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Bloodstock Festival 2010 - Day 3 (Sunday) @ Catton Hall, Derbyshire |
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Bloodstock Festival
Day 3 - Sunday
15.08.2010
@
Catton Hall, Derbyshire
United Kingdom
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The B.O.A. organisers sure like to keep the audience on it’s toes. Sunday brings the weekend to a close with a buffet of death metal, comedy metal, glam rock, thrash and folk metal. So let’s tuck in!
Bringing a weekend of exciting new material to an end, Furyon headline the New Blood stage with a smoking slab of hard rock, featuring Chris Cornell-esque vocals and some excellent dual guitar work. Let’s hope some labels were keeping an eye on the unsigned stage this weekend as a few offerings could easily be rocking the main stage. At least there are folk metallers Korpiklaani bringing something refreshing to the Ronnie James Dio stage. Employing frantic violin melodies that a morris dancer could get on with and vocals that would make a retired pirate feel nostalgic, these Finnish folkers have a party onstage and invite everyone. The oddity of their set is charming enough that most are happy to join.
If you’re kicking yourself for missing that pantomime in favour of a muddy, smelly metal fest then fear not! For all the camp costumes and unconvincing stage-acting you could want is here in the form of GWAR, who will entertain with equal parts primitive heavy metal and crude stage show. Everyone knows what to expect and opens wide for the torrents of red food colouring that spring from prosthetic penises and severed stuntman limbs. It’s just entertainment folks.
Industrially heavy hooks and stony vocals are the building bricks of a Gojira set and tracks like ‘Vacuity’ are on their way to becoming classics, but today the band seem to be lacking something in stage presence. The sound and performance are technically brilliant and there is very little to dislike about this band, there’s just some spark missing.
Opeth fanatics will no doubt be staring in wonder as the usually casual Mikael Akerfeldt takes to the stage in full leathers and aviator sunglasses, but Bloodbath’s appearance on the Bloodstock main stage is something of a special occasion. The raw death metal band have selected certain festivals at which to make their return to the stage and Bloodstock must have felt like a natural choice (especially since their drummer and vocalist were passing through on the Friday anyway). Row after row of metal horns are thrown up worshipfully to greet the Swedish beasts, who reply with a barrage of calculated chaos. We all know that Akerfeldt has a Jurassic roar and that Axenrot was born to drum blast beats, so to see them at work here is to see them in their element.
What were we saying about keeping the audience on their toes? After a day of some very heavy music, once Cannibal Corpse have finished brutalising the (already brutalised) masses with the fastest, most inscrutable death metal set of the weekend, Bloodstock pulls the old switcheroo and introduce Twisted Sister! Actually these glam rockers bring a smile to the faces of young and old with an energy that belies the weight of all those years. OK, so every song has a chorus which features the song title at least three times, but perhaps that sort of simplistic repetition is just the remedy for the ear-pounding brain-scrambling metal that preceded. After all, “If the shirt fits, wear it”, which is just what Twisted Sister do with grin-inducing classics like ‘I Wanna Rock’. Marred by technical problems and shitty weather, Bloodstock 2010 was saved by some legendary performances from the eclectic lineup. |
Reviewed by Mike Gilpin
Photography by Gobinder Jhitta
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Festival Reviews 
