This is the second day recap of the Milwaukee Metal Fest. If you landed here without reading the previous day, you can find the day one recap here, and you might wanna want to check out the day three recap here.
The second full day of the Milwaukee Metal Fest was where I officially got my feet wet, as I’d been working in North Texas and was unable to attend Day 1. Though there is free street parking on the back roads surrounding The Rave, there is no guarantee that you’d be lucky enough to snag a spot. Most of the private parking available near the venue came at a not insignificant cost – roughly thirty dollars per day. More enterprising travelers reported finding five-dollar parking several blocks away. Still, parking was not an issue at all for festival-goers who booked early enough to secure a room at one of the nearby hotels.
Getting to those hotels from the airport would almost require an actual vehicle, as public transport options in Milwaukee are adequate for most locals but hardly useful for out-of-towners. There are no trains, and The Hop Streetcar only operates in the downtown area, a good three miles east of the Marquette University area where The Rave is.
Now, about those hotels. The Rave is located caddy-corner from the Ambassador Hotel, a lodging known to true crime fans as the location of one of notorious local guy Jeffrey Dahmer’s many murders. The crossover between metal fans and serial killer buffs is certainly not lost on the crew in charge of Milwaukee Metal Fest, and one friend expressed disappointment at not being assigned to room 507, where Dahmer committed one of his myriad misdeeds in late 1987. Incidentally, the bar at the hotel is said to sell their wares at much more reasonable rates than The Rave does, and I’m an absolute sucker for the Art Deco style the hotel boasts, but I was never able to carve out the time to have a drink there.
Sadly, we barely missed Tesseract, a group that intrigued me ever since singer Daniel Tompkins guested on that stellar first album from Earthside, but we did make it in time to catch 3 Inches of Blood. Originally hailed as part of the power metal resurgence of the mid-2000s, these lovely Canuckleheads paid their dues for a good sixteen years before taking a nearly decade-long break in 2015.
That beauty sleep has done them plenty of good – while I never followed them too closely, I distinctly remember being very impressed with their mettlesome energy on stage. Now squarely in their mid-40s, 3 Inches of Blood perform with a fury that would leave bands half their age to wonder if being a professional metalhead is such a wise career choice. 3 Inches of Blood sound about three metric tons heavier – and deathier – than I recall from the last time I saw them, opening for Sabaton shortly before they hung it up for a bit. The adrenaline and rage they both embodied and induced were a helluva welcome to the fest that had captured my imagination for so many years, and nearly made me forget about the grotesque DFW traffic I’d been battling against just twenty-four hours earlier.
Between the Buried and Me was another band Milwaukee Metal Fest allowed me to see for the first time in roughly a decade and a half. As captivating as Coma Ecliptic and the Automata albums were, I simply hadn’t bothered to see them since they toured in support of The Great Misdirect back in 2010. Although I made the trek to the dreaded DFW metroplex specifically to see Cynic and the Devin Townsend Project more than once (the tour stopped in my neighborhood the very next day), BTBAM impressed the fuck out of me with their hate-fueled technicality. It was a bit overwhelming, though, and I could not help but wonder what heights they could reach if they would simply let the music breathe a bit more. I won’t take credit for channeling that sentiment into their collective skull, but I am grateful that they did make that move. Their output since chilling out a bit has been just impeccable, and their mastery of their craft is even more evident on stage than it is on record.
As cool as it was to see bands who were making their mark while I was in my 20s, it was even cooler to see bands from metal’s 80s heyday show the kids how it’s done. And if you need a lesson in that kind of violence, look no further than the Bay Area Thrash scene. Yeah, you know Testament and Metallica. But you might not know Death Angel. I didn’t, and I blame my youth, a language barrier, and a strict Catholic upbringing for that. I discovered metal when grunge and alternative were taking over, and if you were around back then, you remember that YouTube and streaming services were not there to make discovering music as easy as it is today.
I was young enough to still be given lunch money, I’d spend on CDs instead, but I wasn’t old enough to work. Flea markets and cheapo bins were my friends, and they didn’t always have a great selection. So while I don’t quite feel the need to hand over my bullet belt for saying this, it is with some trepidation that I admit that Death Angel is one of those bands I simply never got around to checking out. The latent Catholic in me considers that a venial sin, and Death Angel’s absolutely blistering set on the Blue Grape Music stage made me shop online for an appropriate tool for self-flagellation. How the hell can a bunch of dudes in their late 50s still look and perform like they’re still barely old enough to buy a pack of smokes? How the hell could they have created such face-ripping thrash without earning the notoriety their peers have? How could I have missed the boat on this admittedly legendary band, which was performing to an overflow audience? I don’t have the answers, but I say this with full confidence: no other band that weekend melted faces the way Death Angel did, and mind you, they were in some damn fine company. Not bad for a band that was filling in for another thrash titan, Destruction, who had to pull out in February.
As much as I absolutely adore his music, I’ve seen Devin Townsend enough times and in enough capacities to not get too hyped at the prospect of seeing him again, even if his shows are never anything less than entertaining, usually transcendental experiences, and always a feast for all senses. This is, however, a fest, and set times are often truncated, with only the headliners given the luxury of pulling out all stops. And pull out the stops he did – the laser light projections playing behind Heavy Devy were as artfully constructed to match his compositions as he is a loving and engaging entertainer, and his playfulness and laid back attitude towards the crowd while nonchalantly ripping out his vocal cords while both singing and screaming his heart out was an absolute pleasure to experience again. With such a mammoth discography behind him, it’s unreasonable to expect him to represent everything he’s ever done in under an hour.
He and his band – which still includes the legendary Mike Keneally on second guitar – opened their Sumerian Records Stage set with the title track from his most recent album, Powernerd, and proceeded to overjoy his adoring audience with such crowd-pleasers as “Kingdom,” “By Your Command,” and “Love?” Devy’s fans are some of the most committed out there, and one even put his nerdiness on full display by dancing around in the audience wearing an Among Us outfit. Known for his acerbic wit and wry self-deprecation, he kept the snarky quips lighthearted and uplifting, declaring (during “Truth,” because, of course, he did), that “I love metal, guys. And life is fucking beautiful!”
For all the love and goofiness Devy puts into every performance, keen observers did note the exhaustion that was so apparent when announced he’d take at least the rest of the year off once this North American tour concludes, most notably in how far back his whimsy was scaled during this set compared to the usual retinal circus that is a Heavy Devy show. First-timers, however, would never have noticed, and would only have reveled in the grandeur of seeing the Frank Zappa of metal entrance his audience alongside an actual Zappa alum. The man is clearly made for performing, and he loves the hell out of doing it, beaming and cackling while effortlessly exuding his magnificent artistry, even bringing his beloved cheapo theremin into the mix, and capping his set by showering the crowd with guitar picks. Restrained but still exhilarating, Devy’s set was both predicatably and surprisingly the strongest of the night.
Then it was back to the Bay Area for Exodus at the Blue Grape Stage. Another band that slipped my attention owing to my mom refusing to buy CDs for me because the bands who intrigued me had names like Death and Atheist, this set was my second Exodus experience, and man, did they deliver. With founding shredder/ part-time Slayer axeman Gary Holt clearly in charge of this operation, the band dynamics were on par with what you see in concert footage of yore. The stage was simply alive with punishing rage, with returning frontman Rob Dukes intimidatingly commanding the chaos with the kind of destructive control that Marco Aro had in his early days with The Haunted.
That said, Dukes lacks the warm connection with the audience that always shone through with devoted family man, friend, and overall kind-hearted dude Steve Souza at the helm. But c’mon, this is fucking Exodus – they don’t have it in them to not kill as if it weren’t just second nature for them. Destroying a stage is no different to Exodus than breathing. And I swear Jack Gibson can mutilate that clear acrylic bass guitar of his while sedated with his hands bound behind his back, and still not lose any precision. That man hopped off a stage taller than I am just to personally hand me a set list only a couple years ago, and then jumped back on that stage like a spry teenager for fuck’s sake. Even with only Gary and drummer Tom Hunting still around from the old days, the thrashers in the crowd were there for it. Perhaps owing to their later set time (or maybe just the fact that they’re fucking Exodus), these Bay Area legends had even bigger showing than their brothers in Death Angel, and left us fully convinced that they might be tied with Kreator for being the greatest live band in metal.
Readers may note that little has been said about the Copycat/ Reigning Phoenix Stage in the Rave Room. That is simply because if there was a band on stage, there was an overflow crowd, and as much as we love our metal, there was simply no way to safely get in there on Saturday. I did manage to sneak a peek at Nekrogoblikon and that famous goofy outfit of theirs, but I had to do so on my tippy-toes. Back to the Eagles Ballroom we went to catch Saturday night’s closer, Black Label Society.
As an avid mega-fan of Zakk Wylde’s country-metal trio Pride & Glory, I had pretty high hopes for his solo album Book of Shadows and his following band, BLS (whose debut I bought as a Japanese import, with the Johnnie Walker cover), but despite repeated attempts to appreciate them as their notoriety grew, they just never clicked with me. That said, Zakk Wylde is still the legendary Zakk Wylde, and Black Label Society has always been a joy to see live, and they’ve been kind enough in the past to allow us rock photographers to shoot their entire sets instead of kicking us out of the pit after three songs like most bands require. I don’t know if it’s Zakk or if it’s his chemistry with his bandmates, but BLS simply has a way of connecting with an audience that doesn’t require a whole lot of interaction, and that is a fascinating thing to behold.
It may have to do with his current physique – since going sober, he’s become fond of allowing those muscular calves to bulge through his kilt, and of donning a sleeveless shirt for no other purpose than to show off his biceps. He’s definitely no longer the scrawny, baby-faced kid he was when he started slinging for Ozzy before he was even old enough to drink, and he’d honestly look right at home on stage with freaking Enslaved.
Many people have criticized Zakk for soloing too much, but I find his soloing to be just mesmerizing – he’s fluid, aggressive, not too terribly showy, and he’s cut back considerably on his signature squealies. My favorite part of the set came when he was at the far stage-left corner, wailing away with his guitar behind his head during an extended solo. Without missing a note or a beat, he walked on over to down-center and joined fellow guitarist Dario Lorina – also shredding away behind his head – for an extended harmony solo, during which Jeff Fabb beat those cymbals as if they were naughty little school girls, and maybe enjoying that a bit too much for comfort. Black Label Society also displays a great amount of pride in their work, going so far as to still wear those bigass BLS rings and patches to demonstrate their dedication to their craft. Chilling, great stuff here, and a fitting way to close my first day of my first Milwaukee Metalfest.
