Skip to main content

A review of Bloodstock 2016

Bloodstock is one of the highlights of my year. It’s a chance for me to get away from it all (well, most of it), listen to some fantastic music and catch up on reading.

Friday

Gloryhammer are a band I’d never heard of.  Surprisingly good sci-fi based power metal. Lot’s of fun and not to be taken too seriously.

Evil Scarecrow were just Evil Scarecrow which means lots of robot and crustacean oriented antics. I’m always pleasantly surprised how much they often sound like Slayer.

Then for the first band of the day I really wanted to see, Misery Loves Company.  I first saw them in Bradford in the 90s when they were at their prime. Unfortunately those days are gone and I felt they didn’t play as well as they could have done, but their set was full of old classics. I wonder if there might new a new album on the way,

Stuck Mojo and Corrosion of conformity I’ve seen before. I wasn’t that impressed then and nothing has changed now.

Venom I had really been looking forward too and I was only slightly disappointed. Thier sound lacked a second guitarist, especially during the guitar solos. They opened with a couple of songs from their new album, which is very good, played some of my favorites like Evil One and closed, of course, with Black Metal, which I know best from the Vader Cover.

Behemoth were always going to be brilliant. I don’t think they had the best PA sound and I’m not sure if Nergal is lost in the theatrics or disappearing up his own backside. The band did leave the stage a lot between songs. They played latest album The Satanist all the way through and it was amazing. A great stage show, fantastic lighting and even black confetti, although the wind had other ideas.

I wasn’t looking forward to Twisted Sister. I have their greatest hits album and the sound is tinny and under produced. Thier live sound is full bodied and really rather good, especially with ex-Dream Theater drummer Mark Portnoy on drums. However, they were late to the stage, went on too long and had far too much to say! Roll on Saturday.

Saturday

Kill II This. Passed the time. I read my book.

Vallenfyre just blew everyone else away. A fantastic sound from the PA, heavy and both slow and fast songs. Everything I hoped they would be and more.

I seem to remember quite enjoying Akercocke the last time I saw them at Bloodstock. They were ok this time, despite some spectacularly bad guitar playing and/or tuning. It seems to improve as they went on. It was good to hear them try out some new material.

I'd been looking forwarded to Rotting Christ. I used to have an album of theirs which I listened to alot 20 years ago. I bought some of their other stuff, but it wasn't as good and in the end I sold it all. At Bloodstock they started off very disappointingly, but by the third song they seemed to find their feet and remained solid for the rest of their set.

I didn't realise Fear Factory were performing all of Demanufacture. Initially I was disappointed as I really like their new stuff. They are one of the few bands who came back better than they were before. I wasn't disappointed for long. They were incredible, even better than Vallenfyre. Fear Factory are another band with only one guitarist, but this didn't impede their sound at all.

I don't like being wrong, but I was about what Paradise Lost’s performance was going to be like. I didn't have high hopes. To me they're a decent metal band who haven't had a good album since the mid-nineties. I was expecting them to play recent stuff, but they didn't. They reached back, sometimes a long way, into their considerable back catalogue and were heavy and doomy and pretty amazing! Paradise restored.

It gets better! I was looking forward to Gojira a lot! Knowing they were playing I've been collecting all their albums and the new one, Magma, has been a regular for me recently. I had high hopes and I wasn't disappointed. Fantastic band, playing fantastic heavy metal.

I wasn't wrong about Mastodon and I still don't know what all the fuss is about or why they're a headline act.

Sunday

Heart of a Coward, from roundabout ridden Milton Keynes, weren't bad, probably tried to hard, but were nothing to get excited about.

Unearth were better than I remember them being when I saw them support Lamb of God, but even Dimmu Borgir weren't great that day! At bloodstock Unearth were heavy, tight and enjoyable to listen to.

Stoner isn't really my thing, but Jukebox Monkey, the only band I watched on the Jagermeister stage this year had a fantastic, clear and sharp sound. I really enjoyed some of the lead guitar work too.

The Metal Allegiance should have been so, so, so much more. Very sure of themselves and what they were doing in the name of metal, but really just capitalising on the recent spate of rock and metal deaths. Just rubbish.

Satyricon appeared to have a few technical problems before they got down to some fantastic traditional Black Metal. They played most of the Nemesis Divina album and ended with some of their more recent tunes, such as Black Crow on a Tombstone.

Fortunately Dragon Force were exactly as expected, fun and fast! They had a great sound, with perhaps too much kick drum, but the vast amount of guitar widdling and the phenomenal singing made up for that. I've waited to see this band for a long time. Their album before last was amazing, the more recent one not so much. Unfortunately, due to technical problems at the start, they had a very short set.

Symphony were the band I wanted to see the most this weekend and I wasn't disappointed. They blew everyone else away. The guitar playing, the singing, the songs. Wow! Just wow!

Pythia I saw support Threshold a few years ago and they were quite good. I gave them a go on the Sophie Lancaster stage and was super impressed. A much better performance than when I saw them before and much better songs! Bought their latest album from Amazon stood the crowd.

Slayer were Slayer. A few tracks from their new album, which is superb, and all of the classics. Solid, but unexciting. Worth hanging around for at the end of the weekend, but I probably wouldn’t again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv

Bloodstock 2009

This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th