Goatwhore
Metaldays - 2018
Text: Tobias Nilsson Photo: Lunah Lauridsen
The Louisiana blackened death thrashers of Goatwhore had made a very favourable impression on us when they played Roskilde a few years earlier, and thus we were interested to see them as they once again visited the same festival as us here at Metaldays.
“Hey, how are you doing? Where are you going with my palm tree?!”
- L. Ben Falgoust II (vocals)
The whole band was energetic, just as we remembered them, and used the entire main stage for walking, posing, and just in general making a believable visual delivery of their hard music. The music itself came across as more death (the genre, not the band) influenced than I remembered, but that was fine. The weather was warm, and we needed something with a bit of life (ironically) to pick us up.
Falgoust II literally took it a few steps further than his bandmates, as he would walk out unto the speakers placed in front of the stage from time to time, to get closer to the audience.
The band was clearly having a good time up there, as evident by the not infrequent smiles they sent to each other. I don’t, for good reason, know what an American festival audience is like, but it certainly looked like the band was glad to be playing in Europe.
This wasn’t even the most impressive European audience one could have wished for either. Now, it wasn’t bad, not by a longshot, but the ground was only about half filled, and people were standing with a respectable distance between each other. Ok, so it wasn’t directly good either. There was some nodding to the songs up front, and a few headbangers spread across the line, but to start with, there really wasn’t much more than that.
About halfway through their set, Goatwhore’s magic began working though, and the action picked up a bit, and that’s where the palm tree comes in. Given that this was Metaldays, it wasn’t entirely surprising to see that someone had brought an inflated palm tree bath toy with them to the show, and this palm tree was now placed in an open spot in the middle of the ground. Around it, a circle pit opened up, small at first, but growing as the show went on, going up to a respectable size in the end.
Goatwhore delivered a fine show, although I remembered them as more catchy than this. I enjoyed my time with them, but this was hardly one that I’d remember for years to come.
“Hey, how are you doing? Where are you going with my palm tree?!”
- L. Ben Falgoust II (vocals)
The whole band was energetic, just as we remembered them, and used the entire main stage for walking, posing, and just in general making a believable visual delivery of their hard music. The music itself came across as more death (the genre, not the band) influenced than I remembered, but that was fine. The weather was warm, and we needed something with a bit of life (ironically) to pick us up.
Falgoust II literally took it a few steps further than his bandmates, as he would walk out unto the speakers placed in front of the stage from time to time, to get closer to the audience.
The band was clearly having a good time up there, as evident by the not infrequent smiles they sent to each other. I don’t, for good reason, know what an American festival audience is like, but it certainly looked like the band was glad to be playing in Europe.
This wasn’t even the most impressive European audience one could have wished for either. Now, it wasn’t bad, not by a longshot, but the ground was only about half filled, and people were standing with a respectable distance between each other. Ok, so it wasn’t directly good either. There was some nodding to the songs up front, and a few headbangers spread across the line, but to start with, there really wasn’t much more than that.
About halfway through their set, Goatwhore’s magic began working though, and the action picked up a bit, and that’s where the palm tree comes in. Given that this was Metaldays, it wasn’t entirely surprising to see that someone had brought an inflated palm tree bath toy with them to the show, and this palm tree was now placed in an open spot in the middle of the ground. Around it, a circle pit opened up, small at first, but growing as the show went on, going up to a respectable size in the end.
Goatwhore delivered a fine show, although I remembered them as more catchy than this. I enjoyed my time with them, but this was hardly one that I’d remember for years to come.
Goatwhore
