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I'm back from Bloodstock, having survived a day of rain and mud, and mercifully being offered an early return tonight from ironlord rather than having to stay in the tent another night. Hopefully I'll find time for a fuller review tomorrow.

Bloodstock Open Air 2007

I'll try and keep this short for a change, since nobody except me cares about what I thought of each individual band. Several things occurred to me though, and these are they:

Firstly, the scene is very, very musically incestuous, and rarely is it demonstrated as starkly as over the last weekend. The first well-known band of the festival was Firewind, a power metal act led by Gus G. Gus has played for a few bands, one of which was Fredrik Nordström's Dream Evil, who played on Saturday. They were followed by Sabbat, featuring one Andy Sneap, who was the producer on the last 'proper' album by Thursday's headliners Testament (currently featuring Nick Barker of Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir 'fame'). Just after Sabbat came Arch Enemy, who were welcoming back guitarist Christopher Amott after an 18 month absence, during part of which a certain Gus G. was filling in for him. Arch Enemy's 'Wages of Sin' album was mixed by Andy Sneap, and produced by the aforementioned Fredrik Nordström. It also bears artwork by a guy called Niklas Sundin, whose other job is playing guitar in Dark Tranquillity. They performed on the Friday night, just after Nevermore who've also worked with Andy Sneap. Dark Tranquillity's singer Mikael Stanne also used to be the singer for In Flames, who closed the festival on Saturday night.

Jeeez.

Another thing I spotted is that while it wasn't really a case of my worst fears coming true, the presence of more well-known bands at this festival meant the average IQ was a little lower than at previous Bloodstocks. There was a small but significant amount of childish behaviour going on which irritated a few people, not least the security who seemed to be kept quite busy on the final night.

It also occurred to me that this was a festival largely of bands I was into 4 to 8 years ago. In particular, it was good to see In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, and Lacuna Coil in this context, and it's encouraging to see that good music paired with perseverance pays off in the end.

The performances were much as I expected, with just a few notable exceptions. In Flames were better than I hoped, mostly because when playing live the new songs sound more like the old songs. This is probably because they don't have Daniel Bergstrand's appalling production job destroying it. Anders Friden's vocals are the weak point here though, veering randomly between his monotone rasp and his monotone Jonathan Davis whine, with occasional bursts of his monotone death metal growl. Arch Enemy played well, although they committed one unforgivable sin. When your mostly average back catalogue luckily contains possibly the greatest metal riff of the last 10 years, it doesn't make sense to have one of the two guitarists standing around not bothering to play it, making it the most inaudible part of your set. FFS. Sabbat were decent enough as usual, although they really do only have one riff. Martin's slightly hypocritical rants were funny too - paraphrased as "Intolerance and prejudice are the source of many of the world's problems. And, I hate Christians, all of them." Lacuna Coil were slightly underwhelming, focusing mostly on the new material at the expense of the old. Unfortunately most of the new material involves playing a Korn-style percussive one-note rhythm part, with Cristina warbling in Middle Eastern fashion over it. At least three songs started out that way, which is a bit ridiculous. Still, for years I've been wondering why nobody plays 'Daylight Dancer' in clubs, which is a great track by them that you never hear, but they opened their encore with it, thus redeeming my preference.

Finally, I thought Dark Tranquillity were absolutely amazing. I wasn't expecting much because I don't think of them as primarily a live band, but I didn't see anyone else with as much stage presence over the entire weekend. I think they were just happy to be there on their first UK festival appearance, and it showed. I can appreciate some people were disappointed at not hearing anything off Projector, but when you have 60 minutes to play, 8 high quality albums, and a fairly new one to promote, you're not going to get to hear everything you want.

Other assorted highlights include introducing erishkigal to darkwaveart and being accused of not actually knowing the former, seeing l0stxstar have a different man with her every 2 hours or so (bad girl!), random people shouting "THE DARK PROJECT!!" at me, the fur-clad warlord singing while standing on his car roof, and Allan complaining about absolutely everything. :)

Same time next year, probably.

(PS. Totally unrelated, but "Sleeping Death" by Forest Of Shadows is the ultimate epic doom metal track. Such a shame they're not more well known, but I guess playing 17 minute doom songs is unlikely to be the best touring material.)

EDIT: YouTube link added to the last paragraph there. ironlord especially should take a look. It's almost scary to think that our lives are being documented on the global internet barely a day after each event.