Audiovisual Ohlsen Overkill: ROADBURN FESTIVAL 2019 • THE DAY BEFORE: Ignition / Wednesday, April 10th

2019-04-18

ROADBURN FESTIVAL 2019 • THE DAY BEFORE: Ignition / Wednesday, April 10th

- Head first into the bloody rabbit hole -

Great Grief

Ok, remembering Wednesday last week. Piece of cake, right? Yet it feels already like an eternity ago with so much sensory input between then and now. And I'm sick, which besides making me an even slower thinker / writer than usual layers all my memories in a feverish haze.

But let's try it:

I got up, had my first breakfast, and then I listened to a couple of albums in my car:

DruturuM - Druturum V: Wayfarer
Dylan Carlson - Conquistador
Earth - Hex: Or printing In The Infernal Method
Motorpsycho - The California EP
Motorpsycho - The Crucible
Motorpsycho - The Tower
Mythic Sunship - Another Shape Of Psychedelic Music
DruturuM - Druturum: Wayfarer
(Yes again, because come on, I just finished the mix on Tuesday night. Please check it out if you're in for some Danelectro drone!)

Second breakfast, lunch and refuelling inbetween and suddenly I arrived at a sweet little sheep farm fifteen car minutes away.

sheep everywhere...

view from my window

I was early enough for a little pre-ignition nap - or at least an attempt at that. Nice how the sunrays were shining right onto my face now.

Which brings me to the subject of weather, which I will mention here once then and put a cloak of silence on in the following reviews. Coming from Northern Germany I wasn't too bothered with it not being record hot like last year. And Roadburn is an indoor festival anyway right?
But that chill cold wind was really annoying at times. Yet at least it was dry, so the glass was still half full. Except maybe for that thankfully brief shocking moment on Saturday (?) when it fucking snowed! "Der April macht was er will." as an easily translatable german proverb says.

Tilburg

Over to Tilburg.

Trading the ticket for the festival wristband.

Home.

There are changes to the shape of Roadburn almost every year. One of the most dramatic was that the Cul de Sac bar was no longer part of the festival. Sad, I really missed its club atmosphere, which none of the other venues can really substitute.

Tonight for the free warm-up shows however I did not miss it, because the interest in this night (now rebranded from "Hard Rock Hideout" to "Roadburn: Ignition") was clearly big enough to justify the relocation to the Green Room of the 013.

I think the venue DJ tried to make a point, that this wasn't really Roadburn yet, so we got a slightly out of place everyman's hard rock mix including Van Halen's "Jump" and Scorpions' "Wind Of Change", before the fun started.

Temple Fang

I'm a notorious Roadburn overplanner, but Wednesday is an exception. I don't look into the bands too deep before, because there's no alternative programme anyway.

So it came as a sweet surprise that Temple Fang kicked off the night in a much more psychedelic way than expected. The heavy wiry Rickenbacher bass sound gave the group's sound a strong Hawkwind / Motörhead backbone, but still left room for a lot of delicate details in the guitar playing and the creative groovy drum performance.
The vocals left nothing to desire either, yet I would have loved to have one more song than the opener with the higher voice of the guitar player as lead.

All in all a superb attunement for Roadburn.

But while space trips are a very important part of the overall Roadburn experience, there's also the challenging, at times even uncomfortable and into-your-face brutal, which were both embraced by the following act.

Roadburn Bingo: a band from Iceland plays

Great Grief

Boy, these guys are intense. Especially the singer. During soundcheck he just lay on stage with sunglasses on for a while and I was asking myself if that could already be part of the performance. And in hindsight I'm pretty sure that he was collecting himself for what was to come there.

Great Grief are a hardcore band which has obviously taken one or two hints from The Dillinger Escape Plan in terms of stage appearance.

The themes of their songs were mostly heavy personal stuff about depression, suicide, bi-sexual identy, and frontman Finnbogi Örm gave is absolutely all to live and die them. There he suddenly disappeared under the drum riser, then a bottle was broken and next he slit his forehead with a shard.

Great Grief would be playing two more shows during the festival (one regular, one surprise), which I unfortunately didn't witness. Those included him jumping from the ceiling into the audience and eating the Ladybird Skatepark floor...

Wild stuff which rightfully got the audience pretty agitated and willing to mosh.

Hellripper

Next and last for tonight the probably youngest dudes in the room entered the stage.

Hellripper sounded just like their name suggests. And if that's not enough, there were also Celtic Frost "Morbid Tales" and Motörhead shirts.

Yes, it's very raw and primitive Black'n'Thrash metal, hellripped right out of the Eighties. And let's be honest: I would probably never listen to it on record. But the people were already in heightened moshpit mood, and they took the bait without hesitation.

So most of the Hellripper belonged to the ongoing escalation in the audience. Fun to behold, but you guys knew that there were still four full Roadburn days ahead, right?