(Today we share with you Didrik Mešiček‘s report on the third day of the star-studded Tolminator festival in his home country of Slovenia, which ran this year in late July. It’s again accompanied by excellent photos, including another large Flickr gallery at the end, made by Katja Torkar/Bloodbat Photography. For the reports on Day One and Day Two, go here and here.)
They say all things come with their consequences. And that must be why I woke up with a fever on day three. Not exactly how you want to start the second half of the festival, but ah well. Time waits for no man and after consuming an obscene amount of cocaine (for legal reasons, I want to make clear that this is a joke) I felt normal enough to continue and start the day early for once as Patroness was opening at 11:50AM.
Tolminator does try and sort of make the days thematic by subgenres and so Friday had a bit of a stoner/doom vibe and the Belgians fit somewhat into that larger bracket. The band has only one released album, Fatum, from 2022, and therefore limited material but the vocalist is utterly deranged. For some reason his pants had one of the pantlegs cut off, he poured a bottle of ice tea on his head, and showcased a generally nihilistic approach to the entire show. At least you can’t say we weren’t entertained.
I can’t quite decide if his performance added or detracted from the band, which is actually not bad, and I enjoyed the doomy undertones added to their death metal sound. Patroness is a promising band that could be going places… just maybe don’t pour soft drinks on your head. It attracts ants, not fans.
Despite the hour still being utterly inappropriate for a rockstar like me, I was happy to see another band that seemed like they should be good. Nekrodeus comes from the Graz scene in Austria (much like Ellende who have performed last year). Following the black metal = good rule, the band didn’t disappoint and I particularly enjoyed some of the drumming, while the vocalist did his job rather well too as he yelled at me in German, and I’d say this was one of my favourite beach stage bands across the entire festival.
As a fairly small band they apparently haven’t found the money for backdrop yet so they put up a lovely hippie tie-dye shirt – it’s important to contrast your bleak music with some joy, I suppose. At some point, two guys with Tolminator-like masks and a wheelbarrow invaded the area under the stage so I can safely say Nekrodeus is impressive enough to bring forth all sorts of creatures from the various dead branches of evolution.
It was time for a break and some food, which meant skipping False Crown and Dark Insanity (sorry, Wyatt) but I was back for Nemesis – an all-female Serbian death metal outfit. I presume the band’s name is an allusion to the Arch Enemy song, but sadly their performance is not all that exciting. The ladies felt like they lacked some experience on stage and didn’t look very relaxed, which hindered their crowd engagement as well. Musically, they’re apparently supposed to be melodeath but the melody part wasn’t present as much as one would expect and most of their set was more or less similar and therefore not very interesting. Again, not a horrible performance, but not something I’ll remember.
More death metal, what joy! Necrot are the Americans who closed the beach stage on Friday and luckily they were an active band who played an engaging sort of death metal that got people headbanging. They filled up the floor quite well, with several hundred people watching them play and getting some quite active circle pits and mosh pits going.
Their sound can be quite old school death metal despite the band only existing for 13 years and some songs like “Drill the Skull” have that fun, if simplistic, switch between the riff and a chantable phrase. Very welcome when trying to make death metal actually interesting. With that, the third day was concluded on the beach stage and I was, while quite tired, still alive and that was a good sign.
And now for something completely different! A break from the pounding death metal was granted to us on the mainstage where the Polish Dopelord sent us into a dreamlike state with their chill stoner/doom metal, which felt brilliant. The bassist/vocalist Piotr Zin, who I’m told looks exactly like me, wore some silly purple pants and while he may not have been exactly on top of all of his notes this didn’t bother me at all and I quickly let myself be pulled into the music by the enchanting stonery rhythms. The highlight of which was “The Witching Hour Bell” with its haunting and repetitive chorus that stuck with me for the remainder of the festival.
Dopelord’s slow, dirty riffs and a soothing mixture of the clean vocals with the growls were the exact palate cleanser I needed and judging from the fairly sizeable audience at a still rather early hour a lot of the crowd felt similarly.
What followed was the absolute abomination that is Gutalax so I quickly exited the venue as that band is an insult to my intelligence. Naturally, as I returned the entire area was littered with toilet paper so I couldn’t pretend nothing had happened in the meantime as well as I had hoped to.
But on stage, it was time for more doomy goodness as the Ukrainian Stoned Jesus were next. Sometimes three blokes with their instruments is the exact minimalism you need and this is definitely the case with this band. As much as I enjoyed Dopelord before them, the Ukrainians impressed me even more, and despite their worries of how they’re going to follow up the aforementioned insanity of Gutalax this was, of course, a simple task – by actually playing music.
Stoned Jesus is probably most well-known for their 16-minute monster “I’m the Mountain” but it’s their faster-paced and contagious “Here Come the Robots” that steals the show for me. Another song that would not leave my head for days and another band I’ll be checking out a lot more from now on.
Suffocation! A band named for the feeling their sound gives you, presumably, as the aggression and energy can leave you feeling unable to breathe. Which is what most metal fans would describe as a good thing, I’d wager. The band started poorly, through no fault of their own, as they had some technical difficulties that delayed their show for about 10 minutes, but this didn’t seem to shake them up as they continued very professionally and got the crowd going in a pretty intense and violent circle pit. As iconic as this band is and as well as they play my problem is that I just… like nothing about them. Yet I can’t say anything bad about their performance, except that the guitar sound was a bit drowned out and unclear. Still, the Americans sure know how to deliver some proper death metal violence and for quite a few people this seemed to be a highlight of the day.
Friday’s lineup on the main stage has a schizophrenic feel to it – jumping wildly from a stoner band to a non-stoner band. As you’ve read, the previous band was very much non-stoner so you know what comes next – the iconic Electric Wizard. In their preparation, they were trying to set up a screen behind them, and at some point the Panasonic logo showed up which prompted the entire crowd to start shouting the company name for a solid minute. As the band started performing the cops were having some fun as well, pulling aside suspicious-looking people and fining them for their suspicious cigarettes.
EW insists on being very static so it’s actually a good thing the screen behind them started showing excerpts from various movies, all of which had a lot (A LOT!) of nudity and some attempts at various occult rituals. As we all know, Satan isn’t coming to your ritual if there’s no titties involved. He’s a busy man. Anyway, the band’s 80-minute set was the longest of the entire festival and it could have easily been cut down by half and we’d still get about the same experience, as nearly all of their songs sounded basically identical, while the vocalist was visibly struggling towards the end. I can’t say their music isn’t decently headbangy though, and I did enjoy the slow tempo of their dirty music while their biggest hit “Funeralopolis” even got a bit of a moshpit going.
The day ended on possibly the biggest reason I had for looking forward to the festival as the Irish Primordial, a true force of nature, spearheaded by arguably the best poet in metal, A. A. Nemtheanga, was set to close the day.
Much like a few bands before them they had some technical difficulties, one of them being the microphone not working very well at some point, but the band started with “As Rome Burns” and sadly the crowd didn’t really return the energy to the band, possibly still a bit high from the previous group. Nemtheanga is very active on stage, leading the band’s performance forward well and I loved singing along to nearly every song.
It was “The Coffin Ships,” one of the band’s most emotional and tragic songs, however, that was my personal highlight. I really wished the band would have played “Where Greater Men Have Fallen” as well, which might have made me cry (very kvlt manly tears naturally) but alas that’ll have to wait until another time. Primordial’s show perhaps came a bit too late in the day for the weary and intoxicated crowd as the energy just wasn’t there and the Irishmen would have deserved more.
One day closer to the end of the world and we are forging toward the sunset onto day four.
