Lucy Dunnet
Ready to rip off the sleep mask to their summer festival alter egos, the hordes of Bathory-clad Vikings and leathered-up metalheads are excited to once again jump over dawdling tourists and hen parties to see just how many of the 30+ bands on the bill they can catch.
With five of Camden’s live music havens playing host to all flavours of the extreme, there’s something hiding in the darkness for everyone (except maybe the bride-to-be tourists; they’re better off ogling these musicians from afar). Metallic hardcore locals Negative Frame test extreme metal fans’ ability to two-step in The Underworld, while Norwegians Vreid get The Electric Ballroom all aboard the black ’n’ roll crazy train. Tomb Mould pulverise The Roundhouse with their bombastic strain of death metal, and Final Dose ram punk down every black metalhead’s throat as they shake up The Black Heart.
The day starts with some sad news: Danish black metal project Afsky, who were set to open The Electric Ballroom, have had to pull out due to medical reasons. And so it is that The Black Heart sports a queue that reaches down the stairs, past the bar and almost all the way to the front door for the opening band, Yersin. According to their Bandcamp, Yersin are “true Northern extreme metal, for fans of aggression, hatred, violence, riffs, screams and blastbeats” in that order. What’s clear from the moment you’re able to nab a space in the upstairs dungeon is that these Northerners know the meaning of a brutal barrage of extreme metal. Like a starving troll that has awakened from a deep slumber only to discover he has been robbed of his store of goats, Yersin is sheer chaos, fuelled by impulsive, riffed-off cravings. Their vocalist drools out a torrent of screaming noise whilst strangling himself with the mic cord and playing air baseball, likely envisioning the stillest crowd members’ heads as the ball. When his multiple attempts to encourage the first-pint crowd to move fall on deaf ears, he takes it upon himself to get in the pit and undergo a sort of exorcism on the floor. One can only hope that the exorcism was unsuccessful so that this madness will continue for years to come.
Although now opening the Electric Ballroom stage, German extreme metallers Der Weg einer Freiheit delight in thanking London for being here with them “tonight”. Who cares that it’s 2:30pm? When your music is the aural embodiment of the kind of vulnerability you can only find at nighttime, you convince everyone that the construct of day and night is yours to bend. Their set begins with a woman singing a harrowing, tribal melody that strips away the last remnants of light and builds like the starting ramp of an extreme rollercoaster. The bleak anticipation gives way to a rapid stream of tremolo-picking, blast beats and erratic strobe lights, ensuring that only the band’s shadows are visible. You want to close your eyes and let the entire intoxicating black metal spectacle wash over you. But you also don’t want to miss a second of Der Weg einer Freiheit’s sonic and visual rainbow of melancholy. Disorientating and utterly mesmerising, good luck shaking off the existential wonder from this early afternoon set.
Calling all hardcore kids to The Underworld. Incineration Festival is a great one for gambling addicts and deciding which acts require you to abandon sets halfway through and race to a different venue if you want the chance of seeing even half the singer’s eyebrow and which acts you can throw caution to the wind and stroll to 2 minutes before curtains. Unfortunately, Negative Frame fall into the latter category, and while the crowd fills up somewhat during their set, it doesn’t burst at the seams with as much unhinged energy as London’s hardcore metal hybrids deserve. It’s too bad that today’s punters have deemed them too hardcore for their extreme metal sensibilities, because this five-piece are a relentless riff factory with more pugnacious stamina than a den of angry Russian bears. Vocalist Kesari Gorin is a cartwheeling, groin-stretching, screaming force of nature, shoulder-barging his bandmates in a humorous manner that highlights their nine-year-long camaraderie and aggressive determination. While the circle(ish) pit might not have been up to anyone’s standards, everything else, from the maniacally crisp sound quality to their unbridled fervour leaking off the stage, is fantastic.
Black ‘n’ rolllllllllllll. After an intro that straddles the momentum and atmosphere of a funeral march with that of Darth Vader’s The Imperial March, Vreid take their turn in The Electric Ballroom. The Norwegians may be a black metal band, but they’re here to rock. You can almost hear the Prince of Darkness himself screaming ‘rock ’n’ roll’ at every rhythmic groove and gravelly vocal. One minute it’s a pitch-black attack of blasting tremolo-picked walls, and the next it’s swaggering Motörhead-esque riffs and propulsive beats; even the Grim Reaper is dancing. They dedicate ‘The Skies Turn Black’ to Ozzy, which gets the crowd raucously pumping their fists and swinging their heads. However, not only are Vreid black metal rockers, they’re also storytellers and travel back in time to the Second World War to play a song about a Norwegian who chose death over betraying his nation. Speak, Goddamnit, is a masterpiece, the raspy vocals and majestic riffs sonically encompassing the prisoner’s tortured drive, and the stomping, prominent bass taking on the power of the enemy. Story time with Vreid is a bludgeoning, bouncing bit of fun.
Mark Whelan’s furious zest for life is not to be underestimated. So when the energy in The Roundhouse more closely resembles a newborn litter of kittens than an angry viper’s nest, the Fuming Mouth vocalist speaks up. “This is boring. Somebody start a mosh pit. I don’t care who goes first, but somebody needs to push someone.” The result is a two-and-a-half-person car crash, and while a pit doesn’t exactly open up or continue after the beers go flying, the crowd does at least ramp up the headbanging. And Mark proceeds to produce some of the most eye-bulging glares and facial expressions so obscene his whole head visibly vibrates from the effort. Fuming Mouth are a welcome slice of sadism on this already magnificently dark day. Their two-toned screams, coupled with distorted guitar slides and ominously crushing drum beats, drill gaping holes into your eardrums before causing you to grind your teeth together at just how visceral their blend of death metal and hardcore is. You can almost imagine Michael Myers cutting himself out of Mark’s chest (technically, off his T-shirt, but that doesn’t nearly sound as gruesome) and rampaging through the crowd. Maybe then this batch of metalheads would start moshing as if their lives depended on it.
It’s about that time in the day where the cravings for a proper beer slip ’n’ slide mosh pit are getting out of control, so thank god it’s also time for London’s blackened punk band, Final Dose, to get rowdy in The Black Heart. The corpse-painted punks blast straight into a maniacal concoction of d-beat-fuelled punk urgency and bloodthirsty black metal bleakness, fronted by their balaclava-wearing vocalist – although he looks more like an executioner than a robber. The venue quickly becomes a beer-soaked sweat chamber of writhing lunatics, one that the singing executioner admires in between his screeching snarls. They command a frenzied reverie from the crowd, with some fans breaking out into wild gesticulations of worship and others doing whatever it takes to get onto the stage for a quick dive and crowdsurf. This is feral black metal punk at its gut-wrenching finest, and Final Dose immediately becomes a highlight of this year’s Incineration Festival.
Welcome to Tomb Mold’s universe. To the left, we have their first few years of weighty stench and old-school death metal rawness. To the right, we enter a void of celestial technicality, spanning progressive guitar noodling and beefy jazz grooves. The Canadian progressive death metal outfit may only have four albums to their name, but they already have an armoury of metallic variation that makes their set a disturbingly tantalising experience. They are led by Max Klebanoff, who summons demons from behind his drum kit with his unholier-than-thou grizzly growls and breakneck beats that The Roundhouse tries their utmost to keep up with. And where tracks like ‘Final Struggle of Selves’ see Tomb Mold charge into a full-throttle channelling of the nastiest dimensions of down-tuned suffocation, others, such as ‘Will of Whispers’, are a kaleidoscope of stripped-back riffs that border on shoegazy-ethereality. It’s hard to tell who is smiling more by the end of Tomb Mold’s set, the band themselves or the old and new fans they’ve left in a heady, well-pummelled daze.
One of the big four of Swedish death metal, Grave has been prowling the extreme metal realm since 1988. And two years ago, Jörgen Sandström, Jens Paulsson and Jonas Torndal reunited with guitarist Ola Lindgren, returning Grave to its original line-up and bringing the band’s “golden age” back to the stage. Armed with red strobe lights, fire and riffs that could chug their way through entire sieging armies, Incineration Festival gets a taste of exactly what these hardened bastards are capable of. They’re a relentless riff machine, yes, but they’re also calmly humble. Jörgen expresses his appreciation of everyone who made the time to come and see them, despite knowing that it’s “a bit of a puzzle to see everyone” at this festival. A particular highlight of the Grave catalogue is ‘Black Dawn’, which, Jörgen reminisces, they wrote when he was about 14. He’s now 54. It’s a primitive, swaggering piece of death metal that inspires a swell of the crowd to join in with the chorus shouts of “black dawn”. The band pull faces at each other as they unleash a massacre of bludgeoning bass lines and trampling drum blasts, inciting pits and a couple of crowdsurfers to surge forth in triumphant rage, right up until the last fragment of pyro heat has bled from The Roundhouse.
Pioneering one genre of metal is legendary. But pioneering two integral genres of metal is an absurd feat of such behemothic proportions that such a creator is elevated to the highest tier of immortal influence. It is the celebration of one such figure that culminates this year’s Incineration Festival. The man, the enigma, the mastermind: Quorthon. He was the sole member of Bathory, the Swedish extreme metal band that sparked the invention of first black, then Viking metal, and laid the groundwork for so many, many bands to follow. And it is several members of such bands as Enslaved, Gorgoroth, Watain, Aura Noir, Mayhem, and Emperor that play on rare occasions, such as this, in the prominent Bathory tribute band Blood Fire Death, to honour Quorthon and the indisputable magnitude of his influence.
Nothing can quell the crowd’s excitement as the morbid whinnies of ‘Oden Ride over Nordland’ transfix it. The Roundhouse’s gaze on the stage, decorated with a slaughterous battlefield backdrop and banners on either side of it – one for Bathory, one for Quorthon. When the resonant choral melodies in ‘ Fine Day to Die’s’ intro are ripped into by a raspy wail, the first of the all-star vocalists reveals himself to be the uncompromisingly vicious Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal (ex-Gorgoroth). What erupts is a tumultuous cascade of fervent fan reception that slings fully-charged roars into every Camden crevice (roars that only once or twice serve to disguise whatever blips are currently struggling out of the sound system).
Erik Danielsson (Watain) takes over as vocalist with wicked enthusiasm, as the fiery assault from the band is heightened by spurts of pyro – fortunately not of the eternal fire kind, as the pit is heating up and all sorts of face-smacking carnage are breaking loose in the name of Quorthon. Attila Csihar roars ‘Born For Burning’ with a vehemence that manages to send shivers down your spine despite the sweat, the flames, and the assault of brutal, crusty riffs. The original Bathory bass player, Frederick Melander, even makes an appearance, much to the screeching enthusiasm of the crowd, who by this point are spitting out howls of appreciation at every chance they get.
By the time the lump-in-throat, booming melodies of Hammerheart seep into the crowd, the only patriotism felt is to the man thousands have just spent the last hour on well-worn feet jubilantly thrashing out for. All hail Quorthon. All hail Bathory. May it never be a fine day for your legend to die.