”Slovenia, are you ready for some vodka?!”
Well, knowing the band, and hearing that comment, I suppose you can guess the rest, but I’ll still give this review a go anyway…

Korpiklaani was the last band to play the Main Stage on the first day, and I guess the management should have known better than to put these guys on so late; they had had plenty of time during the whole day to drink, and they had spent it well!
Let’s just say, it showed, ok?
They were all in a great mood and ready to party, or party ON I should say; especially in frontman Jonne Järvelä it was easy to see that the party had begun long before their concert. He was literally running all over the stage, so recklessly that he managed to trip over some of the instrument-chords and fell hard to the ground at several times. Drawing nearer the end of the concert, he managed to pull the mic-stand with him as he took another plunge, and then he managed get it entangled in more or less everything lying around, and instead of loosening it (which there were several stage-hands who desperately tried to do) Järvelä just pulled the great chain of cables, mic-stand and monitors after him as he went. Need I mention that this was entertainment value of the highest quality?

If you’ve witnessed a Korpiklaani show in the past, or just heard their music, you ought to know that it isn’t your average down-trotting, hate everyone and death sort of attitude, instead a much more fun-loving and happy-go-lucky sort of mentality prevails in the darkness that is metal.
It was fun and interesting at once to see that the same people I had seen with ferocious looks in their eyes performing one spine-breaking wall of death and death-defying circlepit after the other to bands like Six Feet Under and Cannibal Corpse, all now wore sunshine smiles on their faces, and with their hands firmly grasped on the shoulders of friends and strangers alike, they were now dancing around the festival grounds in long conga-lines. There were moshes and circlepits as well of course, but still with that same playful and happy atmosphere… The first really loud sing-along came with Juodaan Viinaa, their cover-song of Finnish rock artist Hector, but many more followed, their own Happy Little Boozer was and is a certifiable classic in this field.

As a show comes to an end, you all know how reluctant some people are to leave, hoping that against all odds there will be more. Well, very seldom (this was a first for me) it is members of the actual band who do this, but tonight it seemed more or less impossible to get the drunken singer of the stage. After the rest of the band had left, and the crew was removing all the stage from around him, Järvelä was still grabbing on to the mic and spoke about how much he loved Slovenia, and how everyone should party with him and so on, and so forth. There was simply no stopping the man!
Well, as the lights finally came down, and enough people had moved on to other things, he finally managed to leave the stage, and this marked a bloody fine ending of the Main Stage on the first day of Metalcamp.

Setlist (incomplete):

Vodka
Journey Man
Korpiklaani
Cottages And Saunas
Juodaan Viinaa
Pellonpekko
Happy Little Boozer
Beer Beer