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 Photo by Askar Ibragimov
Thank goodness the summer’s lousy weather had disappeared for the Jalometalli weekend, and the first sign of a festival taking place somewhere around the large construction sites around Teatria were people in black clothes sitting on a hill with their beer supply. You can never go wrong with certain signs. The actual festival area was located on the Teatria parking lot and in the hall itself, with one outdoor and one indoor stage, a food and two merchandise stands - and, as a matter of course, two large beer areas.
Friday
When I arrived in the hall on Friday afternoon a Norwegian group called ‘Pantheon I’ had taken over the indoor stage, with Lemmy from Motörhead as a singer. Or so it seemed to me; he appeared to be into the same beard fashion and capable of the same insane look as Lemmy in “Serial Killer”. Musically, ‘Pantheon I’ didn’t have much to do with any kind of hard rock, but rather served some melodic black metal featuring a cello.
A band that had never set foot on Finland before drew a large crowd to the outdoor stage later in the evening. Overkill have been playing thrash metal for over 20 years, and had now finally made it out of the New York-province to the metropolis of Oulu. Stage diving - seen from singer Bobby ‘Blitz’ Ellsworth at the end of the concert -is rare in Finland, but luckily there were at least enough people in front of the stage to prevent any mishaps.
Some Finnish battle metal was presented some time after midnight. Turisas were the colourful bunch that stuck out a bit of the “sadistic, disastrous mayhem” program of the festival. Having found a temporary substitute for their accordion player Lisko, who around February disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and with a violinist they were clearly the folkiest band on the bill. From “In the Court of Jarisleif” off the band’s latest release The Varangian Way to “One more” and “Sahti Waari” as well as the Boney M. cover “Rasputin”, people couldn’t do else but dance and arrange many metres long polonaises.
Traditionally there are a few things which you must not bring to festival areas. For obvious reasons guns, knives, chain saws and axes are among those, the latest dangerous object this summer seemed to be umbrellas. Yet, the Jalometalli festival 2008 faced a newly introduced backpack prohibition. People were stopped at the entrance and told that their backpacks had to be left at the cloak-room “because only shoulder bags were allowed”. While I made the objection that the only difference between those two things is one strap, none of the guards could give me any further explanation for this peculiarity than that “it is a rule made by the organiser”. Now it is just to be hoped that the same happens with those terrible crocs shoes next year, I could absolutely never stand those ugly things.
Saturday
One of the first acts on Saturday was Heavy Metal Perse. Behind what sounds like a humorous group is however a band playing heavy metal with Finnish lyrics somewhere in the realms of fantasy, that has released an excellent debut album in the beginning of the year. A real fan base for HMP seemed to have built up in Finland lately, which sadly didn’t appear to be present at Jalometalli. The concert of Heavy Metal Perse certainly evoked some polite reactions – strident demands for some “ass” like at Nummirock for example couldn’t be heard, though. After all it might have been too early and half of the festival visitors still in a daze from the day before.
Those people that came to see the two following bands seemed to be a bit more awake. Beside numerous acts from the US and Norway also the odd band from Oulu had its appearance at Jalometalli, and Catamenia was one of them. Their music could without doubt be described as “cold”, and winter, a recurrent topic of their lyrics, could be heard in “The Day when the Sun faded away” for instance. Catamenia suffered a loss of band members lately after their former singer Olli Mustonen left the band and guitarist Ari Nissilä took over the vocals and it still seemed a bit odd for everyone having one person less on stage. However, this didn’t do harm to the actual music. If it had been for the audience they certainly could have played longer than the scheduled 40 minutes but the fact of the matter was that “Lost in Bitterness” marked the ending point of the first local band’s performance on the festival.
The second followed right after with Kalmah, even though they are from Pudasjärvi to be precise. Approaching rather melodic death than black metal as their predecessors, they found themselves in front of a decent crowd and presented some new material from their latest album For the Revolution.
Satyricon, on the other hand, made an approach to find an answer to the eternal question of why metal is that popular in the Nordic countries.
“Finland is always good for us, in Sweden it works… it’s something with the mentality”, singer Satyr explained. If a matter of mentality or not, the Norwegians of Satyricon do manage to do brilliant live shows, so also at Jalometalli. Between songs like “My skin is cold” or “K.I.N.G.” the band also advertised their upcoming album which will be released in November, before announcing that “there’s no reason to hold back now since these are the last ten minutes of our show and the last ten minutes of the festival”, and giving the audience what they had been waiting for: “Fuel For Hatred”.
Yet, it wasn’t the last ten minutes of the festival, as KYPCK were scheduled as a last act. Familiar faces on a familiar stage – two members of Sentenced belong to the live line-up of the band that take up the cause of playing “Fast Russian Doom Metal from Finland”. Though the band is completely Finnish E. Seppänen sings in Russian, which might be one crucial thing that’s contributing to the gloomy and sinister atmosphere of KYPCK’s music.
This year’s Jalometalli had barely come to its end when the headliner of next year’s festival was announced. Voivod from Canada will visit Finland for the first time and one of their appearances will be next August in Oulu.
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