As darkness fell over the old military fort of Josefov, where Brutal Assault took its place, Pain from Sweden entered the stage.
Before them was a sea of people awaiting their concert, and quite a lively bunch at that.

The intro came on as I had grown accustomed to by this point (this marked my sixth Pain concert this year!), but something lacked. It was all the special effects Pain usually brings to their shows, such as bombs, fire and confetti cannons. Like almost all other bands at the festival, Pain had to make due on good old fashioned elbow grease if they were going to make this baby fly.
Which they most certainly did; they showed us that no extra fancy-pants effects needed to be present for them to rock our world! Good music and an energetic performance could certainly do the trick just fine.

As I had seen them as many times as I had already, there weren’t really any surprises for me in the Swedes show; the setlist and the comments and jokes between songs were the same as always. Luckily, the bands energy and will to party was also the same as always, which meant the lack of ingenuity came in a distant second or third even in the priority list. Don’t change a winning team it is said, and Pain certainly fit that description here. Change isn’t always a good thing (although, I would still love for them to put Dark Fields Of Pain back in the setlist).

After 50 minutes of industrial disco metal bliss, the concert was ended by a short drumsolo from Mr. David Wallin, played as an outro of Shut Your Mouth; and after this there was nothing to do but bid the band farewell, and with our heads held high, and big smiles on our lips head over for the next band waiting to take the stage…
A positive note which deserves to be taken into account, was that that this was without a doubt the best mixed live sound I have heard in a very, very long time for a Pain show (although the keyboards in On And On were still mysteriously missing…).

Setlist:

I’m Going In
Monkey Business
Suicide Machine
Zombie Slam
End Of The Line
Don’t Care
Nailed To The Ground
It’s Only Them
On And On
Same Old Song
Shut Your Mouth