Dream Evil
Epic Fest - 2023
Text: Tobias Nilsson Photo: Lunah Lauridsen
Dream Evil was the last band of the day and of the entire first year of Denmark’s brand new power metal festival, Epic Fest.
Did that make them the headliner over all headliners? Good question. As we’ve already touched on in another review, Rhapsody Of Fire played just before Dream Evil, so just which one of these two bands were the actual main event of the day? I guess that’s up to the reader to decide.
“We’re gonna play some Swedish Eurovision metal, the kind that’ll get you beaten up in Finland.”
- Niklas ‘Nic Night’ Isfeldt (vocals)
Due to technical complications earlier in the day, Dream Evil didn’t hit the stage until around 40 minutes after their announced time. On one side, I commend the festival for giving each band their allotted time no matter what, but I can’t help but think that this came back to bite Dream Evil in the ass, as several people had had to leave - even though Roskilde is a fairly large town, nighttime commute isn’t the best, so if you were relying on getting home by train or something, you couldn’t hang on indefinitely.
I think that it might also have given the band a bit too much time in the bar. No, they weren’t out and out drunk or unprofessional in that sense, but the focus certainly seemed a bit off, and they were Swedes stuck in Denmark after all, so you do the math…
To add to the confusion, the band hit the stage before the intro was played, which resulted in them just standing around looking like they didn’t know what to do with themselves, giving the rest of us an unsure feeling about the whole endeavour.
Finally, it was time for the first song to commence, and Immortal was the chosen way to go. Makes sense, as it’s a chuggy, heavy song with a good drive and a simple chorus that can quickly pick people up in a sing along. More surprising was that the weight of the set was clearly set for their first album, DragonSlayer, and their latest album, Six, didn’t get a single track onto the setlist. I get that this was essentially a place where it’s good to stick to the classics, but you could seriously not get one single track from that album on there? Maybe there’s a story to this that I don’t know about, but it seems weird.
“Do you want more songs with “metal” in the title?”
- Isfeldt (vocals)
“How metal are you?”
- Fredrik ‘Ritchie Rainbow’ Nordström (guitar)
“Are you metal?!”
- Isfeldt (vocals)
I’ll admit, I’ve never been a big Dream Evil fan, but they did what they were supposed to do when playing, keeping things lively and moving along. It’s just that they make it so hard for me to take them seriously, but maybe I’m not supposed to? That’s a problem, I just don’t know. I mean, they’d clearly not had a wardrobe discussion before hitting the stage, but that can be a choice as well, I suppose.
And then, while they do chat on stage, tonight it at least was a lot of weird jokes told in Swedish with a heavy Gothenburg accent, so I really don’t know who it was supposed to land with, given we were in Denmark. Then again, much of it was just going back and forth between Isfeldt and Nordström, so maybe it was an internal thing? Or was it again leading back to that delay, and whatever the band had passed the time with until they got to play?
Then there was the joke about the time Isfeldt tried to impress his daughter that he could speak Danish, and being instantly corrected by the kiosk attendant they were standing by, that hell no, he couldn’t! Fine by itself, but why did they need to repeat it verbatim later in the set?
And that’s not even mentioning that the mic ran out of batteries and Isfeldt asked the audience for a couple of 9 volts, or the guitarists dropping their pics.
Yeah, for the music, you can always take it or leave it, that’s up to you, but the performance? That was a bit of an unmitigated disaster. The fans that stuck around still looked like they were having fun, and sang along in the right places, but compared to some of the shows we’d already had this weekend, it was hard to see why this band got the honour of closing things down.
Setlist:
Immortal
United
In Flames You Burn
Crusaders Anthem
Live A Lie
The Prophecy
Heavy Metal In The Night
Fire! Battle! In Metal!
The 7th Day!
Made Of Metal
Children Of The Night
H.M.J.
The Chosen Ones
Chasing The Dragon
The Book Of Heavy Metal (March of The Metallians)
Did that make them the headliner over all headliners? Good question. As we’ve already touched on in another review, Rhapsody Of Fire played just before Dream Evil, so just which one of these two bands were the actual main event of the day? I guess that’s up to the reader to decide.
“We’re gonna play some Swedish Eurovision metal, the kind that’ll get you beaten up in Finland.”
- Niklas ‘Nic Night’ Isfeldt (vocals)
Due to technical complications earlier in the day, Dream Evil didn’t hit the stage until around 40 minutes after their announced time. On one side, I commend the festival for giving each band their allotted time no matter what, but I can’t help but think that this came back to bite Dream Evil in the ass, as several people had had to leave - even though Roskilde is a fairly large town, nighttime commute isn’t the best, so if you were relying on getting home by train or something, you couldn’t hang on indefinitely.
I think that it might also have given the band a bit too much time in the bar. No, they weren’t out and out drunk or unprofessional in that sense, but the focus certainly seemed a bit off, and they were Swedes stuck in Denmark after all, so you do the math…
To add to the confusion, the band hit the stage before the intro was played, which resulted in them just standing around looking like they didn’t know what to do with themselves, giving the rest of us an unsure feeling about the whole endeavour.
Finally, it was time for the first song to commence, and Immortal was the chosen way to go. Makes sense, as it’s a chuggy, heavy song with a good drive and a simple chorus that can quickly pick people up in a sing along. More surprising was that the weight of the set was clearly set for their first album, DragonSlayer, and their latest album, Six, didn’t get a single track onto the setlist. I get that this was essentially a place where it’s good to stick to the classics, but you could seriously not get one single track from that album on there? Maybe there’s a story to this that I don’t know about, but it seems weird.
“Do you want more songs with “metal” in the title?”
- Isfeldt (vocals)
“How metal are you?”
- Fredrik ‘Ritchie Rainbow’ Nordström (guitar)
“Are you metal?!”
- Isfeldt (vocals)
I’ll admit, I’ve never been a big Dream Evil fan, but they did what they were supposed to do when playing, keeping things lively and moving along. It’s just that they make it so hard for me to take them seriously, but maybe I’m not supposed to? That’s a problem, I just don’t know. I mean, they’d clearly not had a wardrobe discussion before hitting the stage, but that can be a choice as well, I suppose.
And then, while they do chat on stage, tonight it at least was a lot of weird jokes told in Swedish with a heavy Gothenburg accent, so I really don’t know who it was supposed to land with, given we were in Denmark. Then again, much of it was just going back and forth between Isfeldt and Nordström, so maybe it was an internal thing? Or was it again leading back to that delay, and whatever the band had passed the time with until they got to play?
Then there was the joke about the time Isfeldt tried to impress his daughter that he could speak Danish, and being instantly corrected by the kiosk attendant they were standing by, that hell no, he couldn’t! Fine by itself, but why did they need to repeat it verbatim later in the set?
And that’s not even mentioning that the mic ran out of batteries and Isfeldt asked the audience for a couple of 9 volts, or the guitarists dropping their pics.
Yeah, for the music, you can always take it or leave it, that’s up to you, but the performance? That was a bit of an unmitigated disaster. The fans that stuck around still looked like they were having fun, and sang along in the right places, but compared to some of the shows we’d already had this weekend, it was hard to see why this band got the honour of closing things down.
Setlist:
Immortal
United
In Flames You Burn
Crusaders Anthem
Live A Lie
The Prophecy
Heavy Metal In The Night
Fire! Battle! In Metal!
The 7th Day!
Made Of Metal
Children Of The Night
H.M.J.
The Chosen Ones
Chasing The Dragon
The Book Of Heavy Metal (March of The Metallians)
Dream Evil
