hell bent for metal

Image by Metal Chris via Flickr

I men­tioned way back that I was going to write a lit­tle bit about my prob­lem with Iron Maiden head­lin­ing Wacken 2008. I guess that time has finally arrived.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I recog­nise that Iron Maiden are one of metal’s pio­neers, yada yada yada. But they just don’t really do it for me. My post Judas Priest vs Iron Maiden: Choose Your Side, posted Jan­u­ary 2008 – that is, nearly 12 months ago – is the most pop­u­lar and most com­mented post on my enter the goat­lady blog, so it’s def­i­nitely a hot but­ton topic amongst fans of clas­sic metal.

My issue boils down to this: Iron Maiden toured around the world in 2008 under the “Some­where Back In Time” ban­ner play­ing only songs from their “clas­sic” 80’s albums. At a time when metal is under­go­ing a mas­sive resur­gence, when more new music is being released every week than ever before, when there are so many great bands out there in every sub-genre of metal that are cur­rent and pop­u­lar and great, it just seems back­wards that the main head­lin­ing act of the world’s largest and most respected heavy metal fes­ti­val is a bunch of dinosaurs who are only play­ing music from 20 years ago. Met­al­Sucks’ “Vince Neil­stein” refers to those kinds of bands as legacy acts and while I believe there is def­i­nitely a place for these kinds of bands, the head­lin­ing spot of Wacken is not that place.

Com­pare that with Obit­u­ary, who were my high­light act of the fes­ti­val. Obit­u­ary have a 25 year his­tory and are one of the vet­er­ans of the Florida death metal scene. They reformed after a 5 year hia­tus in 2003 and have released two albums and an EP in that time. Their Wacken set fea­tured mate­r­ial from through­out their career with a quite heavy empha­sis on their lat­est album. The crowd seemed to know much of the new mate­r­ial, responded really well to it, and while 1989’s Slowly We Rot will always be a high­light of the set, here’s a clas­sic band releas­ing new mate­r­ial that is cur­rent and rel­e­vant and dare I say it, fuck­ing awe­some and their fan base recog­nises that.

So let’s have a fresh, cur­rent and rel­e­vant lineup for 2009. It’s look­ing pretty good so far (and is sold out already!).

So here we are in Decem­ber, and 20 bands have been announced for the line up. Am I excited? Hell yes… let’s see – Machine Head we have already talked about. Recent announce­ments of Napalm Death, Motor­head and Nev­er­more make me very excited. Plus a num­ber of bands I’ve heard of (or heard a few songs) as well, that makes for 11 out of 20 bands that I am really look­ing for­ward to. The oth­ers will depend on any sched­ul­ing con­flicts. Or beer con­flicts. Or Metal Mar­ket conflicts.

A puz­zling announce­ment is Bul­let for my Valen­tine (sorry, not even going to link this). Sure, the tag “metal” core is applied to this band, but do they really belong at Wacken? There is quite a bit of vocal dis­sent about this choice on the Wacken forums, rang­ing from the usual swear­ing, threats of vio­lence and “I’m going to sell my tick­ets on eBay” — to strangely log­i­cal sug­ges­tions of “if you don’t like them, don’t watch them”.

I prob­a­bly shouldn’t com­plain, given there will be at least another 20–30 bands added to the bill, so 1 odd choice won’t mat­ter. But still… I won­der how many other bands could have filled that spot. Ah well, noth­ing is per­fect. Only hav­ing 2 arms and 1 liver for exam­ple. \m/