As the final act of the main scene, Metalcamp went with a safe card, but also a very welcome one, in the German thrash quartet Kreator.
This was no less than the fourth time for Kreator to play this festival, something Miland ’Mille’ Petrozza proudly made mention of during the gig.

After gathering enough smoke on the stage, which was set up with large painted screens on either side, a set of short stairs in the back ad a large plain backdrop on which they showed videos and video-productions alternatively, and gathering enough of a buzz in the large crowd waiting impatiently for coming onslaught, the members of Kreator came out on stage and went straight for the throat with the song Hordes Of Chaos (A Necrologue For The Elite). The dust-cloud from the instantly risen moshpit outdid anything the smoke-machines on stage could ever hope to put out, so intense was the fury of the thrashing audience!
It didn’t stop there though, the crowd was hell-bent on using up all of its saved up reserves of energy on this final show, and when Petrozza screamed out the lines of the third song, Endless Pain, he was very fittingly accompanied by a very large wall of death which was then transformed into an equally impressive circlepit for the old tune Pleasure To Kill. The wall of death reared its head again later in the set for Extreme Aggression and later again in Reconquering The Throne, but don’t think that the time between was any calmer because of this. There was simply no letting up on the action for this gig!

And why should there be? Metalcamp had clearly kept the best for last!
Even though I have seen Kreator a ton of times before (including all of their Metalcamp performances), and even though the setlist held a lot of safe-cards for the band, this was still one show which went straight to the heart (and neck-muscles) of this old metalhead. It wasn’t that they were doing things very differently from what they usually do, at least not on the surface, but the band, the music, the crowd and the atmosphere just connected on some primal level this night and unified in some unholy force which could be felt by all those present.
All of the members were kicking ass in their performance, and between songs Petrozza often took the time to reminisce on older time (he was for one thing very happy that the weather tonight was better than that of their last visit during the rain-season of 2009), as well as lead the crowd into epic shout-along’s (one where he had all the guys shouting first and then comparing to the shouts of all the girls afterwards). The only mistake the charismatic frontman did was when he accidentally introduced the song Flag Of Hate when the band in fact only had reached Betrayer on the setlist, but these little things are easily forgiven when you consider the action the band brought to the song in question afterwards.

Not surprisingly there was an almost constant chanting of the Kreator name heard through the mountains when the aggressive music allowed for it; the band was putting on the show of a lifetime this year!
This was without a doubt the best Kreator concert I have ever taken part in, it just worked on so many different levels it was insane. The only downside to it (and this was most likely in no way the fault of the band) was that they went quite a bit over time, thus preventing the audience to leave and watch the start of Moonsorrow’s gig on the 2nd stage; leaving early from Kreator was completely out of the question, not when they were performing like this!

Setlist:

Hordes Of Chaos (A Necrologue For The Elite)
Warcurse
Endless Pain
Pleasure To Kill
Destroy What Destroys You
Voices Of The Dead
Enemy Of God
Phobia
Extreme Aggression
People Of The Lie
Reconquering The Throne
The Patriarch
Violent Revolution
Betrayer
Flag Of Hate
Tormentor