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Bloodstock Festival 2010 - Day 1 (Friday) @ Catton Hall, Derbyshire |
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Bloodstock Festival
Day 1 - Friday
13.08.2010
@
Catton Hall, Derbyshire
United Kingdom
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Actually Bloodstock takes the initiative and starts on Thursday evening, with a couple of acts on the second stage to give everyone a taste of what’s to come. The fun-loving Hospital of Death get the party atmosphere going with speedy melodic metal and 80’s style vocals, while Desecration show us the more extreme side of the fest (blast beats up the khazi) and cutting edge humour (‘Mutilated Genitalia’) with some hardcore Welsh Cannibal Corpse-style death.
The main stage kicks off on Friday morning with a couple of British bands in Snakebite, and Black Spiders, whose accessible hard rock injects some adrenaline into the cloudy atmosphere. With thunder and rain quickly amending the festival’s dubious name (which would seem to have more to do with horse-breeding than metal) to ‘Mudstock’, Friday the 13th’s lineup looks to soothe the sodden punters with some of the darkest music of the weekend. Hence the painted faces of Gorgoroth, who take the crowd on a runaway mine-train ride through a dark landscape of black metal complete with strangled vocals and drilling riffs.
When you see someone on stage wielding that plasticky freak of instruments, the ‘keytar’, you expect to hear power metal before long. There is no disappointment in the light-hearted set that Sonata Arctica play to try and wash the taste of all the black metal from the ears of the more reserved audience members. There are a more power ballads than you can shake a Fisher Price keyboard at, and even a yodelling interlude from the energetic vocalist Tony Kakko.
Meanwhile the ‘New Blood’ of the unsigned stage are keeping things heavy. Mancunian metallers Betraeus show some modern-sounding industrial metal in the vein of Strapping Young Lad, setting a fast pace of tight riffing for a professional-sounding 30 minutes.
It is definitely the main event when the two heavyweights Opeth and Meshuggah take the stage back to back. Both play complex and challengingly extreme music, but both have broken free of any obscure cult status to become lauded and hyped contemporaries in their fields. Opeth in particular have now choked colleges, universities and shopping malls with shirt-wearing converts and are taking their merchandising to Iron Maiden levels with branded leather jackets and g-strings. Times have changed.
Unfotunately Meshuggah’s hearts don’t really seem to be in it and technical issues give their set an unsure feeling. Don’t get us wrong, the Swedish maelstrom don’t put a beat out of place, but the atmosphere just doesn’t quite click until the closing track, the always stirring industrial ‘Straws Pulled At Random’. Opeth seem right at home and as confident as superstars, opening with the quiet prog of ‘Windowpane’ from 2003’s Damnation record followed by the beast of metallic excellence that is ‘The Lotus Eater’. Despite Mikael Akerfeldt bantering on like a fishwife between songs, the Opeth of 2010 are a progressive death metal machine who may have lost some of the natural beauty their sound had when it was more organic. The peak of emotion in this set is a cover of Rainbow’s ‘Catch the Rainbow’, in tribute to Ronnie James Dio who was meant to sing tonight with Heaven & Hell. This song is a great choice and they make it sound their own without changing the essence at all. Akerfeldt stands guitar-less (a rare sight) and sings in his most soulful voice, pulling the heart strings of all present. Opeth: the same band they were a few years ago? Not exactly. An amazing band? Yes. |
Reviewed by Mike Gilpin
Photography by Gobinder Jhitta
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Festival Reviews 
