Amon Amarth 

Twilight Of The Thunder God Scandinavian Tour

Entombed – support act
Kulturbolaget
Malmoe
Sweden
16/10 – 2009

Reviewed and live pictures by: Anders Sandvall

24 & 25 July 2009

Regulars of my reports will remember me as a dedicated Wacken Open Air fan who loves the atmosphere, the metal friends I have made, the diversity of bands performing and the whole experience of ‘Metal Mecca’. Over the years I have been able to cope with the discomforts of survival style camping and weather extremes, but last year I broke off my love affair when Wacken reached record crowd numbers making it mostly impossible to see what was happening on stage clearly without the help of screens and time consuming to move from one stage to another. The introduction of an outdoor movie theatre outside the festival area to cope with the increased crowd was a joke.

The thought of spending another three expensive days carrying around six kilograms worth of camera equipment, writing notes and trying to take photos of bands I couldn’t see anyway had me vowing not to return to Wacken for the 20th anniversary.

Being an obsessive compulsive list writer, I started compiling a calendar of European metal festivals when I returned to Australia and as line-ups were announced this year I started sorting through the festivals with either my favourite bands or bands on my live wish list. As it turned out, this year was mostly about seeing bands on my live wish list and those bands were playing Finnish festivals–perfect. I was traveling alone this year so I was happy that I was going to a country where I feel 100% safe and at home even though the language is quite beyond this tri-lingual girl.

I was on the train to Oulu a couple of days after flying into Helsinki. The 5-hour trip was made enjoyable by picturesque Finland. There’s isn’t a part of this country that isn’t a shade of green and coming from Australia it was a nice change to the shades of browns and reds associated with our landscape. For most of the journey I had my face pressed hoping for my first glimpse of the local fauna on this trip–the roadkill squirrel outside my Helsinki hostel didn’t count.

Candlemass
Dynasty Of Doom Tour Sweden
Trouble – Special guest
Angel Witch – Support act

Kulturbolaget
Malmoe
Sweden
26/9 – 2009

Reviewed and live pictures by: Anders Sandvall

Here is an interview with the German Trash metal act Cripper. When I heard the band's second album I felt that I had to talk with this band. So here we go, here comes the past, present and future of Cripper. I think all fans of thrash metal are gonna love Cripper and their music.

Interviewed by Anders Sandvall
Thanks to Bjorn at CMM Gmbh for setting up this interview.
Thanks to CMM Gmbh for providing promo pictures of the band.

The Jalometalli Open Air Metal festival has gained its status as well as place on the Finnish festival map. Although there are plenty of metal oriented festivals arranged all around in Finland, the Jalometalli festival has found its own style and approach in the metal festival offering in Finland. It doesn't rely on the current hot names on the market like Volbeat and so on, instead the festival offers a more interesting line-up mostly consisting of old school thrash metal and of course death and black metal by having bands which have either never or rarely visited Finland. Especially several 80s thrash metal legends such as Whiplash, Agent Steel have never been seen on the soil of Finland. Now it is about time. Therefore the Metal-Rules.com team made a real assault at Jalometalli by witnessing plenty of killer bands and seeing the general atmosphere and here is the result.

                           Article by Niko Karppinen, Arto Lehtinen, Luxi Lahtinen

                                                     Pics by Arto Lehtinen