“Seriously, I got to ask you something. Metalcamp is a motherfucking metal festival, yes?! Well, it doesn’t look like it down there, we got to do something about that!”
- Christian ‘Chrigel’ Glanzmann (vocals/various instruments)

After the spoken prologue of their Helvetios album, Eluveitie took the stage in all their multitude and continued on with the title track of the very same album. The music was rocking, and even though it wasn’t exactly me, I was able to appreciate it more than usual because of the unusually good sound and mix the band had gotten – for once most of the details got through and weren’t lost in the mud and gloom of too much bass and drums!
This part really helped the band along in my eyes, but what would have helped even more was if the large orchestra had actually been doing something on stage. Fairs fair, Glanzmann was intense in his performance and seemed to have a pretty good grasp on how things were supposed to be done, but his bandmates, both male and female, were sadly only interested in getting the music across and not much else; where this might be a good attribute on an album, one should definitely strive for more under live circumstances to keep the audience interested.

Had Eluveitie as a whole had a better grip on what it takes to play live (something which they have had in the past, I’m not sure what has happened), this could have turned into something truly earth-shattering!
You see, the crowd gathered for the show simply blew me away! It easily was the largest crowd I had seen that day, possibly the largest one so far at the festival this year even, so there was no mistaking the popularity the band held here.
Even so, the Slovenian crowd was taking it rather easy while listening to these Swizz metallers (yes, yes, who like folk music as well) – sure, there were a few spread crowd surfers going by, and in the middle there was a bit of moshing, but on the whole, and especially considering the jaw-droppingly large amount of people here, the party really wasn’t going anywhere. Here I must say that it’s fine for Glanzmann to call out for an increased amount of action in the crowd, like he did in the comment above, but if he really wanted to see some movement, I’d suggest he’d take a look on the stage before concentrating on what goes (or not) on off of it.
Still, his call to action had some effect, and the crowd began moving a bit more after a while. Towards the end, it had actually reached quite a nice peak in the form of a giant circle pit and an impressive sing-along for Inis Mona.

All this must have had an effect on the band, because when the epilogue of the Helvetios album began rolling out of the speakers as an outro for the show, the whole gang banded together at the front of the stage and took a deep bow.
For my part, I didn’t take much away from this show concerning the band, but I was overwhelmed by the amount of people here and the support they were willing to give; I really hoped to see more of this later on during the festival.

Setlist (incomplete):

Prologue
Helvetios
A Rose For Epona
Inis Mona
Epilogue