Hellfest is an annual music festival in the French town Clisson. It is held in the outdoor sports complex Val de Moine, about 400 km southwest of Paris. The festival hosts a variety of heavy metal, hard rock, hardcore and punk acts.
Our crew and editors could not resist to attend this extreme festival once again, so now we’d like to share our experience of this 12th edition of Hellfest with you!
| General | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 |
Day 1
Time to see some bands on the first day in Hell! The weather is great and we are ready! After a stroll from our campsite “far-far-away”, a.k.a. Camp Orange, we get our asses towards the infield.
Textures / Animals As Leaders
So it’s time for the first show of today! The first band we wanted to see is Animals As Leaders on Main Stage 1, but on the way there, I wanted to see a part of the Textures show next to it on Main Stage 2. They recently announced they’re throwing in the towel and this is their final tour, so a quite large crowd came out this early to see them and say goodbye. They played a good show and received a great applause, so it was a nice goodbye show.
In the meantime we managed to get ourselves a spot at the 4th row, ready for Animals As Leaders! The band members did their own soundcheck and every time Tosin Abasi showed his face, the crowd cheered. Clearly, the anticipation was high for this show. It’s been a while since we’ve seen them for the last time and we were anxious to see their new songs live and their progress as musicians. The show started with “Tempting Time”, played as tight as on the album, and they continued that trend. They played a really tight set with some slight variations to the album versions and so proved, once again, their mastership in musical composition and technicality. The drummer played with a clicktrack, but it’s quite impossible to play this kind of music without. The sound was great except for maybe a little too much drums and a little too less of Tosin Abasi‘s guitar.
The crowd’s response was great and soon the first crowdsurfers were spotted (and felt!). Which is rather rare for complex, technical instrumental music like this. Tosin didn’t waste too much time to chat with the crowd, a few thank you’s here and some introduction’s there, but his beautiful smile revealed that he was having a great time. They ended with crowd favourite “CAFO” and soon a circle pit started for a short while! The crowd tried to clap along with the quieter part of the song, which wasn’t easy, but fun to do. The atmosphere was good and the show ended with a lot of applause and respect. The first show we saw on Hellfest was immediately a very good one!
Týr
People can’t deny the consistency in the performances this band is giving the past couple of years. We have had the pleasure to see this band 5 times in the past 3 years alone and not once they failed to give it all to the crowd. The crowd pleasers were there, we danced and we sang to lyrics we do not comprehend or pronounce in a right way. In short: we left the marque tent with a big smile and a heart full of fighting spirit. The way we should feel after a show like that.
Helmet
Later that day we went to see Helmet in the Valley. I used to listen to them a lot in our late teenage/early twenties and have seen em 4 or 5 times already so it kind of felt a bit nostalgic. “We feel old” said a guy next to me in the audience and I smiled and nodded.
Helmet kicked in their set good with an uptempo older song (“Give It”, from “Meantime”, 1992) and immediately went over to a brand new song. They always had a high level of energy on stage and it was good to see that they still had it. They continued their set with a mix of old and new songs, after all they were touring with their new album now. Too bad the crowd’s reaction was rather lame. The cause of that might have been the heat, but Helmet didn’t care and kept playing with the same high energy level. That attitude rewarded Helmet, towards the end of the set, the people got more into it, had fun on the hit songs like “Unsung”, “In The Meantime”, “Wilma’s Rainbow” and “Pure”. The crowd responded at last and gave Helmet a nice and big applause. So a pretty decent show in the end! And just fun to hear those old 90’s alternative metal/hardcore riffs again.
Queensrÿche
Queensrÿche started off greatly with “Screaming in Digital” and kept the crowd pumped up by playing fan favorites like “I Don’t Believe in Love”, “Operation: Mindcrime” and “I Remember Now”. Todd La Torre did one hell of a job to make even the fans of former singer Goeff Tate forget all about the ongoing discussion between lovers and haters of the vocalist switch. He was able to hit all the right notes and together with the rest of the band, bring the crowd an amazing set of classic Queensrÿche songs. This will, without a doubt, be a show of Queensrÿche we won’t forget easily!
Devin Townsend Project
Slowly becoming an all-time favorite for all metalheads who like a bit more different, Devin Townsend is a must see band on every stage or festival you can find him on. The friendly ranting and lyrical projections these guys throw in the crowd on a tune that is absolutely vivacious, is at time breathtaking. The side note is that many of the hardcore DT fans will find this passage at Hellfest a bit more slow paced and would find it a bit regretful that he did not get to play at a more enclosed space like a marquee.
The funniest thing at every DT concert is that moment when “March of the Poozers” start and you see all the eyes in the crowd light up. Illuminating as ever!
Powerwolf
Cryptopsy
Later on we went to see Cryptopsy, who played at the Altar. Their show started at full throttle. Shout out to their bass player, who was headbanging himself a hernia. This amount of energy resulted in a mosh pit during the second song already! Needless to say the crowd was really pleased with this high paced old-school technical death metal machine. Their sound guy did a really good job and this only did justice to their performance. The Hellfest stage decoration, 10 distorted black and white images of an eye, on the ceiling between the stage lights, fitted well with this band, who only brought a backdrop with their logo. But somehow it visually worked nice together. Cryptopsy is currently on the “None So Live MMXVII” tour, on which they play their groundbreaking record, “None So Vile” (1996), in it’s entirety. So after 2 introduction songs, the sample of “Crown of Horns” played, which was a welcome 15 second break in all the moshpit madness.
So, they played a really tight show with close to perfect sound, and best of all, they demanded energy from the crowd instead of asking for it. And that’s what they received in the end!
Deep Purple
Deep Purple is one of those bands that every metalhead and every rocker should have seen at least once in their life. Not just because this band is considered to be one of the pioneers of our beloved music genre, but also because even after all those years, even with how old these guys have become (70+!), they can still deliver an amazing performance! And that’s exactly how their performance of Hellfest was: amazing! With songs ranging from “Time for Bedlam” (from the most recent album “Infinite“), to “Fireball” and even “Bloodsucker“, they brought a nice mixture of old and new. By also bringing “Perfect Strangers” and, of course, “Smoke On The Water” to the table, this show just couldn’t go wrong anymore.
Sabaton
Since their previous passage at Hellfest (2014) the power band Sabaton has changed a lot. Some new material came out and their stage looked bigger and more theatrical (the camouflage, the ammunition and machine guns to top it off). We gathered all our energy for one last time that day and tried to get as far to the front as possible. Surprisingly we did not get far as the crowd was packed and sang the best Frenglish we heard all weekend. The show of 60 minutes was done before we knew it. Sabaton did it again. Maybe a great lesson for future shows: give Sabaton a bit less time and Joakim will talk a lot less between the songs and bring you hit after hit.
Rob Zombie
Seeing Rob Zombie is (at least for us) always a bit of a gamble. Either you get a bang of a performance that ticks all the little boxes or it is a let down and just freak show you tend to forget afterwards. Surprisingly enough it was a bit of both this time. We were lucky good old Zombie brought the production with him to Hellfest, so the light show was spot on and at several times even blinding for the crowd. The over the top clothing helps to overcome the fact that while Rob is singing, he gets the tendency to sing one part of the chorus just a bit to late or to soon. We know he does this on purpose but only Beelzebub knows why.
The set was graciously balanced between the old and the new with the highlights being “Get High“, “Lords Of Salem” and “Scum of the earth“. The two covers “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “School’s Out” were a bit too much for us and just means to get the crowd singing. It did not work for us but a convincing attempt nonetheless.
Monster Magnet
Next up were the greasy space rockers of Monster Magnet at the Valley! Personally it’s one of my favorite bands. I’ve seen them for the first time back in 2003 and it’s the only band from that time that I’m still listening to today! But I’ll do my best to keep some objectivity in my review. Some…
As a fanboy I immediately recognized the “Dopes to Infinity” (1995) intro-sample played at the start of the set. They let it play for a while to build up the tension and finally released us after a good 2 minutes with the opening riff. The show was everything you’d expect from a good rock show: fast, dangerous and tons of coolness on stage. They brought along space sounds and visuals with images of space and naked women. There were blowing fans positioned between the monitors which resulted in this cheesy 70s-like hair-in-the-wind effect. A first climax was reached at the third song, “Powertrip” (1998). Then they took back some gas with some slower songs and a live version of a little known song called “I Want More” which was released as a bonus track on God Says No in the UK only. They have a lot of classics to choose from but it was nice to hear that they try keep things interesting with playing a song like this live. “I Want More” screamed Dave, and that’s what he got! As last song they played, not really to my surprise, their biggest hit “Space Lord” (1998). The intro took a bit too long because the crowd started chanting “Space Lord Mother Fucker” way before the song took off decently. Needless to say that this turned into a giant party, including moshpit, or should I say spacepit, and they received a really big and long applause and cries for more after their set. Hellfest policy is not to go over-time so they didn’t come back for an encore, alas.
In the end, they played a nice show and had a well balanced set with older and newer stuff. Dave Wyndorf proved once again that he’s a great frontman and knows how to please a crowd. Besides that it’s always nice to see one of the grooviest rhythm sections in rock, Bob Pantella (drums) and Chris Kosnik (bass). They also both play in a band named “The Atomic Bitchwax”, which you should check out if you hadn’t already!
Alestorm
Aah, Alestorm…a band that never seems to disappoint us live. Even though we were all a bit worn out from a long and heavy day; Alestorm sure knew how to get the party going again. With an atypical backdrop and an intro that could make you doubt if you were still at a Metal festival, they surprised us all, even though you can always expect the unexpected from them. The newer songs from “No Grave But The Sea” helped to make the party even bigger than it used to be in the past, but the song “Drink” definitely stood out from the rest. The crowd sang along enthusiastically and they almost burst out of the Temple once again! Alestorm and Hellfest prove to be an insane combination!
Review by Ilse, Bernd, Frederik & Jonas
Pictures by Ilse
