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Events and Reports - Sweden Rock Festival 2009 - Day 3 (Stuart) - Destroyer 666, Unleashed, Motorhead
Friday 5th June
I awoke the next morning to discover my biggest regret of the festival. I exited the tent to find Steen almost as drunk as Lemmy had been the night before and enquired as to how he had got that way.
Due to the extreme cold the night before I had dived into my sleeping back around half 2 and not long after Steen had shouted on me to say he was off to the backstage bar. I had refused to join him as I was far too cold, but it turned out that Steen's drunken state the next morning was due to meeting Sabaton in the backstage bar spending the night getting wasted on their tour bus. Bugger...
Still if you're reading this Joakim, I'm more than up for joining in with round three of Sabaton Vs RevelationZ staff members next year!
However, I believe you dear reader are more interested in the band at the festival rather than me crying my eyes out over missed opportunities. In that case you will be interested to find out about one of the "defining" shows of the festival.Thor the Mighty, Thor the Brave, Thor the owner of many plastic masks!!!
Words cannot express the abject humility in which I describe the following stage show. For I have seen a God in human for, Jon Mikl Thor be his name!
Now you may be familiar with the works of Thor, who in his prime was a body building giant of a man who could have beaten up all of Manowar without breaking a sweat. Sadly this is not his prime and he's now a slightly rotund, balding Canadian, dressed in plastic armour and padding with a rather poor singing voice and a load of plastic mask ranging from Mexican wrestler to The Predator.
I don't want to get tore into the guy as he clearly loved being onstage and the show was as much about the comedy as the music but it was one of the most bizarre gigs I've ever seen. Thor spent as much of the set talking to the crowd as he did singing, which was probably a good thing as the music was at times pretty poor fair.
Still I did see the potent feat of our man Thor bending a steel bar with the brute cosmic force of his bare hands. This was after him taking great lengths to ensure the audience it was a real steel bar and almost reducing me to tears when he pretended not to be able to bend it.
How foolish I was to doubt a God! By Odin's will the steel was bent by Thor and given to an audience member (just as well I didn't get that, I would have no idea how to explain it at the airport customs desk). As amusing as this all was we eventually got bored and wandered off. Apparently we missed an epic showdown between our hero and the trickster God Loki, that ranks as my second biggest regret of the festival right there!
The weather disintegrated a wee bit at this point as showers swept the festival grounds; in a way it couldn't have been for a more appropriate band as next up were Destroyer 666. The bands blackened War Metal was played hard and fast enough to make me forget about the rain and concentrate on head banging. The band admittedly got a slightly muted reaction to begin with and KK Warslut (ok, so it's a slightly silly name) didn't exactly go out of his way to stir up the crowd but the Aussies music rose above this. I Am The War God and Black City were tremendous and the all concurring Eternal Glory of War closed an intense performance.
Speaking of intense, a few hours later Swedish titans Unleashed completely decimated the Zeppelin stage with a rampant Death Metal Victory. I've seen a fair few Death Metal bands in my time but Johnny Hedlund and his marauders rose to the top of my list with a brilliant non-stop show that even stirred up that rarest of sightings, a Swedish mosh pit.
Their trade is one of old fashioned Swedish DM with a dash of groove, plentiful thrashing brakes and a healthy distrust of the teachings of Jesus Christ. I was none too familiar with the bands extensive back catalogue but they have perfected the writing of straight up DM songs with lashings of melody that make them easy to pick up and fun to join in with.
The band sound was perfect mixed and allowed tracks like This Is Our World Now, Hammer Battalion Unleashed and In Victory or Defeat to sound like they could level mountains. They were without doubt one of the bands of the festival. As Johnny himself says "Death Metal, no compromise"
After the band vacated the stage we cowered from the pouring rain in the beer tent, had a gander at Lita Ford (who sounded pretty dull) then headed back to the Zeppelin stage to check out Demon.
I had believed Demon were a NWOBHM band but of the fifteen minutes of them that I saw they play soft rock in the style of bands like Magnum. I didn't mind the first song Night of The Demon but by end of Blue Sky's In Red Square I had quite enough of these AOR-alike nonsense and left to watch a bit of Kamelot.
I had seen Kamelot a month previous and that had been an underwhelming experience. The band output since The Black Halo doesn't move me in any great fashion and they concentrate on their last two albums at the expense of (in my opinion) stronger, older material.
This time I only caught three or four songs before the rain drove me into the shelter of the Gibson tent. To my surprise two of them were from the Epica album, the wonderful Centre Of The Universe and Descent of The Archangel. Most surprisingly however was that the normally impeccable Roy Kahn seemed to be struggling with his vocals. He was taking bigger breaks that normal between singing lines and didn't even attempt the high part at the end of Centre.
I decamped after the third track and met Nina and then Craig at the barrier in the Gibson tent for Enforcer. The young Swedes were excellent and managed to draw a packed crowd into the confines of the tent. Although this may have had something to do with the wild rain storm outside.
Anyway, the band raced out of the traps with Black Angel which sent Nina, I and the rest of the front few rows into a headbanging, fist clenching frenzy. The sound wasn't terrific and Olof's vocals were struggling to make themselves heard in the din at points.
However the driving NWOBHM sound of a band like this doesn't require sterling acoustics and it was a brilliant set with the highlights being Scream of The Savage and the impressive instrumental City Lights which featured some fine guitar duelling between Adam Zaars and Joseph Tholl. Also a big thank you to the band for the curve ball that was the cover of The Misfit's I Turned Into A Martian, I rather enjoyed that!
Final band of the night for us was Motorhead back from their contractual years break from Sweden Rock (Well we couldn't have them playing every year I suppose) complete with the always welcome Bomber lighting rig.
We turned only a few moments before the band took to the stage and had to make do with a place down the left hand side of the stage. This was a rather foolish decision on our part as every drunken tosser and their granny attempts to push in from this side. This meant the first forty minutes of the set were filled with constant interruptions of people pushing, shoving and generally acting like pricks on their way into the middle.
The band played some great stuff, Iron Fist, Stay Clean and In The Name Of Tragedy were brilliant but the crowd situation was really stating to grate. It eventually annoyed Craig to the point of him leaving to find a better position but I was not about to surrender and stood my ground.
Bizarrely things calmed down when the band pulled out the big guns so the last twenty five or so minutes were bloody brilliant. Killed By Death pushed the PA to breaking point and when the Bomber rig descended to strafe the crowd things got kicked up a notch further.
It really is impossible to get bored of seeing Lemmy, Phil and drum maestro Mickey Dee hammering out the immortal Ace Of Spades before Over-fucking-Kill destroys what's left of the crowds hearing. It's such an intense finale with the constant strobing, the Bomber rig in full flight just above the bands heads and flames from several parts of the stage. And that not to mention the genius of the multiple endings with wave after wave of feedback. See you in two years time guys!
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| Click Pictures for a bigger version
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All pictures taken by Lunah - Metal Moments | Written by Stuart
Sunday, July 19, 2009 |
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