Festival season is officially underway. There’s something special about the first day at Copenhell. The asphalt hasn’t yet been coated in four days’ worth of beer, your voice is still more or less intact, and the battle vests look almost freshly washed. Wednesday is the day when you have to remind yourself how to walk 25,000 steps with a pint in your hand. And this year’s opening certainly didn’t disappoint.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Dogma – Madonna has always been a little black metal
I can’t imagine many better ways to start a sunny Wednesday than with four nuns in corpse paint.
Dogma is one of those bands that makes you start wondering how much of it is concept, label and marketing. The band describes itself as both documentary, cult and sect. It sounds almost like a Netflix series that was pitched a little too hard.
But then the thoughts stop there too.
Because it worked.
Corpse paint and a 28-degree heatwave look like a terrible combination on paper, but the energy was scorching from the first minute, and the crowd turned up in surprisingly large numbers for one of the festival’s earliest slots.
The smartest move came almost immediately.
A cover of Madonna’s Like a Prayer maybe shouldn’t work at Copenhell. But if you stop and think about the lyrics, Madonna actually wrote something that is almost more black metal than half the black metal scene. It was funny, theatrical and the perfect way to set the scene for the festival’s first day.
★★★★☆☆
Tom Morello – “Hasn’t he just been here?”
I heard several people say exactly the same thing.
“Hasn’t he just played?”
It almost felt that way. Tom Morello also visited Copenhell a few years ago, and on paper it looked like a repeat.
Luckily, it wasn’t.
Morello is still one of rock’s most original guitar minds. He can make a guitar sound like a DJ deck, a turntable or a printer about to explode. He plays the cables, switches the guitar on and off, pours screws over the strings and somehow makes the whole thing make sense.
Last time he seemed almost a little too eager to be the frontman.
This time he seemed more at ease in the role.
The concert was built like a finely tuned greatest-hits set, with plenty of Rage Against the Machine and a few detours into Audioslave. Bread and butter? Yes. But very, very good bread and butter.
One of the concert’s finest moments came when a young guitarist was invited on stage to play Morello’s iconic Arm The Homeless guitar. Several people around me thought it was his son. Whether that was true or not, he played insanely well, and Morello looked like a man enjoying the chance to stand slightly in the background for a moment.
It was one of those small moments that stays with you.
★★★★★☆
Six Feet Under – exactly how your parents think metal sounds
Six Feet Under are kind of funny.
If someone who had never heard metal before were asked to imagine death metal, it would probably sound something like this.
And that’s actually a compliment.
The band, fronted by former Cannibal Corpse vocalist Chris Barnes, delivered exactly the heavy wall of sound you’d expect. It got a little repetitive along the way, and a couple of technical problems took some of the momentum out of it.
But in the blazing sun, it still worked. Sometimes everything doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it just has to be heavy.
★★★★☆☆
Wednesday’s other highlights
Wednesday also brought strong performances from Konvent, who once again showed why they belong on the biggest metal stages, while Mammoth delivered one of the day’s most tightly played rock shows.
The festival also got underway with solid sets from Alice Cooper, Mastodon and, of course, Iron Maiden, who brought the first day to a suitably gigantic close.
Reflection
One of the best things about Copenhell is that the festival doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is.
You can start the day with black-painted nuns, hear one of the world’s most inventive guitarists in the afternoon and end the evening with the world’s biggest heavy metal band. It doesn’t necessarily make sense on paper.
But it does on Refshaleøen.
And Wednesday was a reminder of why Copenhell is still one of Denmark’s most complete festivals.
