Live Review : Bloodstock Festival 2021 - Day 4
Well it’s day 4 of the festival that never ends. I am already becoming delusional that my permeant home is in fact a canvas shelter in a field and that my adopted family are those people surrounding me. I am struggling to imagine what life was like before I entered the gates on Wednesday. My day beginning with the sludge-tastic Horse called War. With distorted guitars and murky melodies, they manage to blow away the most stubborn of hangovers. Netherhall are progtastic and sound like Marillion fronted by Francis Dunnery (formally of It Bites). Back in the New Blood stage Black Atlas are deftly combining grunge and stoner rock. The result is remarkably danceable, laced with filthy riffs and scuzzy beats. My first visit to the main stage is next for the much lauded Conjurer. This is Black Metal thoroughly deconstructed and discombobulated. Like Svalbard the day before, there is actually very little here, the magic (pun intended) is what they do with the minimal amount of riffs and notes. Conjurer build atmospheric soundscapes that lurch and then recoil. The juxtaposition between the walls of noise and then the sudden slight fragile interludes is both disorienting and all consuming. It is that constant fluctuation that makes the whole thing so enticing. A remarkable emotionally wrenching set that sets a high watermark for the rest of the day.
Terra IV is Timfy James, once the mastermind behind Hacktivist, new outfit. As you would expect he carries on the blueprint of shoving tight taught rapping over tech metal. What is surprising is how good they are for a band that is playing only its third ever show. Rap metal in the main leaves me cold, but this worked, really worked. It piqued my interest by being distinctly old skool in its approach and channelling eighties Public Enemy in its twin mic delivery. Confident, strident, and just a little divisive. Very much one of my surprises of the weekend. Buoyed by being out of my comfort zone, I decide to stick my head in at Wargasm. It sounded like a hamster being castrated to a soundtrack of shit nineties dance. I left pretty sharpish and returned to the comfortable shallows of the Sophie stage and the majestic King Goat. There, is a big theatrical, almost operatic doom. The dry ice machine is working overtime, there are church bells clanging on the backing tape and the band are all be-hooded and hidden in the shadows. It is all fairly standard commercial doom, that is until Anthony “Trim” Trimmings opens his mouth. His voice is quite simply extraordinary. A rich baritone that sounds like it belongs in a welsh male voice choir as opposed to a heavy metal band. The depth and emotional resonance of his range just adds so many layers and textures to the music it accompanies. It is truly goosebumps moments as his vocals sore into the rafters. Wonderful, quite wonderful.
Malevolence come across like a hip-hop crew doing death metal. There is a swagger and unbridled energy to their approach. Whilst they may not command the biggest or most attentive crowd, they still manage to burn off the stage. Any concerns about the legitimacy of While She Sleeps playing Bloodstock are dispelled the moment they roar into action with ‘Sleeps Society’. The reception is rapturous and there are Sleeps tops everywhere you look. With so much to prove they manage to pour the ferocity of a full headline set into their slender forty-five-minute slot. Not a second is wasted. They plough straight into ‘Anti-Social’ and then into ‘Brainwashed’ at an unrepentant pace. While She Sleeps may be utterly determined to prove that they belong on the Ronnie James stage, but they are not prepared to compromise who they are. This is fifteen years of hard work distilled into three quarters of an hour. Unrelenting and utterly unstoppable. The band cover every inch of stage, leaping over monitors and frequently jumping into the photo pit to get closer to the frantic feeding frenzy that is the crowd. Then during ‘You Are We’, Loz decides to top all that, parts the crowd Moses like and heads for the lighting tower. He scales it and hangs there, master of all that he surveys whilst a panicked sound engineer desperately tries to hang onto him. It may well be a stunt, but it sums up the raw unpredictable energy that fuels While She Sleeps. They are captivating and you simply can not take your eyes off them, mainly because you have no idea what will happen next. They finish with ‘Systematic’ and depart, but they will be back and, mark my words it will be as headliner.
I am going to hold my hands up now and say that the next paragraph will be as objective as my mum writing me a job reference. “Draconian Times” soundtracked my dissertation. Due to chronic time mismanagement on my behalf I left myself two solitary weeks to write the bugger. I holed myself up in my student bedroom, developed a coffee addiction I am yet to recover from and put one record on repeat. That record was “Draconian Times”. Having been released the year before I was head over heels in love with its Metallica meets goth aesthetic. I already knew the songs intimately and their wide screen miserabilism soothed my aching bones as I sat writing for hours and hours at a time. Twenty-five years later I can still sing you every line, play every chord (on the air guitar of course) and hit every beat. And that is what I did. I stood in that in that field, tears rolling down my cheek and screamed along with every syllable. This was my album and I was prepared to relive every sumptuous moment. Now if I was going to be less subjective, I would say that the band looked a bit bored and non-committed during the recital and that many of the latter tracks were thrown out with very little fanfare or feeling. But frankly that didn’t matter one iota to me. I was watching Paradise Lost perform an hour that I love with every bone in my body and to be honest I was going to revel in it even if the band didn’t seem as keen.
Back in Sophie and British Black Metal Leaders Winterfylleth have packed the place out. It is utterly heaving, and you have to head to the far end to get any chance of seeing the mancunian legends. They are in the bizarre situation of debuting tracks that they recorded nearly two years ago. Their seventh album, “The Reckoning Dawn” was released last year at the height of the first lockdown, therefore a full sixteen months later this is the first time they have had the chance to play material from it. We get three tracks from it including the hauntingly masterful ‘A Hostile Fate (The Wayfarer Pt. 4)’ which continues their singular quest to stretch black metal as far as it will go. You see, Winterfylleth have stripped out all the nihilism and self-loathing from black metal and instead constructed something primal but also wonderfully euphoric. They have forged it into a celebration of self and the natural origins that we all come from and in doing so have created a cinematic tour de force of bellowing guitars and pounding drums. Equally subtle and anthemic, it is quite simply a joy to behold.
Hanowar are in it for the irony. A crew of lanky streaks of piss, wearing fur and loin cloths, with a Blue Peter-esque cut out Viking longship on stuck onto the drums. They know and revel in the absurdities of metal god’s Manowar and they are prepared to have a ball pointing them all out to us. They hand out plastic swords and regularly get us to shout out “Hail” and “Kill”. They are also remarkably good fun and make you wonder how much more enjoyable the real deal would be if they weren’t so bloody po-faced? Memoriam have long since outgrown their status of being the band that grew from the ashes of Bolthrower. They have engraved their own chapter into the death metal lexicon by quite simply doing what they do incredibly well. This is Death Metal at its most basic but also its most potent. It is simple, stripped down but also highly effective. We get eleven tracks from across their four records, all delivered with minimum fuss but maximum velocity. Very much a case of getting the music to do the talking.
Yes, maybe if Corona hadn’t happened, Kreator would not have got the opportunity to headline at Bloodstock, but god, have they earnt it? Tonight, they pull out all the stops with their sole intent on showing that they are a Bonafide festival headliner as opposed to a supersub that got lucky. They achieve this with knobs on because they are magnificent from start to finish. What they have is the songs. Even if you don’t know them at the start, by the time they reach the chorus you most certainly do. They have constructed what feels like zillions of devilishly crafted numbers that have huge choruses you could get a whole airforce to land on. It is a wonderful mix of accessibility and brutality. They have skilfully concocted a setlist that manages to engage even those with only a passing interest in the German thrash legends. It is a precision engineered masterpiece full of fist pumping anthems with chantable refrains. They been through their extensive back catalogue and found every single festival friendly track that they have and played them all.
We get less chat than with Devin on the previous night but you can tell that they are utterly chuffed to be there. Mille Petrozza may not be one for grand on-stage pronouncement but he is still a dynamic and infectious frontman. He stands stridently on centre stage, part bassist, part singer and part demonic conductor. He is very much the black heart at the centre of Kreator and it is his enthusiastic personality that pours off the stage. It is a frantic set as seventeen tracks and umpteenth backdrops are burned through in their allotted hour and a quarter. Dani filth lends his unique screeches to ‘Betrayer’ and we end with pyro a plenty with ‘Pleasure to Kill’. As ever Mille’s parting shot is “the Kreator will return” and after that, you better believe they will!
I just love Metal. I love it all. The bombastity of symphonic, the brutality of death, the rousing choruses of power, the nihilistic evil of black, the pounding atmospherics of doom, the whirling time changes of prog, the faithful familiarity of trad, the other worldlyness of post, the sheer unrefined power of thrash. I love it all!