Audiovisual Ohlsen Overkill: ROADBURN FESTIVAL 2024 • DAY THREE: Saturday, April 20th

2024-05-04

ROADBURN FESTIVAL 2024 • DAY THREE: Saturday, April 20th

- The truth is a grave under a knoll,
fully covered in earth and blood -

feat. BLOOD INCANTATION, FULL EARTH, KNOLL, DEEPSKY, LANKUM, THE KEENING and YANTRAS

After my brief review detour to the Dazed & Spaced Festival in Hamburg I'm of course returning to Tilburg for the diaries of the two final Roadburn days now. I'm pretty confident I'll get this finished before the next big live event on my schedule - which will be in less than two weeks, so let's not waste too much time and get right into it!

This longest festival day began in darkness, as Knoll only had two lamps and a bit of backlight hardly illuminating the stage of The Engine Room. (The first show where it was futile to take pictures with my usual Digital Harinezumi toy camera.)

Ever since their online appearance during Roadburn Redux in 2021 it was a given that Knoll would some day enter an actual stage here in the flesh. The young Grindcore commando has been quite active since then, so what had been a mixture of a fresh take on early Napalm Death with electronic Noise elements has evolved to something more Avantgarde which also includes Black and Death Metal and the occasional majestic trumpet being thrown into the mix for all us Jazzheads and Imperial Triumphant fans. Glorious!

The main takeway from Knoll's shadow mass after noon however were its unfathomly inhuman, blasting brutality - too much to bear at this hour for more than one spectator - and the absolutely sick vocal performance of their frontman. This was the shit!
Him talking about weird things having to happen in his nose and throat during certain techniques in almost YouTube vocal coach manner in a chat after the show somehow made this inferno even better.

And being a bit out of the loop since their debut "Interstice" I just had to put their new killer album "As Spoken" into my merch bag. Which I have to mention here, because it will come back later to wrap this whole review up!

CLASHBURN:

The infamous endless queues outside of packed venues, which had a comeback for several shows this year, didn't affect me much. Only now - since I didn't cut Knoll short - I took a shrugging look at the line for Couch Slut, said nah, fuck that and used the time for merch shopping and getting a little unhealthy extra snack to eat in the city. That was the only part of my plan not coming into action today.

So I kept sticking to my planned timetable as close as probably never before. My timing for when to leave a show and when to enter the next one was very good and sometimes even perfect. Only today I would leave a performance too early at least twice, when I could have easily enjoyed up to fifteen more minutes of music.

The decisions had been surprsingly easy for Saturday. Of course there were many great tempting things happening - Agriculture, the second set of Uboa, the comissioned show of Kavus Torabi are just a few of many names to mention -, but the mighty pull of bands like The Keening or Full Earth, who I wanted to see from start to finish no matter what, was just too strong to spontanously choose a different route.

Missing Ni was hard, but my memory of their show in Hamburg last November being still very vivid in my memory comforted me a little. I'm actually most saddened by the fact that I could only watch one show in the Paradox the whole day especially since the Jazz club was again only part of Roadburn for Friday and Saturday.
We need more Paradox next year, at least Sunday, when sitting down is most welcome. Please make it happen!

The hour-long break of course took away the impact of it, but the contrast between Knoll and the improvising experimental duo Deepsky still couldn't have been much bigger. While the drummer had some surprising sounds incorporated in his kit and didn't shy away from playing quiet busy stuff at times, the guitar work was very slow, minimal and relaxed. Both elements merged together as an interesting dynamic take on Ambient music.

With a little more composition the show could probably have been more immersive, yet it succeeded in what it wanted to be. But then I can't really judge the entirety of the performance, since I had another thing coming up in a tiny venue...

Yeah, this was what I mentioned earlier: I arrived at the Cul de Sac and almost had the whole space in front of the stage for myself. Could have arrived a lot later easily and still would have been there, when the room actually filled up. But I hadn't been to this small music bar for years, since it isn't part of Roadburn anymore, so I just had no idea what press of people to expect before an Offroad show (the semi-official free side program in several venues all over the city).

Last year I had been able to spontanously see one Offroad show during the whole festival in the LOC Brewery. The band blowing me away there had been Yantras. So them being my only Offroad band again surely doesn't sound like an original choice. It was the right one though!

Their sometimes harsh and sludgy, sometimes shoegazy dreamy Doom Metal leaned towards the "old" Roadburn days, while simultanously not being caught in the past, but feeling rather forward-thinking instead. And of course you cannot write about them and withhold the presence of singer Natalya Thelen, whose warm clean vocals and killer growls both elevated the already very convincing band to another level. Yantras are just a group really rounding up the whole experience and we need to see them on a bigger and official stage in the future!

And boy, how I missed the Cul des Sac! So many amazing memories connected to this tiny stage.

Again. So even though it was not as extreme this time, here's already the second occasion I could have enjoyed one more song of the previous show and arrive a little later without risking my spot. But you only get to know know this in hindsight...

Since SubRosa had been making Roadburn history with several memorable shows, I can't imagine that there was a general lack of interest into Rebecca Vernon's new venture The Keening. So I guess it was just the late Saturday afternoon timing and the constellation of other stuff which made the full performance of their debut album "Little Bird" the only Main Stage event (of those I saw) with visible gaps in the crowd. So this probably could have taken place in a more intimate setting. But once again: you only know in hindsight.

And I'm not saying the show suffered from its setting, absolutely not! The Doom / Goth / Folk / Alternative masterpiece "Little Bird" is one of my favorite albums of 2023 and the performance did the epic work justice. Surrounded by appropriately excellent musicians Rebecca herself switched between guitar and sitting down at the piano. The intensity was somewhere between the 2017 "subdued" and regular SubRosa shows, the emotions and her vocal delivery even reached new highs.
Speaking of singing: The standout next to Rebecca in an often almost equivalent role (actually similar to the the bass player on the Myrkur tour a couple of weeks ago) was violinist Andrea Morgan, who even bravely took on the operatic vocals at the finale of the finale "The Truth". What a star! And what an incredible song!

I loved all of the music before and I love it even more after this show. So yes, as expected this was a massive highlight.

Could the next Main Stage act keep me in that transcendent state the previous shows had sent me to? With Irish fucking Folk out of all genres? Simple answer: absolutely!

Of course Lankum are explicitely not one of those Folk bands, who just provide their audience with an excuse to drink themselves senseless. No, the earnest tone, meat and drone of their dirges and ballads was a mesmerizing and profound experience. Especially in the department of perfect vocal pitches this band had wonders in store.

I hadn't come around listening to their much-lauded last album "False Lankum" before, but I knew a couple of tracks and was determined not to leave this show until "Go Dig My Grave" (one of the greatest songs of 2023 besides The Keening's "The Truth") had been performed.

Luckily it was not - as half-expected - the opener, but the first encore. And I'm glad that I experienced everything leading up to it. The album's spinning repeatedly now and "The New York Trader" for sure has opened a permanent office in my head.

I was a bit torn between wandering around, needing a break to process impressions and wanting to get into the front row for the next really important, not to be missed show on my schedule.

Since opportunity arose and there was no line outside I went into the Paradox for a couple of minutes while the French madmen Ni were playing, to check if there maybe was a merch guy with the band, so I could give away some more money. Nope. I only watched very little of the show from the back, since working myself through that crowd with my bag seemed like too much of a hassle. What I can safely say even from that small glimpse is that it was probably the wildest shit the club had seen all weekend - also the only full standing show there. It is rumored that there has even been crowdsurfing. But content with my memories from Hamburg I moved on before I got sucked in.

To my surprise time had been moving slower than expected again, so I could still see the last two (?) songs by Heath in the Hall of Fame. Not nearly enough to be able to properly review their show, but enough to know that it would have been nice to watch the whole thing. Some high quality fresh good ol' Psychedelic Rock there!

Next up on the Hall of Fame stage were Full Earth, whose debut "Cloud Sculptors" feels like one of the strongest AOTY contenders to me at the moment. So the Norwegian quintet - basically an enhanced version of the already always amazing power trio Kanaan - had filled me with dangerously high expectations.

And of course the guys around drum madman Ingvald, who also wrote this whole material totally smashed it! And this wasn't even a full album show, so the more classical inspired smaller pieces were omitted as well as one my favorite album tracks "The Collective Unconscious". That left us with - ahem - only three instrumental monster tracks and still a whopping full hour of playing time.

What a super heavy wall of fuzztastic riffs, Psych lead guitars and tasty analogue synth and organ sounds! Full Earth turned the concept of Rock music into an elemental force, an earthquake and storm, shaking, levelling, pulling apart and flooding the room and everyone who was in it.

What I found especially impressive even with knowledge of the studio versions was to see the hypnotic keyboards being actually played. On the album one could often think that there were some kinds of modular-ish loops being used, but no - they were actually playing every damn note of those fast deliciously repetitve patterns and it was freaking awesome.

This day was still getting better and better and this whole show could have gone on forever. Or at least for the running time of the whole album, which Full Earth actually performed on other dates of their tour. Yet even in limited format this show still was my favorite show of Roadburn 2024 so far!

So what now after the heavy bliss of Full Earth? Could anything get close to that paramount example of Roadburn ecstasy? You know it: On this day it could!

It was another one which really had left me little choice but to attend. Having immensly enjoyed their Ambient "Timewave Zero" show (I'm wearing the shirt right now as I'm typing this!) the day before, extra-terrestrial energy rays downright forced me on the path of cosmic balance by also experiencing the other side of Blood Incantation, which of course means top-notch mind-melting technical brutal Death fucking Metal!

Yes, Roadburn, that woke not-even-Metal-anymore weirdo hipster-trash Festival closed its Saturday with a blasting Death inferno of one of the best bands in the game right now. The career-spanning setlist even included the long track "Awakening From The Dream Of Existence To The Multidimensional Nature Of Our Reality" from "Hidden History Of The Human Race" and ended with "Obliquity Of The Ecliptic" from last year's "Luminscent Bridge" EP. What more do you need? What can I even say? The 013 transformed into a wormhole to hell. Another outstanding killer show for a killer day!

And it all wrapped up so neatly as a whole.

Because see: When I bought that Knoll record ten hours earlier, it wasn't sealed and I felt I needed to do something to protect it in case it was raining outside. Fast forward to the Blood Incantation show, where at the beginning I was standing next to the singer of Knoll, who had kick-started the day.

And now better grab your skullcap, so your brain doesn't explode! Only a while later I realized that while I was standing next to a Knoll member during the Blood Incantation show... wait! Let me just put it into a meme: