INFERNO FESTIVAL 2017 – Day one #2 – Rockefeller & John Dee
- Posted on 14-04-2017
Helheim enters the stage at Rockefeller, greeting a medium sized audience that is only going to grow during their performance. The second the band starts to play, they establish their presence as a tight band that knows exactly what they are doing. Songs like "Dualitet og Ulver" and "Baklengs mot intet" sounded especially nice and gave the people that watched an extra good time. The band seemed tight as always, and they had a good control of their stage presence. One would come to expect that from these guys by now, and it is nice that they deliver such solid shows. Melodic, yet somewhat primitive. Absolutely an interesting blend that Helheim has mastered quite nicely!
Down at John Dee, Panzerfaust, brought a dark, atmospheric and brutal show to a completely packed arena. The first thing you notice with this band is how enormous their vocalist is. That sets the atmosphere from the get go, and the band definetly delivered on it through their music as well! The music were dark and atmospheric, and the vocals were dark and brutal to an extreme degree. Maybe not the most technical music, but that isn’t what this band is aiming for anyway. They captured the room with their occult image, and it totally worked. The audience seemed almost mezmerised by the cultish tension in the room. John Dee was definetly the right stage for this band as well, because of the vibe they were going for. A+ for effort, performance and music!
Do you like Black Metal? Do you like Venom? Well, this year, Inferno managed to book Venom Inc. whic is two thirds of Venom. They are basically Venom without Chronos, and that is just fine. Venom is rock n’ roll, and not really that much more. The audience seemed to like what they saw, even if it was a somewhat mediocre attempt to recreate the magic of one of the first extreme metal bands ever. The truth is that by today’s standards, Venom (inc) is a completely uncontroversial band, and at that point, there is not much left of the band’s meaning. The performance was ok, and the band was tight enough, but the musical material is just not that interesting.
Destruction is probably one of the tightest thrash bands that are still around. They had such a great control of their audience and their material, that it wouldn’t even matter if their music was horrible. Now, with that being said: Their music is pretty much as good as thrash metal gets, so this was just a win all over the board! Rockefeller’s audience seemed to really enjoy the show that these old timers gave, and it was with good reason. The show was basically a glorious showcase of what thrash metal was always meant to sound and look like. It is easy to appreciate when the old schoolers still give a damn about their music and their fans, and in Destruction’s case, this was obvious!
From (some of) the guys that brought you Agalloch, here is Pillorian, a band that pretty much picks up the mantle and carries on the legacy of the Cascadian Black Metal genre. The music was wonderfully performed for a club sized audience on John Dee, and this definetly sounded like what you’d come to expect from the US bands (the good ones). Atmospheric and lifelike are two very describing words for the journey that these artists brought their audience on. Let’s all hope this band continues down the path they have started.
And then there is Carcass. If you want old school Death Metal, then these guys will definetly be the guys to check out. On the other hand, you don’t really like old school Death Metal if you haven’t listened to these guys already anyway. Carcass gave an incredibly tight show that will definetly stay in the minds of their fans in the audience for a long time. These guys shows with their performances that the old school is just as relevant as the new school, and that it can be just as brutal. They also had the most interesting light show of the day and the coolest backdrop of the festival so far, so extra points for effort. Their setlist was close to perfection and the performances themselves were amazingly good. It is for the best that this band never hangs it up on their fans, if this is how they perform forever.