Sonisphere 2009, Nijmegen (2)

I'm a bit behind with posting. Main reason is that my work is quite demanding at the moment. I often get home late and once at home I didn't always had heo energy or the mood to post.

To avoid that I'm getting too much behind I will post most of the pics with a minimum of backgroudinformation. Basically it will be some information about the happening/event and sometime what you'll see on the pic.This will be the last selection of pics from Sonisphere 2009, Nijmegen, Holland.

Korn was the fifth act and personally I found their performance the best of the evening. The sound was good, the reponse of the crowd was good and they played a swell set. The first 4 pics are from their set. The next 4 are from Slipknot. And the last two are from the set of Metallica.

In my next posting(s) I will post pics and some short comments from our visit to North Sea Jazz Festival.

(click on the pics to enlarge)

Sonisphere 2009, Nijmegen

This time an impression from Sonisphere 2009 which was held last June 20th and where N. and yours truly went to. Way different in terms of atmoshere, music and audience then Pinkpop where we went three weeks earlier before Sonisphere.

Anyway, we had great fun and it was an enjoyable day. When we arrived at the festival the weather didn't look very promising. The sky was grey and while we were waiting to get in some raindrops were falling, but lucky enough it got dry when we entered and the rest of the day it stayed dry and I even got a bit sunburned.

The bands that were performing were: Pendulum, Kamelot, Lamb of God, Down, Korn, Slipknot and headliner Metallica.

The festival had a bit of a false start. One band, The Sword already cancelled one or two weeks before the festival, and after the doors opened short before the festival was supposed to start the organization announced that Mastodon also couldn't make it on time from a show 12 hours earlier in Austria. So that left 7 bands out of the original 9.

So now the festival opened with Pendulum, a band originally from Australia but now relocated in the UK. I didn't know the band and when they start playing it made me wonder what this band had to do on a heavy metal festival. Their music sounded more like a dance act with their Prodigy type of music (they also did a version of Prodigy's Voodoo People see here). So this band seemed a bit weird choice to me in the line-up, but the singer compensated it with lots of enthusiasm and they got parts of the crowd moving and that was not a bad result, because it's always an ungrateful job to open a festival around noon when most people aren't ready yet to party.

The second band was Kamelot, a kind of sympho power metal group. This band had some sound problems which made that the singer sometimes wasn't hearable. Picture 6 and 7 were shot during Kamelot's performance of the song "The haunting" with a guest appearance of Simone Simons of the Dutch symphonic metal band Epica, which can be seen here. The band Epica is named after Kamelot's 2003 album Epica and Simone Simons made some guest appearances on two Kamelot albums.

The third band that entered the stage was Lamb of God, a heavy metal band from the USA formed in 1990. It was obvious that a huge part of the younger crowd came for Lamb of God, judging by the many teenagers wearing Lamb of God t-shirts. They gave a loud, heavy and energetic performance and parts of the crowd got quite exited judging by the several mosh pits. The singer Randy Blythe was shouting/growling at the tops of his lungs proving that it requires training to sing like that. If I would sing like he did, my voice would be deceased within two minutes.

To give you an idea about the mosh pits, I've embedded a video after the pics that I shot of a Mosh Pit during the Lamb of God performance.

After Lamb of God the band Down came on stage. They are also from the USA, from Louisiana to be exact. I didn't know the band but they played a good and heavy set.

The report and pics from Korn, Slipknot and Metalllica I will post in the upcoming second post which I planned to post soon.

For now enjoy the pics and video

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The funny streetband "Blaas of Glory"

For videomaterial from "Blaas of Glory" check here

Wonder from which band the woman in the middle is a huge fan?

The picture above and below to proof that the Kamelot's keyboardplayer didn't used hairspray

Just a little more patience

I'm suffering from a cold, so a little more patience, but there are soon some updates coming up with pics and impressions from Sonisphere, North Sea Jazz Festival and the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra which we visited last Sunday.

Now I'm off to bed. See you soon!

Pinkpop 2009 (3)

In my third post about the Pinkpop 2009 music festival this time some pics from the Dutch band Rowwen Hèze and Madness.

The band Rowwen Hèze was the second band we saw that Sunday. It's a Dutch band that sings in the local dialect of the province Limburg and where Pinkpop was held, so they were playing a home game. But the band is popular all around Holland and they have a good live reputation. Their music can be described as a mix of Tex-mex, Irish folk and brass band music. It's a real party band but they also do an occasional ballad.

After Rowwen Hèze we saw Madness. They played Pinkpop before in 1981, the year that U2 also played at the festival together with Fischer-Z, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and other bands. Ian Dury who also played at Pinkpop in 1981 did one of his last recordings before he died in March 2007 with Madness in 1999 as a guest vocalist on the track "Drip fed Fred" on the album "Wonderful".

As I already wrote on my music weblog BrownNoisemusic, Madness was great fun and there was a great party going on among the crowd while they were playing.

You can check some of the pics that I took below. With Madness we were standing a little further from the stage. That's why I don't have many close-ups. With the compact camera on maximum zoom it was often hard to make steady shots in a dancing crowd, despite the image stabilizer of the camera. Anyway enjoy the pics.

There will be one or two more post with pics from Pinkpop coming up. And there is also some other festival stuff on it's way. A week ago N. and I went also to the first Sonisphere wiht headliner Metallica and also Korn and Slipknot with some other heavy metal bands.
click on the pics to enlarge