Now it was time to move into the more known section of the evenings’ entertainment, even as we still stayed in the upcoming section.
The band was Caro from the north-west of Denmark, and their latest public achievement was to qualify during the Danish try-outs to the Wacken Metal Battle competition, a placing which had earned them even more fame in the Danish homes.

“Have you had anything to drink tonight?”
- Michael Olsson (vocals)

One way of telling that we were now moving into the big league was that Caro had managed to collect the largest audience of the day so far, and yes, we had had something to drink!
The reason Olsson asked though, was that the band and he was conducting a beer competition straight after the question, a competition which I must admit that I did not fully comprehend the rules of, but there was a lucky guy in the front-row who won a bottle of beer from the band, so at least it wasn’t false advertisement.
Neither was it false in the last competition the band would host this evening; at one point Olsson asked for the most beautiful girl of the audience to come up on stage, and after a moments hesitation two blondes went up there together and danced/headbanged for a while. They seemed a bit tipsy, but were apparently good enough at what they were doing to make the band forget about the CD they had promised as a reward. As Olsson later realized that he was still holding the CD in his hand after the girls had left the stage, he decided to do the honourable thing by tossing it out to an awaiting crowd in front of the stage, where some lucky guy had at least one more disc in his collection by the end of the night.

“You want more?! Well, we don’t know any more.”
- Olsson (vocals)

Caro wasn’t all about competitions and that kind though, even though I do admit that Olsson was a formidable frontman and kept the spirit up during song changes with little comments and what you have already read about.
No, Caro was also about delivering some hard-hitting modern thrash groove metal which went straight for the throat, and they were definitely about handing it out in a very convincing manner. Again, Olsson springs to mind as he delivered a very strong performance and had both a great presence and a good deal of humour, a very powerful combo in a frontman if I may say so. Not that we should forget about the rest of the gang either, who also played their part in getting this show on the road and keeping it there. The show worked very well with their style of music, and was intense enough to keep the crowd banging away till the end.
Musically, I’d say that this isn’t really my sort of thing so I would probably not listen to it on album, but it worked well enough for a live show most of the way. Halfway through though, I felt it was getting a bit too repetitive for my taste, and that of course took away from the overall experience, but as I said, this may simply be because the genre as a whole only rarely speaks to me...

Still, it must also be said that it was a delight to see a band which, and I have mentioned this in other reviews from the earlier days of Dark Mental Festival, was genuinely having fun while playing for us. This is something we need more of, and Caro was the best at this during the entire day.

Setlist:

I Will Fight
A Dream Come True
Without A Name
All Or Nothing
World Purification
Away Melts The Human Brain
My Black Widow
My Ending
Like A Sickness