Festival Reports
Tuska organization killed it again, considering the line-up with a solid combination of established and classic names with modern and upcoming greats. Staying in touch with their roots and history, while at the same time looking to the future and moving forward. The first day was filled with surprises and solid shows from both sides of the aisle.
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Punks not dead, but it does have a museum! Rather fortuitously, this is situated in Downtown Las Vegas, the home of the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. This week the museum is doing very well thanks to the legions of punks flocking to it because they are in town for the festival. You can even get guided tours by punk musicians you may or may not have heard of, who will regale you with amusing anecdotes from back in the day!
At the museum you can see any number of old fliers, instruments, clothing, posters etc. from ye olden days of punk right up to more recent times, both British and American. You can even get the opportunity to play guitars donated by various punk rock luminaries through their own amps. My favourite exhibit though had to be the recreation of the garage that Pennywise used to rehearse in! Complete with its own bar and tattoo parlour the museum is well worth a look and gives you a couple of hours relief from the unrelenting Vegas sun.
This brings me to what we have all really come for – The Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival experience, and when I say experience, that is what it truly is. To fully appreciate the festival, you do have to embrace the experience as a whole. The festival is based in Downtown Las Vegas, which is hardly the sanest place on earth to begin with. To walk down Fremont Street, you experience any number of “street performers”, a vast majority of which are almost naked and doing bizarre things, a very high and noticeable homeless contingent and the just plain crazies! Add to this mixture a few thousand punk rock fans, and you have the ingredients for one mighty fine weekend!
Although the Festival runs for three days, Saturday 27th – Mon 29th May, events start to happen on the Thursday for the early arrivals. The Music Festival itself is split into three entities, the main festival itself (2 stages over 3 days), nightly club shows which take place after that day’s headliner has played and pool parties which take place each day before the main festival starts. Yes, there is a bowling competition as well.
To fit everything in, you have to be prepared to run yourself into the ground for 4 days with barely any sleep and the ingestion of copious amounts of alcohol. And even then, you probably won’t see or do everything you want to. The main festival takes place in its own dedicated grounds and has two stages which are quite close together, so there is no problem in getting from one stage to another. Everything is timed to perfection as one band finishes, another will shortly begin on the other stage. The bands are quite a mixture and shows the depth and breadth of what can be considered “punk” these days, but there is truly something for everybody. If you don’t want to watch a particular band, well just wander round the site and get something to eat and drink at the reasonably priced vendors or browse the various merchandise stores in the marketplace area.
Rather than describe every band I saw, these are my top ten moments of this year’s Punk Rock Bowling, in no particular order:
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It’s that time of the year again: The Finnish festival summer gets kicked off properly with the black metal festival Steelfest! The gathering of the wolves of the underground is easily a yearly homecoming for anyone who has a love for the extreme and obscure. And as always, the lineup is massive with an impressive list of 46 bands filled with cult bands, legends of the underground scene, and exclusive and rare performances.
After last year’s extended anniversary edition, they decided to permanently add an extra day to what used to be a 2-day celebration of the underground. After a first day of great shows, we got back to the festival ground early to catch as many bands as we could. Sadly we missed out on Rienaus, Gaurithoth and Ritualization because we simply couldn’t get there that early, but luckily there was more than enough to fulfill our need for extreme and underground music…
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It’s that time of the year again: The Finnish festival summer gets kicked off properly with the black metal festival Steelfest! The gathering of the wolves of the underground is easily a yearly homecoming for anyone who has a love for the extreme and obscure. And as always, the lineup is massive with an impressive list of 46 bands filled with cult bands, legends of the underground scene, and exclusive and rare performances.
After last year’s extended anniversary edition, they decided to permanently add an extra day to what used to be a 2-day celebration of the underground. 2 days into the fest, we got back to the festival ground as early as we could to catch as many bands as possible. Though by hanging around and party with Carpathian Forest the night before, we sadly rolled out of bed too late and missed out on Ruttokosmos, Vornat and Sotherion, luckily there was more than enough interesting stuff to come and to fulfill our need for extreme and underground music…
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It’s that time of the year again: The Finnish festival summer gets kicked off properly with the black metal festival Steelfest! The gathering of the wolves of the underground is easily a yearly homecoming for anyone who has a love for the extreme and obscure. And as always, the lineup is massive with an impressive list of 46 bands filled with cult bands, legends of the underground scene, and exclusive and rare performances.
After last year’s extended anniversary edition, they decided to permanently add an extra day to what used to be a 2-day celebration of the underground. So on ascension day, we already got to make the trip to Hyvinkää for a first day of exciting shows…
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Finally! After several times having to postpone due to the pandemic, we have a sequel to 2019’s well received Hoarsefest, the small festival put together by the Oceanhoarse guys. A fest that heralds the local Finnish up-and-comers in the metal scene and provides clinics by renowned names from that same scene like… We sadly had to miss out on the first couple of bands, and Thy Row, but I’m pretty sure they all killed it!
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Every year again, Elektrik Products brings the best and most exciting bands from the industrial, goth, EBM, (dark) elektro, darkwave and cyber scene to Finland for Hellsinki Industrial Festival! After last year’s edition on the new location, we get to return to Ääniwalli for yet another exciting fest there. With major artists like suicide commando, Faderhead, Agonoize, Centhron and Gothminister besides a nice slab of more fan favorites and surprisingly different artists, this promised to be yet another massive party!
Due to a late night and traffic not working along, we ended up missing out on Matt Hart opening the 2nd day of this year’s edition, but luckily there was still plenty to enjoy!
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Every year again, Elektrik Products brings the best and most exciting bands from the industrial, goth, EBM, (dark) elektro, darkwave and cyber scene to Finland for Hellsinki Industrial Festival! After last year’s edition on the new location, we get to return to Ääniwalli for yet another exciting fest there. With major artists like suicide commando, Faderhead, Agonoize, Centhron and Gothminister besides a nice slab of more fan favorites and surprisingly different artists, this promised to be yet another massive party!
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Steelchaos day two was clearly the main day for many people as it clearly drew the biggest crowd with a fantastic lineup from old school heavy metal to skull crushing death metal and to good ol’ Finnish black metal. Even though the more classic heavy metal acts all delivered, it was very clear that still this festivals target audience enjoys more of the extreme music when the biggest hordes gathered during the more extreme metal bands. The festival area concept still worked well with minimal lines to get beer or food but the toilet situation was a complete disaster when men’s inside bathrooms were out of commission, that’s really the only complaint about the arrangement of the festival, just sort your shit out, quite literally when it comes to proper toilets for drunk metalheads to do their needs in.
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After the glorious and epic return of Steelfest last spring (check out the reports here, here, here and here), now it’s time for its little brother (or sister if you so will) Steelchaos! This would be the first edition that takes place with a proper live audience at the “new” location. And on top of that, there is a stellar line-up again, with compared to the last edition of Steelfest, way more variety and room for other genres like death metal and traditional heavy/speed metal. And with the cherry on top, the Finland exclusive show of Venom Inc. celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Venom classic ‘Black Metal’.
But that was for the next day. First we traveled down to Hyvinkää, to the all too familiar Steelfest grounds where the indoors venue would be the place for Steelchaos from now on. With on the Friday a lovely line-up with Finnish natives Satan’s Fall, Malicious, Flame and Barathrum, topped off with the Austrian black/death metal maniacs Belphegor and Swedish melodic death/black metal legends Sacramentum, we got a proper start of 2 days of underground metal madness!
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