ARMAGEDDON OVER WACKEN 2004
The
Wacken Open Air festival is a juggernaut concert that has
been going on for fifteen years, and the most recent incarnation
featured bands like ANTHRAX, DIO, DORO, MOTORHEAD, CHILDREN OF BODOM,
CANNIBAL CORPSE, and many others. The bands play for tens of thousands
of concert goers over the course of a few days at the northern end of
Germany, and attract over a thousand international journalists. To
commemorate this fifteenth anniversary of the yearly festival with a
three disc box set only makes sense.
I haven't heard a live recording sound this sweet in a long time. To be
honest, it sounds like it's loaded with studio overdubs, but there are
so many bands involved with this
Armageddon Over Wacken 2004, that I doubt that getting each band to re-record tracks for each song would have been realistic.
This 3-CD set serves mostly as a souvenir for those in attendance at
this mother of all metal festivals, because you can't really capture
the energy of a huge outdoor festival like
Wacken Open Air
in audio form. With that said, the collection of bands assembled is
really impressive, and the way the bands are grouped on the CDs is very
well thought out. Rather than mix the bands up and criss-cross formats,
the thrash and death bands are on disc 1, the power metal and
traditional appear on disc 2, while the current crop of underground
bands is packed onto disc 3.
Just wait until you hear DIO launch into "Holy Diver" or even (former
IRON MAIDEN singer) Blaze Bailey launch into "Fear Of the Dark", and
you'll get an idea of the power of this festival. Metal might be
sucking wind in the U.S., but it is alive and well overseas.
