Wacken trip, Pt 2
Aug. 15th, 2008 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkprojectThis is part two, of what looks like being 3 or 4 parts... I have to get some sleep before going to Bloodstock tomorrow!
Thursday 31st July: After getting maybe 3 or 4 hours' sleep at most, due to the various noises nearby and so on, I woke up at maybe 8am in the scorching heat. It wasn't all that bad outside, but my tent's translucent nature was letting all the sun in, and my portable digital thermometer told me it was about 40°C in there. And why do I take a thermometer with me to festivals? To be able to post sentences like that one. Either way, it was way too hot, and I had to rush to get out of the oven before I soaked everything in perspiration. Fun.
As I recall, there was virtually nothing to do this day as the bands didn't start until mid afternoon, and even most of those were uninteresting ones so Chris, Lisa, and myself decided to get on the shuttle bus back to Itzehoe and do some shopping for provisions at the Lidl we saw on the way in. This was actually quite a pleasant way to spend a few hours, wandering around in the sunshine, eating rather odd-looking foodstuffs, drinking grape juice. I still didn't have any luck finding anything alcoholic that I particularly wanted to drink though, so it was about this point where I resigned myself to staying sober for this festival. This is also where we found out that Lisa's HSBC card was refusing to work in the German cash machines, whereas mine was fine. Thus, I became our banker for the weekend.
Back at the campsite later, I remember grabbing Chris at about 6:30pm before heading off to see Negură Bunget. Negură Bunget are one of those bands I'd heard a lot about, and who in theory I should love, but upon listening to them on MySpace, failed to be convinced. So I set forth to see them in person, and it was certainly interesting. The ethnic instrumentation was out in full force, and watching the guy hammer on a suspended piece of wood with two mallets in one song was quite surreal. Their distinctive sound came across far better and more forcefully live than on record, but I still felt it lacked structure or melodic hooks. I will need to listen to them a bit more to decide whether their brand of black-folk-metal-cum-post-rock is for me.
After they vacated the stage, I vacated the area to avoid the hordes of plastic sword wielding Alestorm fans. Hasn't the whole "cheesy metal, some traditional instrumentation, and pseudo-historical lyrics" thing been done to death in the last few years? Hasn't the last drop of hypothetical milk been squeezed from that tired and withered udder? Please, make it stop. I fled to the relative safety of the 'party' stage to see Leaves Eyes; possibly the most boring female-fronted gothic metal band in existence. I tried to like them, but there's just nothing there. Liv Kristine has such an inoffensive and uneventful singing voice, and the rest of the band keep their delivery even more subdued as to not drown out the vocals. The end result is just bland song after bland song. Unfortunate.
Something else on the list of things I'd like to stop is the existence of Avenged Sevenfold; I'd hoped that they would be less annoying on stage than on record, but no, quite the opposite. Even just seeing their appearance on the big screens as I came back from Leaves Eyes made me want to punch them. GO AWAY. I wandered back at this point to the camp to attempt to find people for Iron Maiden who were on next, but ran into Lisa on the way who said everybody was already in the arena. So I turned around, and attempted to find a good spot.
This completely failed. Probably over 50,000 people were packed into that field trying to see Iron Maiden, and the stage is up the hill so you can't really see anything at the back. In the end we moved over to the side and at least got a view of one of the 3 large video screens. Everything then went according to plan: Churchill's speech came on the video screen, I shouted "I've been there!" when the black and white map of Nazi-threatened Britain flashed up, 'Aces High' kicked in as expected, I made another joke about the war to Lisa, and then proceeded to watch Iron Maiden play a flawless set of classics. It's worth noting that these classics included 'Fear of the Dark', which is out of the time period that Maiden were supposed to be picking songs from. However, 'Fear of the Dark' appears to be massive in Germany. So much so, that the tribute bands that Wacken have in the beer tents and so on played a cover version of this song. All The Time. I am not even exaggerating when I say that I think I heard 'Fear of the Dark' played 20 times while I was at Wacken. It filled my days, it haunted my nights. Anyway, after a brief chat with people around the campsite about the merits of Iron Maiden's set, it was time for bed again, early nights seeming sensible since the heat was going to wake me early anyway.
Thursday 31st July: After getting maybe 3 or 4 hours' sleep at most, due to the various noises nearby and so on, I woke up at maybe 8am in the scorching heat. It wasn't all that bad outside, but my tent's translucent nature was letting all the sun in, and my portable digital thermometer told me it was about 40°C in there. And why do I take a thermometer with me to festivals? To be able to post sentences like that one. Either way, it was way too hot, and I had to rush to get out of the oven before I soaked everything in perspiration. Fun.
As I recall, there was virtually nothing to do this day as the bands didn't start until mid afternoon, and even most of those were uninteresting ones so Chris, Lisa, and myself decided to get on the shuttle bus back to Itzehoe and do some shopping for provisions at the Lidl we saw on the way in. This was actually quite a pleasant way to spend a few hours, wandering around in the sunshine, eating rather odd-looking foodstuffs, drinking grape juice. I still didn't have any luck finding anything alcoholic that I particularly wanted to drink though, so it was about this point where I resigned myself to staying sober for this festival. This is also where we found out that Lisa's HSBC card was refusing to work in the German cash machines, whereas mine was fine. Thus, I became our banker for the weekend.
Back at the campsite later, I remember grabbing Chris at about 6:30pm before heading off to see Negură Bunget. Negură Bunget are one of those bands I'd heard a lot about, and who in theory I should love, but upon listening to them on MySpace, failed to be convinced. So I set forth to see them in person, and it was certainly interesting. The ethnic instrumentation was out in full force, and watching the guy hammer on a suspended piece of wood with two mallets in one song was quite surreal. Their distinctive sound came across far better and more forcefully live than on record, but I still felt it lacked structure or melodic hooks. I will need to listen to them a bit more to decide whether their brand of black-folk-metal-cum-post-rock is for me.
After they vacated the stage, I vacated the area to avoid the hordes of plastic sword wielding Alestorm fans. Hasn't the whole "cheesy metal, some traditional instrumentation, and pseudo-historical lyrics" thing been done to death in the last few years? Hasn't the last drop of hypothetical milk been squeezed from that tired and withered udder? Please, make it stop. I fled to the relative safety of the 'party' stage to see Leaves Eyes; possibly the most boring female-fronted gothic metal band in existence. I tried to like them, but there's just nothing there. Liv Kristine has such an inoffensive and uneventful singing voice, and the rest of the band keep their delivery even more subdued as to not drown out the vocals. The end result is just bland song after bland song. Unfortunate.
Something else on the list of things I'd like to stop is the existence of Avenged Sevenfold; I'd hoped that they would be less annoying on stage than on record, but no, quite the opposite. Even just seeing their appearance on the big screens as I came back from Leaves Eyes made me want to punch them. GO AWAY. I wandered back at this point to the camp to attempt to find people for Iron Maiden who were on next, but ran into Lisa on the way who said everybody was already in the arena. So I turned around, and attempted to find a good spot.
This completely failed. Probably over 50,000 people were packed into that field trying to see Iron Maiden, and the stage is up the hill so you can't really see anything at the back. In the end we moved over to the side and at least got a view of one of the 3 large video screens. Everything then went according to plan: Churchill's speech came on the video screen, I shouted "I've been there!" when the black and white map of Nazi-threatened Britain flashed up, 'Aces High' kicked in as expected, I made another joke about the war to Lisa, and then proceeded to watch Iron Maiden play a flawless set of classics. It's worth noting that these classics included 'Fear of the Dark', which is out of the time period that Maiden were supposed to be picking songs from. However, 'Fear of the Dark' appears to be massive in Germany. So much so, that the tribute bands that Wacken have in the beer tents and so on played a cover version of this song. All The Time. I am not even exaggerating when I say that I think I heard 'Fear of the Dark' played 20 times while I was at Wacken. It filled my days, it haunted my nights. Anyway, after a brief chat with people around the campsite about the merits of Iron Maiden's set, it was time for bed again, early nights seeming sensible since the heat was going to wake me early anyway.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-15 12:01 am (UTC)I would kill for that kind of cool weather for just a day...
no subject
Date: 2008-08-15 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-15 06:53 am (UTC)