Fuming mouth are a dark twisted entity slamming together sludge and doom and then shoving it into a blender with a big handful of unrepentant crust punk. They crackle with raw energy and hum with disenfranchised righteous anger. Their riffs brim with bile and belligerence and it has an unconformity to it that feels refreshing and different. It's like they know the rules of metal but have decided that they don't quite apply to them. Instead, they are using it well-worn clichés to tread a different path and that sense of individualistic endeavour shines through.
Read MoreLast year's Damnation Festival was pretty much perfect and I'm sure that would be the opinion of almost everyone. The single dissenting voice you would find are probably the organisers as the uncomfortable fact is whilst it was a faultless affair for those attending, it just about scraped itself to breakeven and another year of negative growth would potentially spell the end of this miraculous experiment in putting extreme metal in an arena. Needless to say the thousand plus tickets that flew out the door on the Monday after last year's event showed that there definitely was a market for witnessing insular bands in a widescreen environment.
Read MoreThere is something ornamental and ritualistic about an album playing in full. Usually sets are a Russian roulette of endless probabilities. For a band with a healthy back catalogue there is an existential dread that the next song is either going to be one that you don't like or even worse the dreaded "one from the new album”. A playback of a legendary album takes away all of that uncertainty and instead becomes a musical installation, an art form frozen in time. You are plunged into a warm bath of familiarity where you know exactly what's coming next. This comfort blanket approach is especially true of albums that are very much of their time or define a specific moment, era or movement. Hearing those songs again in exact order that you would have listened to them on vinyl/CD/minidisk/personal stereo (delete as applicable) offers a gateway into the past allowing the listener to reconnect with their younger selves.
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And just like that it is Sunday and the big yellow ball of heat in the sky is doing its best job to burn us all to buggery. It's 2022 all over again, including those joyful yelps from the crowd when any cloud cover is forthcoming. Needless to say everything is all a little more laid back today as a collective lethargy emerges from the heat.
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It's raining. Not much rain, but it's still raining. Cauldron kick things off in the Sophie stage. Those who hope the name conjures up sword and sorcery inspired power metal will be bitterly disappointed. This is classic early-era metal core with an emphasis firmly on the core. Hailing from Birmingham they have gone for the nostalgia vote hard.
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Friday beckons fourth with almost perfect Festival weather. Warm, but also enough breeze and cloud cover to stop the place becoming a perpetual oven. Friday may well be packed with many musical gems, but really it is all about one band, who aren’t even playing, Motörhead. Today is the day that Lemmy becomes a permanent part of Bloodstock lore, with a proportion of his ashes placed on site in a specially commissioned bust. The ceremony to invest the final resting place for some of his remains is an emotional affair.
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In years to come, 2024 will be known as the year Bloodstock came of age. It's previously spacious set up for the first time ever feels consistently busy. The step up to a stable and constant 20,000 capacity feels very obvious in the sheer amount of people around the place at any given point, but it is still dealt with with Bloodstock’s usual level of finesse and honesty. This was the year that Bloodstock no longer felt like a small concern.
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A music journalist’s role demands absolute objectiveness and critical distance. Well bugger that for a game of soldiers as Sunday night belches forth my singular favourite band in the entire universe, Liverpudlian gods of grind, Carcass.
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The UK might well have invented heavy metal and the states may well have popularised it, but it is our brethren in the frozen North of Scandinavia that have done most to keep it alive over the preceding decades.
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Buried away at the foot of Friday’s schedule is one of the finest purveyors of classic rock that you will come across. Haxan are another trio that proves that a threesome is always more fun.
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A modern criticism of Bloodstock is where is the power metal? Well in the shape of Unleash the Archers and Beast in Black it is well and truly in the house. Choruses you could house the royal airforce on? Check. Keyboard flourishes that would make Liberarchie question the level of decadence? Check. Obsessions with fantasy and a tendency to hit the dressing up box hard? Check.
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So what is progressive power metal? It is when you dial down the emotion and dial up the emotion. Evergrey are kings of this particular sub-genre and have carved a long and illustrious career creating complex melodic music that simultaneously manages to be accessible and structurally challenging.
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What better way to end the weekend than with authentic Nordic death metal royalty. Formed in 1991 by mainstay duo Satyr and Frost, they have managed to avoid the controversy that has dogged their peers. They have achieved this by concentrating on the music instead of the gimmicks surrounding it.
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In the mind’s eye, a one-man band is Bert from Mary Poppins with a Bass Drum on his back and two cymbals tied to his thighs. However Hellripper are a one man band and that man is Aberdeen wonderkid James McBain. Last year’s “Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags” was an extraordinary record.
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If you played every record ever made simultaneously, it still wouldn’t light a candle to the eclectic bonkerness that is French innovator Gautier Serre. Igorrr circumnavigates every genre that you think of, but resolutely fit in none.
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When I first started attending Bloodstock Open Air in the late noughties, its USP re headliners was to give us continental big hitters that, in any other circumstance would not command a large stage in this cottage. So we had Children of Bodom, Immortal, Behemoth (who were still a relatively small concern in those days) and Emperor bewitch us with headliner extravagances when their pulling power on raiiny Tuesday in Stoke was no more than 500 people.
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The normal trajectory for a folk metal band is to start with metal and then drift towards folk. Korpiklanni turned that on its head. In the late 90s, they were a Sami folk music collective playing the guttural sounds of the indigenous Finnish people.
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Comedy metal has become a complex and multi-versed beast. There is the Python-esque absurdity of Evil Scarecrow, There is the Benny Hill revivalist movement that is Steel Panther (“look tits he he he he) and there is the children's birthday party in hell vibe of Party Cannon. Raised by owls are not taking the piss, they are far more astute than that.
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Now Celtic punk mainstays, Flogging Molly may well seem a little bit of a left of centre choice. But that's before you realise that lead vocalist and founder Dave King used to ply his trade in Fastway, what Fast Eddie did next after Lemmy kicked him out of Motorhead.
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There are those who say the number 13 is unlucky, well it ain't here as it's giving you the eventual appearance of the much touted Clutch. They have sat at the top of the Bloodstock wish list for over a decade. It might have taken a while to get them onto the site but believe me it will be worth it.
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