater at its finest.
Cussing about this under my breath in a mix of four or five languages, I bought my ticket, got banded, and got in to browse the merch while the bands were setting up. This turned into a Warbringer patch -- which I have serious reservations about actually putting on anything, see below -- as well as their new record to make the change come out, a trip to the bar to break up my bills so as not to inconvenience Vader's merch stand, Necropolis and two special-edition Decapitated patches (to raise money for Covan's medical bills, not just because Vogg's playing in Vader now), and the latest cool shirt design from Decrepit Birth. These guys have mastered the "lots of t-shirts" model allegedly required by the new paradigms in digital music distro, but it'd also be awesome to see this art (and the art on the "Living Doorway" shirt) done up for a 10" pic-disc or something (maybe the song that inspired it, a couple live tracks, a random fuckaround jam...like Out of the Dark..., I don't know, just throwing shit out there). T-shirts fade when used for their intended purpose, pic-discs don't.
Eventually, though, I decided I had to stop buying shit if I wanted to go to Metal Thursday or, for that matter, be able to pay the tolls to get home, and Swashbuckle was starting up anyway. Downstairs for music.
Swashbuckle [5.5/7]
I can't really see Running Wild ever coming out to "I'm On A Boat". However, this just goes to demonstrate that Swashbuckle aren't Running Wild (or, for that matter, Alestorm, who played here Tuesday and may feel put upon by their fans to take themselves a smidge more seriously than that), and that their attack on the pirate trope is their own. They smashed out a decently long set balanced towards the new record to a pretty good reaction, though I'm not sure what other people's reaction to the people in parrot and shark costumes thrashing about in the pit was. If they'd run out from backstage and stagedove, it'd've been as clear as it was in Germany that they were band-affiliated rather than (as some might have concluded) random hipsters in leftover Halloween costumes, causing the ultra-true to become unnecessarily SO FULL OF HATE. On the whole, about on the level of the last time I saw them here, downstairs; not serious enough for the death metal portion of the bill and significantly heavier than Warbringer (who probably got the most heads in the door), they still got a good reaction out of the half-full floor and less negativity than the other thrash band in the lineup.
If you want a different perspective on shows like this one, or just a general idea of what it's like on the other side of the front monitors at this level, you might want to take a look at Commodore Redrum's tour diary; this gig doesn't get its own entry, but the return match in December when they come back with Ensiferum and Hypocrisy might.
Augury [6/7]
The Forest Lapointe Show [7/7]
I don't pay nearly as much attention to new developments in metal as I could or really should. This means that when I haven't seen or heard a band before, especially on a large, weirdly packaged tour like this one, I wait around in general trepidation, expecting that they, like a lot of bands these days, will suck. (This is because I'm an old stick-in-the-mud almost as much as because a lot of newer bands that are just getting national tour exposure do suck.) This was the baseline for Augury, and fortunately, they blew that expectation out of the water. Their set was a little short, but packed top to bottom with a perfect mix of the technical and brutal schools of Quebecois death metal. Stellar all the way across, even the drummer, who landed from Australia in Montreal (their old drummer quit, and the guy from The Amenta was sitting in) days before and learned the material in a matter of hours, but Forest's bass playing was in a class by itself. The guy annihilated so hard on the first song that when Patrick announced before the second that we'd get a bass solo later on if the crowd reaction was good enough, the whole place erupted, even before he strapped on his fretless to take things to another level, even from those who'd never heard the band before. The solo came two songs later, and was as massive as anticipated. Not a perfect set -- time as much as anything else to do with this -- but impeccably delivered, and probably quite well enough to convince anyone who showed up to keep their eyes peeled for these guys the next time they come back south.
Following this, I went up and immediately forked for their record. I haven't gotten a chance to listen yet, but given that the board was kind of inconsistent on the night, it's likely to be even better than what we got out of the band -- and if nothing else, at least more.
The Amenta [4.5/7]
I was in the way back for these guys because there was a shortage of places to stand further forward, and that turned out to be for the better. They were in most ways decent, but I remember a band called Meridian, and if you have qualms about that score, you probably don't, or just haven't listened to The Seventh Sun in a while. "But they came all the way from Australia! And Meridian isn't even together any more, much less touring!" Sure, but that makes the hurdles for The Amenta taller, not shorter. The performance here was ok, and most people probably won't recognize it as being firmly in the shadow of another and better band, but that doesn't mean that they really did anything to get out of this shadow, and you don't cross oceans to play "ok" gigs.
At this point I went up and got a Swashbuckle shirt ("Splashzone", a little more topically unified than their "The Trooper" parody, and it had the tourdates besides) from Pat; I'd been ambivalent about this first due to the possible need to support The Amenta and then pay the door charge at MT, but both of those issues kind of resolved themselves for various reasons about here. Shirt in the belt, it was back down again, now absolutely skint and somewhat foreclosed from drinking the rest of the night.
Warbringer [5/7]
I can now firmly say that I've seen Warbringer, and the impressions from before with their limited lineup and with their first record are pretty much accurate. Warbringer are a good thrash revival band, but somewhat allergic to doing anything new with the style. They turn out good, crunchy, Bay-Area thrash metal, but I still haven't heard anything out of them that I can indelibly stamp as the "Warbringer sound". There are Exodus parts and Kreator parts, but this is an empty foundation without a house on top of it. The guys are talented enough to build said house, but they need to do so ASAP -- does anyone remember when Reanimator was in the pole position of the thrash revival? Anyone remember how bands like Faith or Fear sank without a trace in the '80s because they didn't differentiate themselves? True, Denial, Realm, and Devastation also fell off the map despite being awesome, but obscurity happens faster to bands that can't carve their own name into the listener's brain.
There were a few thumbs down passed out during the performance, mostly by a dude of no small standing in the thrash millieu of this part of New England, but the band shouldn't be too dismayed, as they weren't going to get this guy, or those like him, anyways. As mentioned before, thrash fans who were into thrash before the revival started tend to have a rather simple and brutal means of classifying bands, which likely corresponds in this case to something like the following chart:
Band goodness is easily seen to be a dependent variable, and Warbringer of course sounds nothing like Sodom, so they get pelters. I have a very similar chart for personal use, but it usually says "sounds like Kreator" at the bottom, so Warbringer gets slightly more of a break on that one.
In here I went more forward, aided by the fact that a suspicious number of people seemed to go back and then not come back to the front for Decrepit Birth, nor noticeably swell the numbers upstairs. If you actually left in this timeframe you are a lamer, and Devin Townsend will come to your house to take back your metal points, cut up any jacket you have attempted to build so far, and force you to watch while he commits indecent acts on any domestic animals you may have lying around. If you're not scared of Devin Townsend raping your pets, that's fine with me; your loser cred is established and there are fewer people standing between me and respectively Matt Sotelo and Waclaw "Vogg" Kieltyka.
Decrepit Birth [6.5/7]
Seeing Augury's set -- and, depending on your perspective, the two bands that played after them -- it might have been reasonable to suspect that they might steal the show. Nope. Decrepit Birth came out and demonstrated that they are still Decrepit Birth, and still on the leading edge of amazing technical things that can be done in death metal. They played a nice balanced selection of material from both records so far, and teased an upcoming new one though (if I recall correctly) they didn't have anything off it at this one. I don't know if Bill actually believes all his weird inter-song banter, but it fits with the music and lyrical topics, and, hey, California. Ferociously good music, easily on a par with Vader, and quite possibly the best (and definitely longest) performance I've seen from them in this building.
Despite the relative length of the set, there was a strong demand for the band to do more, which they of course couldn't without running into Vader's timeslot, who would themselves end up relatively pinched for time. This show didn't exactly get out early, either, so the problem here is probably trying to shoehorn six bands into just under 4 hours. Like the last Maurizio-put-up tour that I saw in this building, backlining was used to good effect for most of the bands, but this time around there was just too much good music.
The coherence of Decrepit Birth and the backstage presence during their set of the NEDF organizers/New England Green Thumb horticultural society members, though, might argue that they would not have played longer had they had the opportunity, choosing rather to undertake other activities as a preparation for Vader. ;) Nothing implied......
Vader [6.5/7]
Decrepit Birth set a really high standard, but Vader definitely matched the mark, though to a crowd that was shamefully diminished from the night's high point. For crying out loud, you idiots, bands from Poland don't just wash in every day -- and most of the time when they do show it's fucking Behemoth, so exult, as those of us who stayed true and stayed in did, that you get a good one for a change. There was a lot of new material in this set, which still ripped and popped with as much power as the old. It's Vader -- did anyone expect differently? People were running out of energy by the end, but even if the band were a little let down, they didn't let it affect the music, and both we and they got a good finish out of the night by the time the venue turned the lights back on and foreclosed any further encore.
Unfortunately, this really was the finish to the night; it was late and I was tired as well as dead skint, which cut Metal Thursday out of the plans to continue. No Morgirion, no Mythology, no Kathadin -- well, I'd missed two out of those already just by virtue of what time it was; time to just bear up the pain and get to work in an normal fashion in the morning. This may have turned out to be a blessing in disguise, too, as I didn't have to go in the legendary shambles of the Ralph's parking lot and further aggravate the damage to the tire that ended up dying on the way home from work Friday rather than on the way home from this show. That dead tire may also have bricked any chance of going to Deceased on Saturday, but at that point, I was probably already sick enough that I wouldn't've made the trip back in.
Future shows are up in the air; I've got to finish being sick first, then see what's coming up, and where.
This was another direct-out-from work special, but I timed it right to get through the bullshit on the Pike and up to the venue right about at doors. I also remembered to bung the knife in the car before leaving it, but this was not enough for the security. Twits stole my fucking pen again. It's fucking ridiculous, first that they do this and second that they don't do it frequently enough that I know to grundle it in advance. It was in the process of dying, sure, but stealing people's pens isn't fucking cricket. Not cool; however, they did let me take my phone in to make digital notes with at the price of looking like a lamer. And I still could have easily brought a knife or chisel in undetected to do much more serious vandalism, if that was the point. Paying customers unreasonably inconvenienced, nothing actually blocked or averted; security theater at its finest.
Cussing about this under my breath in a mix of four or five languages, I bought my ticket, got banded, and got in to browse the merch while the bands were setting up. This turned into a Warbringer patch -- which I have serious reservations about actually putting on anything, see below -- as well as their new record to make the change come out, a trip to the bar to break up my bills so as not to inconvenience Vader's merch stand, Necropolis and two special-edition Decapitated patches (to raise money for Covan's medical bills, not just because Vogg's playing in Vader now), and the latest cool shirt design from Decrepit Birth. These guys have mastered the "lots of t-shirts" model allegedly required by the new paradigms in digital music distro, but it'd also be awesome to see this art (and the art on the "Living Doorway" shirt) done up for a 10" pic-disc or something (maybe the song that inspired it, a couple live tracks, a random fuckaround jam...like Out of the Dark..., I don't know, just throwing shit out there). T-shirts fade when used for their intended purpose, pic-discs don't.
Eventually, though, I decided I had to stop buying shit if I wanted to go to Metal Thursday or, for that matter, be able to pay the tolls to get home, and Swashbuckle was starting up anyway. Downstairs for music.
Swashbuckle [5.5/7]
I can't really see Running Wild ever coming out to "I'm On A Boat". However, this just goes to demonstrate that Swashbuckle aren't Running Wild (or, for that matter, Alestorm, who played here Tuesday and may feel put upon by their fans to take themselves a smidge more seriously than that), and that their attack on the pirate trope is their own. They smashed out a decently long set balanced towards the new record to a pretty good reaction, though I'm not sure what other people's reaction to the people in parrot and shark costumes thrashing about in the pit was. If they'd run out from backstage and stagedove, it'd've been as clear as it was in Germany that they were band-affiliated rather than (as some might have concluded) random hipsters in leftover Halloween costumes, causing the ultra-true to become unnecessarily SO FULL OF HATE. On the whole, about on the level of the last time I saw them here, downstairs; not serious enough for the death metal portion of the bill and significantly heavier than Warbringer (who probably got the most heads in the door), they still got a good reaction out of the half-full floor and less negativity than the other thrash band in the lineup.
If you want a different perspective on shows like this one, or just a general idea of what it's like on the other side of the front monitors at this level, you might want to take a look at Commodore Redrum's tour diary; this gig doesn't get its own entry, but the return match in December when they come back with Ensiferum and Hypocrisy might.
Augury [6/7]
The Forest Lapointe Show [7/7]
I don't pay nearly as much attention to new developments in metal as I could or really should. This means that when I haven't seen or heard a band before, especially on a large, weirdly packaged tour like this one, I wait around in general trepidation, expecting that they, like a lot of bands these days, will suck. (This is because I'm an old stick-in-the-mud almost as much as because a lot of newer bands that are just getting national tour exposure do suck.) This was the baseline for Augury, and fortunately, they blew that expectation out of the water. Their set was a little short, but packed top to bottom with a perfect mix of the technical and brutal schools of Quebecois death metal. Stellar all the way across, even the drummer, who landed from Australia in Montreal (their old drummer quit, and the guy from The Amenta was sitting in) days before and learned the material in a matter of hours, but Forest's bass playing was in a class by itself. The guy annihilated so hard on the first song that when Patrick announced before the second that we'd get a bass solo later on if the crowd reaction was good enough, the whole place erupted, even before he strapped on his fretless to take things to another level, even from those who'd never heard the band before. The solo came two songs later, and was as massive as anticipated. Not a perfect set -- time as much as anything else to do with this -- but impeccably delivered, and probably quite well enough to convince anyone who showed up to keep their eyes peeled for these guys the next time they come back south.
Following this, I went up and immediately forked for their record. I haven't gotten a chance to listen yet, but given that the board was kind of inconsistent on the night, it's likely to be even better than what we got out of the band -- and if nothing else, at least more.
The Amenta [4.5/7]
I was in the way back for these guys because there was a shortage of places to stand further forward, and that turned out to be for the better. They were in most ways decent, but I remember a band called Meridian, and if you have qualms about that score, you probably don't, or just haven't listened to The Seventh Sun in a while. "But they came all the way from Australia! And Meridian isn't even together any more, much less touring!" Sure, but that makes the hurdles for The Amenta taller, not shorter. The performance here was ok, and most people probably won't recognize it as being firmly in the shadow of another and better band, but that doesn't mean that they really did anything to get out of this shadow, and you don't cross oceans to play "ok" gigs.
At this point I went up and got a Swashbuckle shirt ("Splashzone", a little more topically unified than their "The Trooper" parody, and it had the tourdates besides) from Pat; I'd been ambivalent about this first due to the possible need to support The Amenta and then pay the door charge at MT, but both of those issues kind of resolved themselves for various reasons about here. Shirt in the belt, it was back down again, now absolutely skint and somewhat foreclosed from drinking the rest of the night.
Warbringer [5/7]
I can now firmly say that I've seen Warbringer, and the impressions from before with their limited lineup and with their first record are pretty much accurate. Warbringer are a good thrash revival band, but somewhat allergic to doing anything new with the style. They turn out good, crunchy, Bay-Area thrash metal, but I still haven't heard anything out of them that I can indelibly stamp as the "Warbringer sound". There are Exodus parts and Kreator parts, but this is an empty foundation without a house on top of it. The guys are talented enough to build said house, but they need to do so ASAP -- does anyone remember when Reanimator was in the pole position of the thrash revival? Anyone remember how bands like Faith or Fear sank without a trace in the '80s because they didn't differentiate themselves? True, Denial, Realm, and Devastation also fell off the map despite being awesome, but obscurity happens faster to bands that can't carve their own name into the listener's brain.
There were a few thumbs down passed out during the performance, mostly by a dude of no small standing in the thrash millieu of this part of New England, but the band shouldn't be too dismayed, as they weren't going to get this guy, or those like him, anyways. As mentioned before, thrash fans who were into thrash before the revival started tend to have a rather simple and brutal means of classifying bands, which likely corresponds in this case to something like the following chart:
Band goodness is easily seen to be a dependent variable, and Warbringer of course sounds nothing like Sodom, so they get pelters. I have a very similar chart for personal use, but it usually says "sounds like Kreator" at the bottom, so Warbringer gets slightly more of a break on that one.
In here I went more forward, aided by the fact that a suspicious number of people seemed to go back and then not come back to the front for Decrepit Birth, nor noticeably swell the numbers upstairs. If you actually left in this timeframe you are a lamer, and Devin Townsend will come to your house to take back your metal points, cut up any jacket you have attempted to build so far, and force you to watch while he commits indecent acts on any domestic animals you may have lying around. If you're not scared of Devin Townsend raping your pets, that's fine with me; your loser cred is established and there are fewer people standing between me and respectively Matt Sotelo and Waclaw "Vogg" Kieltyka.
Decrepit Birth [6.5/7]
Seeing Augury's set -- and, depending on your perspective, the two bands that played after them -- it might have been reasonable to suspect that they might steal the show. Nope. Decrepit Birth came out and demonstrated that they are still Decrepit Birth, and still on the leading edge of amazing technical things that can be done in death metal. They played a nice balanced selection of material from both records so far, and teased an upcoming new one though (if I recall correctly) they didn't have anything off it at this one. I don't know if Bill actually believes all his weird inter-song banter, but it fits with the music and lyrical topics, and, hey, California. Ferociously good music, easily on a par with Vader, and quite possibly the best (and definitely longest) performance I've seen from them in this building.
Despite the relative length of the set, there was a strong demand for the band to do more, which they of course couldn't without running into Vader's timeslot, who would themselves end up relatively pinched for time. This show didn't exactly get out early, either, so the problem here is probably trying to shoehorn six bands into just under 4 hours. Like the last Maurizio-put-up tour that I saw in this building, backlining was used to good effect for most of the bands, but this time around there was just too much good music.
The coherence of Decrepit Birth and the backstage presence during their set of the NEDF organizers/New England Green Thumb horticultural society members, though, might argue that they would not have played longer had they had the opportunity, choosing rather to undertake other activities as a preparation for Vader. ;) Nothing implied......
Vader [6.5/7]
Decrepit Birth set a really high standard, but Vader definitely matched the mark, though to a crowd that was shamefully diminished from the night's high point. For crying out loud, you idiots, bands from Poland don't just wash in every day -- and most of the time when they do show it's fucking Behemoth, so exult, as those of us who stayed true and stayed in did, that you get a good one for a change. There was a lot of new material in this set, which still ripped and popped with as much power as the old. It's Vader -- did anyone expect differently? People were running out of energy by the end, but even if the band were a little let down, they didn't let it affect the music, and both we and they got a good finish out of the night by the time the venue turned the lights back on and foreclosed any further encore.
Unfortunately, this really was the finish to the night; it was late and I was tired as well as dead skint, which cut Metal Thursday out of the plans to continue. No Morgirion, no Mythology, no Kathadin -- well, I'd missed two out of those already just by virtue of what time it was; time to just bear up the pain and get to work in an normal fashion in the morning. This may have turned out to be a blessing in disguise, too, as I didn't have to go in the legendary shambles of the Ralph's parking lot and further aggravate the damage to the tire that ended up dying on the way home from work Friday rather than on the way home from this show. That dead tire may also have bricked any chance of going to Deceased on Saturday, but at that point, I was probably already sick enough that I wouldn't've made the trip back in.
Future shows are up in the air; I've got to finish being sick first, then see what's coming up, and where.
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