Ok, I really shouldn’t be the one here posting the first Heathen Crusade comments, but I’m a boring old man who wasn’t drinking last night, so I think the job probably falls to me by default. Here’s my comments from Day One:

Bronnson
I caught their last two songs. They were a local band brought in as a last-minute replacement, and that’s basically what they sounded like.

Will of the Ancients
Pretty damn good for the second band of the night. I’d say they basically play “Heathen Crusade metal”: blackish metal with lots of melody and headbanging groove. While they were almost exclusively growling, their song about pirates had their bass player doing some epic melodic yelling which was quite awesome.

Vesperian Sorrow
Wall-of-sound blackdeath metal. The parts where they’d just blast away could be a bit boring, but luckily they included enough kickass headbanging riffs to keep me interested. In what I think is a first for me, the normally-growling singer would exhort the crowd *during* the songs, using a normal clean voice. That just struck me as funny.

Slough Feg
Easily the best band of the night for me. I’m not even that much of a fan of them on record (it all seems pretty one-dimensional), but I’ll never miss a chance to see them live. They had their shit so together they started 10 minutes early, which gave Mike Scalzi time during the set to work his stand-up act: “So who here got a ride from Gary Gygax?” “How many women are here who aren’t somebody’s mother?” Even without the awesome jokes, the band had perfect sound, is tight as hell, and had the most impressive drummer of the night. Add in nearly constant dual-guitar harmonies played along to head-chunking rhythms, and what more could someone with good taste ask for?

Vreid
Well, the Windir song was the best thing that they played, but only by a small margin, so that’s pretty impressive. Somehow they find the perfect proportions for the mix of black, thrash, epic, and rock-n-roll groove to generate what was probably the most energized crowd of the night.

Månegarm
Finally, the first non-standard instruments of the night (violin and a bit of recorder)! Oddly, they were played not by a Viking, but by the guy who works in the A/V department of your college library. Some of their songs were total ass-kickers, but then they had some that were just kind of there. Still, they kept me interested for their whole set, which means I was kept interested for the entire day, which is pretty unbelievable.

As for the festival, scheduled times were hit dead on the nose for the entire night. Sound was generally good, lighting was about the worst ever, and I cannot comment on the beer!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under concert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.