Hot, Hotter, Rockharz – The Third Festival Day

Zur deutschen Version geht es hier.

In case, you missed it, find Day 1 and Day 2 here.

All good things come in threes! This seemed to be somehow the motto of the third day of the festival, which had a lot to offer. Besides heat and lots of sunshine, a lot of hot music was performed on the festival stages. Read below what exactly I mean by that.

But first things first! Huge thanks to lightinmirror.de for the amazing pictures!

Friday, as we all know, is the day when almost all new albums and many singles are released. Based on this, it can not really surprise anyone that some bands presented themselves with new material that day.

The Heavy Metal vertical starters ALL FOR METAL around singer Tim „Tetzel“ Wagner and Antonio Calanna made the beginning for me. Their brilliant battle anthems, such as Born in Valhalla or the self-titled song All For Metal, were outstandingly suitable to wake up all those who were not quite awake yet (including me!). Musically the band doesn’t leave any doubts where the journey is going: MANOWAR as inspiration are obvious here. The brilliant melodies are stylishly mixed here with Tetzel’s booming voice and Antonio’s ability to hit many tonal high points in a perfect way. With so much concentrated metal power, it’s also no wonder that all the records of the debut album Legends, which were brought along, were sold out enormously fast! But don’t worry, the album is still available for order!

However, the costumes, which were also very obviously influenced by MANOWAR, didn’t really meet my taste. Especially the fact that they put a couple of women in just those costumes on stage for mere aesthetic satisfaction made the whole thing seem a bit cheap and clumsy. But in the context of the first album you can still experiment a bit and have a certain phase of discovery!

The line-up continued with BURNING WITCHES. This Heavy Metal band around frontwoman Laura Guldemond literally tore up the stage for me! Their current album The Dark Tower was already playing non-stop in my rotation in the run-up to the festival! But nothing could have prepared me for the live power of this quintet. Especially the song Unleash the Beast struck a chord with me. Let me tell you, nothing is as wonderful as a self-confident and talented woman and if you have five of them right on stage, then it must be GOOD!

As said at the beginning, all good things come in threes! The Rockharz booking team probably thought so too and completed the Heavy Metal afternoon with the Swedes from BLOODBOUND. It was also a release day for BLOODBOUND, because on this day their 10th studio album called Tales from the North was released. You could literally feel their joy about it and so you couldn’t help but join their energy. While the sun just made its way in the firmament and slowly but surely shone in the faces of the band, it was just the perfect (intermediate) conclusion of a wonderful power metal afternoon!

But it was time for a change of pace and SEPTICFLESH gratefully took over this task. It was the first time for me to experience them live (consciously) and I was really annoyed that I didn’t do it earlier! The Greeks around singer Seth Antoniou had an uncanny stage presence, which was only enhanced by the music. In general, their special mixture of death and gothic metal elements is already a unique selling point, but I found it enormously admirable how you can deliver such a great show despite the now 30°C heat! I’ll have to watch that again in the future!

The program continued with DESTRUCTION. This band is already cult due to their long existence and the fact that they are one of the most successful Thrash Metal bands in Germany. But I absolutely can’t get into Thrash Metal to save my life. No matter how good, no matter how bad, it just doesn’t appeal to me. Big sorry to Schmier and his guys, but this gig I stopped listening after three songs. But I’m sure there were many joyful fans in the audience who enjoyed this gig in Sahara conditions!

The most anticipated gig of the day, from my point of view, however, was that of EQUILIBRIUM. The reasons for this were manifold: a new single, a new video and – most important – the (live) premiere of the new singer Fabian Getto. 

Two hours before the gig, the video for the new single Shelter had gone online and surely some, like me, had already listened to the single a few times that morning. The expectations were enormously high for me. Whoever makes such a secret around everything, that not even a sliver of gossip reaches me, raises the expectations enormously high! 

The first surprise were two pairs of Taiko drums on stage. The direction of the show was therefore quickly clear: a statement is being made here today! As a prelude, the now German-Israeli-Norwegian group around guitarist and songwriter René Berthiaume also straight went to performing the new song. One may like to disagree here, but I felt this was exactly the right move in the sense that of course everyone present had a respective expectation of the band and the new singer. By showcasing the new song at the beginning of the gig, Fabian had the opportunity to present himself in his own right as an outstanding singer without having to fear the direct comparison with Robse, which awaits him anyway. The set was unfortunately only 45min long, so there was no room for really deep excursions into the band’s discography, but despite everything you could hear songs like Renegades – A Lost Generation, Born to be Epic and Blut im Auge, which in combination I find a successful balance of interests. Overall, there was a band on stage that seems to be completely at peace with itself and ready for the departure into a new era.

And to the person who thought that a few fire interludes would be quite cool in the hot temperatures: May your comforter always be 5cm too short and may you always step into any nasty puddles with socks on! That didn’t work for me at all! In this respect, I also see the event team as having a responsibility. Climate change is here to stay and in the coming years the weather conditions will become more and more extreme. Care should be taken to ensure that at 30°C in the afternoon/early evening, when the sun is still shining, extra heat is not generated!

But before we get to the other bands of the day, I would like to say a few more general words about EQUILIBRIUM. For this reason, there is no general daily report today, as you are used to from my other Rockharz articles!

What everyone present could see on Rockharz Friday was without a doubt a departure into a new phase of the band, which could even be recognized visually by the Taiko drums and the lighter stage outfits. 

Shelter has an unmistakable Metalcore impact, which you can like or not. For me this song is a consequent continuation of the line the band has been following more or less since Armageddon. EQUILIBRIUM in the year 2023 means that the classic folk elements are left behind a bit, but instead they return more to the epic melodic processing that made this band so great. If you’ve listened carefully to songs like Revolution or One Folk, Shelter hasn’t surprised you beyond belief. Fabian’s voice has a kind of lightheartedness about it that I felt was missing in Revolution. In this respect, Fabian as a new singer, from my point of view, is an absolutely successful cast! Shelter is a single for all those who don’t want to miss a certain Metalcore approach in their battle anthems.

But the other side of the coin is that this new course will put the fan community in turmoil, if not divide it. For all the euphoria that the new song and also the performance at Rockharz has triggered in me, I am still cautious. With the last album Renegades, I felt that the song of the same name was so monumental because I had the feeling that we would get an album in which EQUILIBRIUM would shake up the scene and show how true, modern anthems in Metal can sound. This hope was then demolished for me and to this day Renegades is also the album from which I like the fewest songs. The album just didn’t sound properly formulated yet. 

Looking ahead to the new single and an album hopefully coming out next year, I’m inclined to think of it as a sort of transitional work that was instrumental to the stylistic evolution leading up to Shelter. I’m sure there will be people who disagree with me on that as well, but that’s okay. But you should also realize that although albums like Turis Fratyr, Sagas and Rekreatur are classics, you can’t ask a band to repeat the same thing forever. We are all human and we don’t become transcendental beings just because we happen to be on stage in front of a big audience. We evolve and for the artists this evolution is reflected in the music. I find it inconsistent to now portray Robse’s departure as the beginning of EQUILIBRIUM’s – alleged – decline. Those who are proclaiming this now probably already said the same when Robse joined the band. Did the band implode then? Did the sales of merch, tickets and records decline? No! If one leaves aside the personal, and also often enormously dramatized, sensitivities a little bit, one has exactly two possibilities: Either you wait and see if the new material does something for you personally, or you are happy about the albums that have shaped you and that you liked, but let everyone else enjoy their music. We as a metal scene always claim to be very open and tolerant and I think that the discussion about EQUILIBRIUM’s musical direction is a perfect opportunity to remind ourselves of that.

Well… From the semi-review of the single we now come back to our actual program! 

Metal has the ability to attract a lot of talented Scandinavian people. One group of such people is known as SONATA ARCTICA and what can I say? It is always a pleasure to see this band live! If I Have A Right doesn’t make your heart swell, you really need to get checked out! Furthermore, I’m happy every time I hear Fullmoon, because it was the song that brought me to the band! The fact that I was able to do an interview with them at short notice that day made the whole thing even more special, of course!

As we all know, a good Metal festival must always have two important things: Beer and songs about beer. KORPIKLAANI were responsible for the latter on this day. With songs like Ievan Polka, Beer Beer or Vodka they have conquered a firm place in the Metal scene. On this day the gig was as good as it hasn’t been for a long time!.. Rumor has it that the band arrived at the festival just before time and didn’t have a chance to help themselves to some beer. Normally I’m against excessive alcohol consumption (at least for me), but to send the poor band on stage without any alcohol is a bit inhumane… I’ll gladly take less perfection if I see more fun on stage in return. In this sense: VODKA!

But from the Finnish alcohol chants the festival came directly to Australian rock sounds, because AIRBOURNE did the honors. Although the temperatures had cooled down a bit, the atmosphere was still very hot! With fast guitars and a truly brilliant show, it was really hard not to keep up! The band played songs like Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast, Breakin‘ Outta Hell or It’s All For Rock’n’Roll. Highlight here was definitely Joel O’Keeffe, who let himself be carried through the crowd on the shoulders of a crew member and kept on playing his guitar! Ingenious!

The headliner of the third Rockharz day was ARCH ENEMY. This Melodic Death Metal band doesn’t have such a standing by sheer accident and albums like Khaos Legions or War Eternal had a great influence on my personal, musical development. Unfortunately, the performance that night didn’t convince me. The band seemed to be playing by the book and as if it was just another gig. They were just there to play, but the spark just didn’t jump for me. They did play War Eternal right away as the second song, but even that somehow didn’t save it for me. For the large crowd though, it was certainly a good headliner that gave the many fans in attendance a special highlight. 

Due to the heat that day and my busy schedule, I was really tired by then, so I didn’t watch FIRKIN anymore and went to sleep instead to be able to commit the last festival day rested!