A new day dawned, and with it came more metal.
Our first band for the day was Arkona, and morning is actually saying too much as the time was a quarter to six in the afternoon.

I must admit that I hadn’t spent much time getting better acquainted with this band since their show at Metalfest earlier this summer, so the only songs recognised were still Goi, Rode, Goi and Stenka Na Stenku, and sadly our dear Miss Maria Arhipova (a.k.a. Masha Scream) wasn’t one for introducing titles this day.
She was however one for screaming her lungs out during the songs, as well as dancing and jumping around at any given moment, and this day it was guitarist Sergei ’Lazar’ who the best one in the band to follow her wild example. While Arhipova was dancing around in circles, he was often seen jumping up and down and smiling broadly to the crowd.
As you can hear, at least some of the band members were very active during the show, and as you can see by the photos the clothes they wear aren’t exactly made for frolicking in the sun. Heck, Arhipova even has a dead animal wrapped around her shoulders! Luckily for them, this day proved to be far less warm then the previous days of the festival had been; had it not I’m afraid there would have been a high chance of someone collapsing up there!

But we shouldn’t forget about the crowd, now should we?
I was actually impressed with the amount of people who had shown up for this gig. Fair enough, it was far from packed, but there were still a whole lot more people standing here than I had expected! And in all fairness, standing is an understatement; even though Arhipova had some trouble getting through at times there was still a very wild response from the crowd most of the show. Even though the vocalist called out for a wall of death for Stenka Na Stenku (which literally means wall to wall) she wasn’t heard, but the crowd instead offered up a wild moshpit which stretched far across the field.
Later on, Arhipova would ask the crowd to jump, and this time there was no communication problem; everyone who had recently thrown themselves in the mosh were now just as fervently jumping up and down. Heck, I even saw a guy jumping while having another person on his shoulders!

There were some downsides to the show though; Arhipova's growls were not nearly as convincing as they had been at the last show, and also nowhere near what she does on album, and this took out a lot of the power of the show I thought. Also, there were minor issues with the sound; at one place Arhipova was beating a drum, but this was impossible to hear in the crowd.

Still, I was entertained enough to enjoy myself reasonably through the whole show. This will, however, not be one of the shows which will stick with me down the road...