FRIDAY

We begin our weekend with a building uncertainty—will the festival’s two main draws, Sweden’s black metal war machine Marduk, and Switzerland's top export Samael, arrive in the isolated town of Seinäjoki despite the disappointingly invisible threat of looming Icelandic volcanic ash clouds menacing the airways?  Having just played Helsinki last fall, Samael’s potential absence may not have been a determining factor for most considerations, but Marduk, at least, was for many non-locals a decisive factor in attendance.

This became overwhelmingly clear when an 18-passenger bus arrived to pick us up from Kamppi, and only two other Helsinkians showed up for the Firebox-bound reissu .  The trip, arranged by KRK and handled by Olbifrus, was expected to have well over a dozen metalheads from the capital area aboard, but the majority of planned attendees had abandoned the excursion once news of Marduk’s flight problems made their appearance iffy.  It worked out quite nicely for us, though, having just seen Marduk in New York a few months earlier, instead we got to enjoy the deluxe accommodations of an entire tour bus to ourselves, along with a couple of other great drinkers with relaxed attitudes about the whole outing.  We spent our driving time gazing at the unexpected and unwelcome late-April horizontal snow, playing the strategic card game Dominion, and listening to loads of dark music, from older, reminiscent To/Die/For , to suicidal black metal.  We left town around noon, and this seemed to be an appropriate time to start full-scale drinking in preparation for the obscurities of the evening.

Arrival to the venue brought confirmation that Marduk was, in fact, AWOL.  The Swedes had made their volcano-hindered travels all the way from their previous gig in Brazil to the European mainland in Spain, before getting their journey cut short in Denmark, despite wasted efforts.  Samael, who was to be Saturday’s headliner, had fortunately already made it to Seinäjoki on Friday.  Our arrival into this town where civilization was strangely absent also brought other surprises to us urbanites.  At the festival, you could buy earplugs from the venue for a mere 20 cents, and the narikka was only one euro—and was optional!  This rural and hospitable policy helped to encourage goings in and comings out of the building during or between bands to retrieve and consume your own drinkage from your car.  The policy was so open and uncommercial that it seemed unreasonable to us cynical city-folk.  The area surrounding the club reminded of the dirty, industrial vibe of Club Teatria’s hoods, and aside from the high-speed trains passing by regularly from across the parking lot, you’d have no idea that anyone even knew of this place.

Even at the pizza joint we visited prior to the gig, we were surprised with the value of our euro.  At the higher-tiered buffet place Pizzeria Piikki, whose street sign strangely lead to an elevator instead of a front door, a to-go pizza was just 6€, and they didn’t even charge for double-cheese!  What’s more, and what’s significant, is that the pizza also came with another free topping—grease—that I’ve been craving on a pizza since I relocated here.  Yes, I mean the juicy, fattening oils that deploy from properly baked pepperoni and quality cheese.  And, it was sliced.  Thank you Piikki, for your gracious offerings on this strange, somewhat snowy spring day.

The same cannot be said about the prices of alcoholic goodies at Rytmikorjaamo.  A normal lager or lonkero was nearly Tavastia-priced, so we quickly adapted to the drink specials that were offered especially for us Firebox fiends; these included some fucked-up tasting highly-hoppy beer called Kuohu that I didn’t want to drink until my taste-receptors were dead and buried—which didn’t really take very long, thanks to 6 hours of bus-boozing.

With Swallow the Sun doing a North American tour at the same time as this festival was scheduled, there were a couple of improvisations to be made with the line-ups.  The first instance was ALGHAZANTH, normally fronted by StS’s Mikko—or Goat Tormentor, if you prefer—but substituted this time by their guitarist Thasmorg, who focused fully on the vocal duties for this gig.  This was an interesting twist, which brought no audible discrepancy to my ears, but instead just a slight increase in movement on center stage.  As usual, the band came equipped with loads of dichromatic make-up and stage props, including a centrifugally glowing inverted cross, a nice backdrop, and a fair amount of darkly lit smoke; but these visuals are surely just there to detract from the lack of energy or visible emotion from the front line.  Musically, very comfortable and welcoming for black metal, and good background music for the beginning of the day in the large, vertical drinking area extending nearly to the stage.  But thinking about it more critically, does this not-so-extreme and barely original band really offer anything to the benefit of mankind, or are they just another CD in the pile?

Wandering around this unfamiliar, factory-converted venue, I see a few scene- and industry-familiar faces that provide a sense of community and home.  I’m confronted with the thought of Sacrilegious Impalement being named as the day’s replacement headliner, and I find the proposition of a Finnish band with only one full-length behind their belts as a replacement for Marduk to be somewhat absurd.  At least Demonical, the day’s other Swedes, could have been promoted to the last slot, and it would have made more sense.

But next up is TORTURE KILLER.  Even though I’ve never sat down with their music and listened thoroughly and with undivided attention, I found some of their songs and riffs to be so familiar that I cannot even believe they are theirs. “Crypts”, a song from their newest vocal era, and their “epic” over 5-minute “Forever Dead” from the Chris Barnes days, seem to me as being so nostalgic that I must have dreamt them.  During their performance, the front and entirety of the drinking area becomes crowded already, and this small festival feels bigger than me.  I watch the amusingly forced 2-dude moshpits and drink the special-priced cider that tastes like bitter, dry wine, allowing myself to be taken in by this common yet commanding performance.  And it didn’t hurt either when they included the cover of Morbid Angel’s “Immortal Rites”.

When it’s time for SKEPTICISM, it occurs to me that this is my first experience with funeral doom, and I had no idea that it would sound similar to a Catholic burial, complete with malevolent ambience and organs reminding of a church service, but with an unambiguous lacking of reverence and blind obedience.  The funereal and old-fashioned dress of the long-cuffed vocalist represented a strongly different impression than what I perhaps expected.  I don’t visibly see this as suicidal, but more like a theatrical production that I don’t know how to relate to.  It has the hopelessness of black metal but without the cruelty, and is dark without being sinister.  Above the organ/piano is a creepy, archaic mirror, and the drummer is using ball-ended drumsticks like that of a marching band.  Overall, I like the visual conceptualizations and how well they play into the idea and sound, and the moments when the speed increases are welcome, but the somewhat slow and continuous drawn out riffs aren’t able to hold me.

I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about the next act, Swedish death metal’s "newbies" DEMONICAL.  It’s a bit confusing that they would have been called upon to play Firebox, even though they were scheduled to tour Finland with Deströyer 666 only 2 weeks later.  Probably not much of a draw, of course, for that reason, but I didn’t find much other reason to savor their performance.  They weren’t so bad on stage, but neither were they especially energetic nor exciting.  Solid riffs and playing, indeed, but it failed to leave an impact.

This was a good opportunity to, well, drink at the bar some more (we failed in our first day’s planning and didn’t have any beer left in the bus), and then do some shopping at the Firebox table.  Now, this label has had some questionable merchandising practices in the past, notably when they introduced their “pay what you want” sale on select Firebox discs, but here again they didn’t fail to surprise with seemingly unreasonable pricing schemes.  There were two bins of CDs, some of their own releases and some not, that were priced 5€ or 10€.  And these weren’t worthless, useless releases, but widely-spanning and mostly-known bands’ CDs, so there was no reason not to browse and discover some treasures.  The 10€ bin had the additional incentive of 3/25€, which later became 3/20€, making it a decent opportunity to stock up on some items missing from your collection.  But even fucking better was their raffle system, where you pull a ticket from a spinning device and win a random item, with every single ticket yielding some sort of merchandise.  I’ve only seen this system before on Spinefeast, and I did pretty well with theirs, so I thought I should again have a go.  With 3 pulls costing 5€, we ended up walking away with a Plutonium Orange 7”, a digibook CD of My Shameful, and finally, the new Throes of Dawn release + a t-shirt in my size.  You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?  Did we have insanely fortunate luck with picking, while all the other prizes were patches and stickers?  Or, why must they offer such amazing steals, aren’t you people buying their stuff?  No complaints from me, though, except that there were no more raffles available on day two.

At this point, I’ve been drinking for nearly the whole day without interruption, so it would have taken a lot for newly announced—and relatively unknown to me—SACRILEGIOUS IMPALEMENT to make an impression.  Marduk is a difficult band to stand up as a replacement for, and props to Sac for their zero-hour willingness to hop aboard the Firebox boat and take a go at it, but there was very little aside from black metal comparable between the two bands, and I don’t suppose that most Marduk fans felt they got their money’s worth.  On the one hand, Sacrilegious doesn’t nearly have the experience, or the quantity of material, to be a festival headliner.  On the other hand, though, they were much fresher meat for the metal dogs to gnash at, and they performed with a ravenous, carnal hunger.  And while I was surprised that many festival-goers stuck around by the front of the stage to watch these guys, I found it equally inconceivable that so much of the crowd left the event before they even began to play.  If you live in or near Seinäjoki, do you really have something better to do than to stick around and watch the fifth and last band of the evening, or was this just a rebellious expression against the missing metal militia of Marduk?

In general, there was a really comfortable and heavy meininki at this place, with loads of strangers and unfamiliar acquaintances coming to drink with us, and we decided already by this point that Firebox Metal Fest will definitely be added to our yearly repertoire.  I wasn’t exactly thrilled when the staff started throwing us out of the bar promptly at 3am, while I had a partially full glass of some unknown drunkness-inducing liquid and was amidst conversation with others, but they handled my cheerful resistance patiently, and I managed to finish the drink, and the talk, before making my exit.

SATURDAY

15 hours of drinking later, we pass out on the tour bus and awake at 2pm in the slowly populating industrial parking lot, with signs of the metal machinery in motion.  With mild hangover, we choose to begin our afternoon by retreating to the city center and joining our tourmates in their sauna-accommodated hotel room for a beer or 20.  Back in the center—another town, another Kalevankatu—we eat again at Piikki [who should be sponsoring this report by now] and prepare better for this evening’s outings, by purchasing as much beer as we can carry, to start killing the hangover and to return to periodically between bands.  No more strange beer and aridly dry cider for me tonight.  Besides, this seems to be the way the locals do it, and I’d just hate to be an outsider.

There was quite a bit of time to kill before festivities began, although not as much as we expected, considering the first band was to begin at 6, and prior to that would've been the pre-listening of Enochian Crescent’s new mini-CD.  We didn’t arrive early enough on the previous day to partake in this special opening event, and as it would turn out, we ended up idly missing round two as well.  In our effort to drink properly on this day, and in our enjoyment of our busmates’ Jallu/Pommac mixture, we also missed Firebox’s only own-label band of the festival, PRESSURE POINTS.  Although we could have totally enjoyed their aggressively progressive set, well, sorry guys, we had our priorities straight.  On a side note, in staying with the theme of inviting bands that are missing members due to their involvement in Swallow the Sun, we thought that another Firebox band, Plutonium Orange , should have definitely been on hand for this.  Oh well.

When we finally did arrive, we did so in high style—by a 12€ taxi from the hotel.  You couldn’t possibly expect an American to walk over a kilometer to the venue, could you?  We showed up just in time for BEFORE THE DAWN, fortunately, as I would have been disappointed to miss these masters of dark melody.  It seems like an easy thing to do nowadays, to skip their performances at festivals, or miss their club gigs in the capital, because you always know that a band as pervasive as BtD will afford you another live opportunity quite soon, somewhere.  As a result of their frequent outings, they do what they do in high quality.  Tight, memorable (if not ever-so-slightly cheesy) riffs and powerful sets of lungs to deliver the catchy choruses that adorn them, are characteristic for this band, and you can always count on a consistently professional performance.  While being the most mainstream-capable of the festival’s bands, they still manage to pile on the aggression and energy needed to be a respectable heavy band.  Were it not for our deep desire to consume the pleasures of the booze, I could’ve definitely stayed and watched the whole set.  Yet, once they announced my oft criticized “Monsters”, we decisively, and even symbolically, made our exit towards the bus, despite the original intention not to.  I’m sorry, but I really don’t need to hear about the monsters under their bed, or in their heeaaadd...

GHOST BRIGADE, on the other hand, made us really want to stay, and forget about the lure of cheap beers.  Despite a distinct lacking of rockstar good looks, the band performed like it was no one’s business.  I was surprised by the great moves from all the stringed players, as on both previous occasions I’ve witnessed them, it had been on the nearly stageless confinements of Helsinki’s infamous bat cave Lepakkomies, and the opportunities for this 6-piece to find movement there were limited.  It was great to finally see them on a deserving stage, and to watch as fans clapped and danced to their soulful, intense rhythms.  If one didn’t know better, it would've been hard to even notice that Aleksi (the other StS missing person) was absent from the keyboard duties, except that a great headbanging presence was not among them.  But the sound seemed no less full, and I can’t say if that was because the keys were played in the background—which I only recognized on occasion—or if they really even need this musical inclusion at all.  The final thing I noticed about GB was that their drummer was sometimes sporting drumsticks like the guy from Skepticism, and I wondered if this was a new fashion trend.

Another of the festival’s imported acts was next, and although I quite enjoyed the brief listens to IN MOURNING on MySpace prior to the gig, for their melodic Swedish style, I felt it was a bit contrived and not nearly original enough to take them fully seriously.  Still, I wasn’t going to miss seeing at least part of this somewhat exclusive gig, and they gave some really good reasons to stay.  One was the synchronized guitar flailings and cheerful stage wankery, which is always fun, or quite funny, to watch.  Quite fittingly, they also had some dramatic choral four-dude vocalizations, and these characteristics of their presence would have been so much more exhilarating if the music had been more familiar, or even more fitting to their stage attitude.  The singer sometimes reminded of Opeth’s Åkerfeldt, in his style and some touches of his voice, but at other times, he brought to mind the image of the guy from Spinal Tap .  The music also resembled Opeth at times, though much more melodic and atmospheric than progressive, and not having any especially complicated or deep musicianship.  At one point they started playing a strangely goth-tronic sounding intro to a song which was quite different from the more intense and somberly aggressive riffing otherwise presented.   I don’t know how well In Mourning is known, but was surprised to hear them announce “I think this is the first time we played for this big audience”, when it wasn’t all that big of a crowd in the first place, although certainly respectable.  Still, the show, and the tight bright red pants worn by one of the axemen, were interesting, and I could give a few more listens to try to discover some inherent value, but this time it unfortunately rendered itself as background music to our continued drinking escapade.

The faces in the crowd seemed a bit different than the previous day’s, and I wondered about how the distribution of sales had been.  It wasn’t an expensive 2-day fest, so I can’t agree with many excuses to miss one day or the other, whether you’re a local who can easily make it, or a traveler who came all this way for no Marduk.  The crowds on both days seemed nicely sized, all things considered, but Friday’s count managed to make it to only 400, a startling disappointment, and a mismatch from my perception of the evening.

One of the bands I was most eager to see when I moved to Finland, partly for the certain exclusivity, partly to repair the absence and abandonment I felt for the days when their singer used to front Amorphis , and mostly because they’re fucking awesome, was AJATTARA.  The problem with this great plan was that each time I’ve now seen them (the acoustic gigs noninclusive), they haven’t sounded fucking awesome.  Pikemminkin päinvastoin .  Their distinctly dark and personal heaviness doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to replicate live, but somehow it manages to become an indistinct wall of noise, and it sometimes takes me minutes to recognize a familiar song.  This is one thing that made their Firebox gig so triumphant for me—they managed to sound brilliant, like I’ve never experienced before.  This is the Ajattara I’ve been waiting to hear in their full gloriousness.

Still, having known Pasi as the introverted, thoughtful, silent guy of yesteryears, who would sit in the woods by himself and write lyrics based on the Kalevala, he seemed to have regressed into something more of a circus act or a punk.  Now newly skin-headed and noticeably beer-bellied, he spits on stage and towards the audience, gazes into the crowd with intimidating and foul looks, sneaks in a few possible gestures of sieg heil, and just otherwise gives me the heebie-jeebies.  He was either drunk on this night or else possessed, and he performed with a bitterly serious and hateful vibe that made me uncomfortable snapping his picture from the photopit.  While this disturbing visual and ideological side was unsettling, and conflicted in some ways with their superior sound and feral intensity, well, fuck it, I just retreated to the nearby confines of the K-18 gates and cheered and banged along enthusiastically to a convincing and winning performance.  A highlight of the weekend without a doubt.

Even though I had just seen them not long before, SAMAEL was the headliner I was geared to see, and it surely would have been a lot more difficult to find a “comparable” replacement.  And fuck, Samael, seriously… their playing was like a trance, one where I must respond with repetitive hypnotic bangs of the head like a soldier lacking any semblance of will.  Samael performs with true professionalism, the kind you expect of a legitimate headliner, and this was something Firebox Metal Fest³ desperately needed in order to be a serious festival, a contender.  Had they not made it, there would have been nothing of real memorial value.  But, as it so happens, they made it.  Samael – 1, Volcano – 0.

One of the best things about watching Samael is getting to watch their energizer bunny bassist Masmiseim.  This little dude is non-stop energy, leaping into the air and banging around with his instrument in an almost routine but still maniacal manner, and smiling all the way.  And Xytras is a madman as well, and can be seen pogoing high into the sky from his post in the back, interrupting the images flashing erratically on the screen to his rear, and exaggeratedly and voraciously pummeling at the standing drum kit.  One wouldn’t think these guys would still be as active as they were a decade or two ago, but they’ve perfected it, and they’re still in such great physical form.

The images on the wrinkly backdrop are simple and mesmerizing, and manage not to detract significantly from their forceful electronic sounds with imperial Germanic overtones.  I watch so intently that I forget my mouth is getting dry.  The songs from Passage still affect me most appreciably and nostalgically, but the repeated “connecting people” chorus line from the title track of “Solar Soul” is also quite cool to hear in the land of Nokia.  Samael’s set reminds me that I need to familiarize myself with the few newest albums, because it seems they haven’t missed a beat.

The rest of the night is spent recovering from a full night of bands we didn’t want to miss, and celebrating the victoriously pulled-off festival, and the fact that I victoriously avoided passing out before it was over.  We also took the opportunity to spread a hundred or so copies of Enslain to every poor sucker who headed to the exit after the show ended—and were compared to Jehovah’s witnesses, which was a riot!  We did spread those things like the plague, usually inconveniencing people over and over who had already taken one the day before, or months ago at FME.  At the end, again the good venue people had to eject us from the bar during closing time, but my spirits were high nonetheless.  I’m quite pleased that Firebox Metal Fest will become a yearly tradition for us, as it was such a relaxed setting, with relaxed rules, and really funny people from all sorts of backgrounds.  The bus trip, travel companions, and driver were the nail on the coffin, so to speak, so Olbifrus, ya oughta mark yer calendar for next year already, ‘cuz we’re coming whether ya like it ‘er not.  Now, how about another Selviytyjät Private MetalFest since we missed all the previous?  I think Seinäjoki won't be getting rid of us so easily now.