Half the fun of going to a concert is, like my dad always calls it, "monkey watching". Just looking around and marvel at some of the things you see. Pretty rock chicks that you’d kill for. Fashion-conscious pubescents that spend most of their time looking around thoroughly displeased with everything including, so it seems, the very music they paid money for to watch. Harmless looking guys with neat haircuts sporting an ‘Extreme Music for Extreme People’ T-shirt. In this case there was even a 50+ year old guy in jacket and tie who crowd-surfed and dove from the stage, to some applause and a lot of bemusement. What do you mean, generation gap?

No Mercy 2002 consisted, as it often does, of two sets of bands playing on two stages. Thankfully, they had decided to put all bands that I wanted to check out on the main stage. No running (or, rather, crowd-elbowing) your way to and fro this time. I arrived just in time to see Catastrophic start, which prompted my immediate enthusiasm. This band around former Obituary guitarist Trevor Peres plays a mix of hardcore and Obituary-style death metal. This night they elected to play the more death-metal style tracks as opposed to the rather more hardcore offerings. They even played Obituary’s "Chopped in Half", which generated a lot of crowd action. A very good move, and although there were a lot of people yelling for "Body Bag", "Turned Inside Out" and "Final Thought", that was all Obituary we got. Still, a cool half hour or so.

Up next was a band I’d heard a lot of good things about, Australia’s Destroyer 666. For some reason the band didn’t deliver anything I could get excited about. They were reasonably quick, reasonably energetic, but somehow not special. One of the audience members seemed to like Destroyer 666 a whole lot more. It’s been quite a few years since I saw his kind of hell-bent-for-leather, sometimes potentially bone-breaking stage-diving antics.

Malevolent Creation. Incredibly tight, incredibly controlled drummer, a lot of energy and aggression, but there was no ingredient that I considered magic. Not bad at all, but I looked on and didn’t mind too much when they vacated the stage for the next band.

Up next: Death metal banner carriers Vader. This was the primary band I’d come for, these chief innovators of the death metal genre, these friendly Poles who play some of the best death metal that’s made today. Vocalist Peter should perhaps get some elocution lessons, though, as almost none of his in-between-song mumblings could be understood at all. I did gather that he had some voice troubles, which may have been the reason for their disgracefully short set that lasted no more than 20 minutes. This was quite a disappointment, I have to say, and I don’t think I was the only disappointee.

Hypocrisy was the pentultimate band on the main stage. For some reason I have sold all my Hypocrisy CDs on Ebay. I always reckoned the band was overrated and I didn’t particularly like their particular band of death metal, though their production values were always what they should have been. But I was most pleasantly surprised when they took to the stage and treated us to their allotted time of really rather good music. A good time was probably had by all, but in particular by a bunch of kids in the front who acted as if they were MTV teenagers and Peter Tagtgren Robbie Williams.

Up last was Immortal. I had seen them once previous, in daylight, at Waldrock 1999. I was not impressed, in fact I thought they were a bunch of lunatic posers who made mediocre music. Abbath’s ridiculous phallic thrusts and the cliché fire-breathing act launched them right into my top-something-or-other of Bands Not To Be Taken Seriously. Then they released "Damned in Black" (which many people consider their "sell out effort"). The album grew on me and it’s one of my favourite black metal albums of recent years now. I was glad to hear the band kicking off with "Damned in Black", after which at least another two tracks from that album were played (including, I believe, "Triumph"). I do not have vast knowledge of their earlier albums, but an Immortal fan I talked with told me they concentrated on their recent albums (I don’t have "Sons of Northern Darkness" yet…) and only played "Battles in the North" from their older material. He was a bit disappointed. I, however, had great fun. Immortal really are quite good live, and Horgh is a drummer that’s right up there with Nicholas Barker. Unfortunately, Immortal’s gig was of such quality that it involved massive crowd movements, reversely proportional to yours truly’s photo opportunities. Obviously I wanted Abbath, but I only managed to get their new bass player (name unbeknownst to me).

(You're more than welcome to rip the pictures and use them wherever you want, however please credit Metal-E-Zine and add the www.metal-e-zine.com URL. Thanks!)

RK

Written April 2002

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