After all the excellent metal and rock shows and festivals that are crammed into my schedule, it felt somewhat refreshing to come across an event that focuses on a different part of the alternative and dark scenery. Hellsinki Industrial Festival came in my sights, a festival organised by Elektrik Products, Club Infektio and Findustry, quickly boasting with some of the biggest names in the industrial/EBM/Gothic scene of today. The event that took over Helsinki spread over 3 nights and 3 locations and brought us a very pleasant weekend!

The second full day of the Hellsinki Industrial Festival I arrived just in time to see the young lady in rather sexy white outfit come on stage and wave a led light strip around on the tunes of the Blastromen (***) track Into The Void. The Finnish synth duo is quite the interesting sight to behold live with only purple blue blacklights, the few bars of light behind them lighting up every now and then and the leds mounted on their jackets often flaring up in patterns and different colors. The music itself makes me think of some old school Daft Punk tracks, including the heavily distorted robotic sounding vocals. A cool different band to get day number 2 kicked off!

Next band is yet another Finnish one and actually the most metal band of the whole weekend. Black Light Discipline (***) plays the kind of industrial metal/rock that sounded a lot in the direction of their countrymates Turmion Kätilöt when I checked some of their videos out. So I was kind of looking forward to enjoy a cool set of almost party metal songs. Disappointingly so, the band actually seems to focus more on an emotionally laden and often melancholic performance. It wasn’t a bad show, but when you were expecting something else, it’s easy to get maybe a little bit bored when they embark on yet another similar sounding song.

The underwhelming show of the earlier band, made me being completely blown away by the Estonian band Freakangel (*****). They absolutely destroyed and ruled the weekend in my humble opinion. The perfect blend of metal/metalcore with high amounts of industrial/electronic music simply blew the roof off the place. Frontman Dmitry Darling was simply a canister chock-full of energy that never seemed to end. He jumped and danced around the stage, put tons of passion in his vocal performance and pushed the show to new levels. The interaction between the band members was a great thing to see and it was clear that they really enjoyed being together on stage playing their music live. It was a bit of a pity that we rarely got to see drummer Tanya properly due to all the smoke, because when I caught glimpses of her, it was infectious to see her joy in playing. I probably could go on for a while still, but shortly said this is a band you need to check out, because they are doing some great things.

Closer of the festival weekend and headliner of the Saturday was the Belgian Suicide Commando (****). Being around already since the late 80’s, this is an almost legendary outfit in the industrial and aggrotech scene. Classics like Bind. Torture. Kill. and See You In Hell of course were performed in a setlist of heavy hitters one after the other. Main man of the outfit, Johan van Roy, showed up on stage wearing a mask ending in a huge point, as if he went through the outfits used in some of Lady Gaga‘s music videos to find something to use, playing the volatile The Gates of Oblivion to kick things off.

Soon that mask disappeared and we got to enjoy the signature crazy faces that Johan regularly pulls throughout a set of high energy and close interaction with the crowd. An absolutely perfect end to a great festival. Party on motherfuckers and hopefully see you all again next year!

For more pictures go here!