The Man in the Cock-costume will lead us! Rockharz Day 3

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Searching for the first parts? Find Day 1 and Day 2 here!

Welcome to the Rockharz report part 3! Unbelievable how much I’ve already written about this festival and I’ve only gotten to the second half of the upcoming reports.

Even more amazing is the awesome support of you guys out there! Insane! Who would’ve thought that my thoughts on this festival would be interesting to so many of you?

But enough talking, let’s get down to business 😉

Thanks, once again, to the talented lightinmirror.de for the pictures! I hope you guys out there enjoy them just as much as I do!

To the guys who brought their ducks to the festival, let me tell you: I like you!

Pressure makes Diamonds

On this festival Friday, I had a lot going on. As you were probably able to piece together, i had a good number of interviews scheduled for this festival which will be published here in August. What you may not know is that each interview needs good preparation and a capable organization once you’re at the festival. At Rockharz there was however one pressing issue: How do you reach people when the telephone network sucks?

In the previous years the telecommunication companies put up an extra cell phone tower to aide the network, but for some reason they couldn’t be convinced to do it this year too (looking at you Telekom, Vodafone, O2 and co..). One might say that you don’t need to call anyone while you’re at a festival, but for me it’s absolutely essential to be able to communicate properly with bands and promoters. My phone did show a good reception but that’s only worth so much when more than 20.000 people are logged into the same network cell that’s not prepared for this kind of traffic. Communicating via SMS did help and it worked somehow, but it really showed our dependency on our modern technology. The hope remains that the companies will be more prone to aide in this matter next year.

Apart from all the technical issues, it was a wonderfully sunny day even though it was still quite cold on which I had three interviews.

It was finally one of those days on which you didn’t have to worry about the weather so much.

Let me tell you, one lesson from this festival for me is that I really need to pack a windbreaker jacket or something like that. It was so windy all the time! If I hadn’t caught Covid during the festival, I certainly would’ve had a cold afterwards!

Highlights, Highlights, Highlights

On this very Friday, I had an early musical start! The second band of the day, KAMBRIUM from Helmstedt, were already my first highlight of the day. It was my first time seeing them in their current line-up with their new drummer and it was an absolute joy, as always! Despite them being the second band of the day, a lot of people were on the infield celebrating with them. The set, which was a good mix of their songs, especially from their latest album Synthetic Era, was a lot of fun! The fans were ecstatic and as a thank you the band were gifted pink underpants in the size 6-super-mega-XL that said „Kambrium“ on the back during their signing session. It remains a mystery how they correctly guessed the correct size for guitarist Maxi…

During the afternoon, I didn’t really get to see any bands because of how my interviews were scheduled. I’ll definitely have to think of another strategy in order to be able to see more bands. In any case, I was happy to make it in time for JINJER. This Ukrainian band just dominates the stage and it’s insane how much power their vocalist Tatiana shows! I anticipated this band from Lwiw to not make it to the festival due to the war in Ukraine. Due to that it was all the more amazing to get to see them play.

After JINJER, it was time for some Folk Metal presented by FINNTROLL. In the Venn diagram of corpse paint and Lord of the Rings cosplay they are settled right in the overlapping middle. The Finnish band is famous for their weirdly entertaining way of making music and it’s always a party. Whoever is able to stand still or remain seemingly untouched by that, is just a psychopath!

If Finnish Folk Metal isn’t your cup of tea, then you’ll probably enjoy AT THE GATES all the more. These members of the Goteborg school are likely not for everyone, but I enjoy good Melodic Death Metal and AT THE GATES are just that! To be able to just sit on the ground and watch them really brought me back to my beginnings in the Metal scene!

The biggest highlight of the day however, at least for me, were ENISFERUM. I just love this band and to see them live again after all this time really was a „Come to Jesus“ moment for me. The last album Thalassic wasn’t really my thing (I’m a One Man Army girl), but hearing songs like Andromeda and Rum, Women, Victory live really gave me a new outlook on the album.

The atmosphere in the audience was incredible. As it should, there was a good pit going on. This pit was encouraged by front man Petri who picked out one particular member of the audience and said: „The man in the cock costume will lead us!“. I laughed so hard. Even though ENSIFERUM played for over an hour, it wasn’t nearly enough! Seems like I will go to one of their concerts in the near future!

After this amazing gig, it was time for STEEL PANTHER. I want to be honest here: I’ve thought long and hard if and what I should write about this. On a musical level, excluding lyrics, it was quite good. Nevertheless, it’s a mystery to me how a festival, and in general a scene, which I always perceived to be open-minded and tolerant, is able to give a stage to racist and misogynistic lyrics. I was just disgusted by that. Needless to say, I hated the entire ordeal. In my opinion, songs like Asian Hookers or All I Wanna Do Is Fuck (Myself Tonight) are neither funny nor entertaining. Even less funny to me is the request for women to expose themselves to the band.

The whole truth however is that the audience went totally batshit insane. I haven’t seen anything like it in quite a while. People were undressing themselves, screaming and there was an army of crowd surfers coming towards the stage. Apparently, my opinion on the music wasn’t shared among the majority of people and that’s totally legitimate. It remains to be questioned whether this is ample cause for people, mostly women, to undress. Despite all this, being able to undress freely and without prejudice as a woman is part of gender equality, at least for me.

If you like American-style insanity, then I can only recommend this band. Personally, I hope I never have to see them ever again on stage!

The rest of the evening was quite uneventful. Both ASP and RUNNING WILD are bands that can’t quite capture me anymore as they would’ve done a couple of years ago and because of that I kind of shut down in a way. This was also due to my exhaustion. At the end of the RUNNING WILD set, I had been at the festival for more than 12 hours…

Since THE 69 EYES aren’t really my thing anyway, I decided to head home „early“ and to get more sleep in preparation for Day 4.

And that was Day 3. Time really races sometimes! Don’t miss the report on Day 4 which will be posted in the next couple of days!