Metal Reviews

Which bands are you referring to?

Seeing Warthane and Sacrifist on Thursday. Kind of curious since I've never heard either band's material before, we'll see how it goes.

Just got back from the Green Man festival. Awesome stuff, despite finding my friends profoundly irritating.

God dethroned Oct 1st
Austrian Death Machine Oct 7th

I can't make it to see Obituary because I don't have a job yet.....

Might go see Agalloch and Indian in Chicago on 9/12, assuming I can get one of my deadbeat friends to make the trip.

Motorhead in a week!

lucky...

Loudest fucking show you will ever see. I saw them a couple years ago, in a fairly big theater type venue. I was way in the back (where the bar was) for most of the show, and I went completely 100% deaf towards the end of their set. Awesome live band.

Don't worry, I'm a BM fan. I think it was more to do with the big festival setting. I guess 'doesn't work' is too strong of a statement, I should have said something like 'less entertaining'.

Most of if you can't sing along to, nor can you really headbang or mosh effectively to blastbeats and constant time changes. A lot of it relies on production, mood and atmosphere. So at a festival with 70,000+ people you simply get a larger and more engaged crowd for bands like Hammerfall and Testament as compared to Enslaved or Borknagar. Even though I would rather listen to Enslaved than Hammerfall, I had more fun watching Hammerfall live.

An all-BM show at a smaller venue I think would just be a different atmosphere; you would be pre-disposed to simply absorb the music.

Going to The Gates of Slumber CD release show in Indy on 9/26. Hoping the rest of the album kicks as much as that first track they released. I'll tell them you said hi Ken.

i saw that the red chord were coming to Arizona and I was like ayy!! Then the lineup was Gwar and Job for a cowboy and my joy abruptly ended

That's awesome yet worrysome at the same time. My ears are still fucked up from when I was sick a few weeks back, not to mention I was right up front when I saw Kreator/Exodus and my ears hurt like hell afterwards.

Oh well, no matter how my ears feel afterwards, I am seeing goddamn Motorhead.

I see what you're saying (was there this year as well, actually), but I think part of the problem is that the set times weren't particularly ideal this year for a lot of bm bands. Personally, I don't mind the no singing along and very little crowd engagement, since I really don't expect that at a bm show. But for me seeing Vreid, for example, at noon kind of took away from the show a little (though in some ways it was good because it meant I wasn't totally wasted for the show, as I would have been had it been at midnight). It didn't really bother me that I was the only one around my area belting out the lyrics to Speak Goddamnit or anything like that. I enjoyed the show as much as I did more engaged bands anyways. Last year I saw Nifelheim at Wacken and to me that was far more ideal since they played after sunset and even though they were in the tent it was kind of nice since there weren't that many people there. Most bm bands I prefer just to stand back, enjoy the show and headbang rather than get as engaged/involved in a pit as I would for a thrash or death metal band, anyways, no matter if its a festival or regular show.

Its just a matter of getting different things from different shows. Even though the crowd wasn't as engaged as in the Running Wild shows, fex., Vreid was still up there with the RW show as my favourite show at Wacken this year just because I loved the music. I wouldn't have called it less entertaining, because I equally enjoyed watching both bands. The only thing I would have changed would have been the time of the set.

Anyways, that's my take on festivals and bm bands vs. other bands as live acts at festivals.

Skoal

I've never seen a BM act in an open air festival setting but I can't imagine it working that well. Then again, I don't think any open air festival performance can touch a proper club gig.

Not seen that much live BM at all, but it can be awesome. Satyricon doing Mother Earth as their encore must rank as one of the best live performances of a song I've witnessed. A real goosebumps moment.

Saw Thrice, Protest the Hero and a bunch of local bands at a festival last night. It was very dusty. Of the local bands, some were incredibly bad (Theset. Jesus Christ what a terrible band.), but there were some awesome ska bands (The Kiltlifters might have been the best group of the day, Rude City Riot). Protest the Hero were awesome. Rody was lol. I saw him in the crowd and talked to him before the show and he was cool and normal, then on stage he went on ridiculous rants about how a guy from Finland called them emo fags and how he hates kids between almost every song. Highlight was him pointing at a crowdsurfer in a The Devil Wears Prada shirt and saying they suck, because they do. Thrice opened with four of their best songs from Vheissu and earlier albums (Dust of Nations, can't remember the names of the others, Hold Fast Hope and Your Eyes are the lyrics of two of the other songs that stand out to me, I think one of them is called Trust) so after that the rest of their set was kind of underwhelming.

lol, I should see Protest The Hero next time they come around.

They're sweet. I forgot to mention that Arif got hit in the face by an egg and they just laughed it off, which was great.

PPR, Destroy Destroy Destroy, Balboa, Some Hardcore Band, Anal Cunt

I caught the end of PPR's set. They seemed fun. They had a fuzzed-out, heavy, groovy thing going on, and then they had punky bits.

Destroy Destroy Destory - Like reviews on this site have said, they weren't breaking new ground, but they were fun.

Balboa - Vocals were bad. Only one member of the band (the bad vocalist) showed up in corpse-paint, which seemed odd. They had cool moments in some songs, but overall...not for me.

Some Hardcore Band - I felt bad for them because they were having some serious issues setting up. And their singer seemed like a kind of a dick. Also, they should lose the boring breakdowns.

Anal Cunt - Began by Seth Putnam being too drunk to get onto the stage by himself. He then whipped the microphone chord into the audience and followed up by throwing the mic stand at us. Later he had to stop playing for a while to go take a shit. They also got rather upset by people heckling them and throwing cups at the stage. Something which I thought they would be used to by now, or wouldn't mind. Seth challenged the offending parties to a fight, but nobody owned up to it. Also, their drummer got VERY PISSED on one occasion. This all could have been performance art though, I have no idea.

Oh my god. I'm still not done laughing from reading this. So did the rest of the band continue without him or was it like an intermission?

Just got back from a gig with local hardcore/metalcore bands. God, it was so fucking boring. Breakdown after breakdown, and the crowd ate it up.

You should've ran up on stage, stolen a guitar and Hammerfall-ed their asses off.