By now we had done industrial, symphonic and folk metal, so what was next?
Thrashy death delivered by Denmark’s own Satanic Stormtroopers! Or in their own words; “No piss, pedal to the metal, fire in the dick metal!”. Yeah, that pretty much describes it actually…

Satanic Stormtroopers is a fairly new name to the scene, but the members all originate from other bands and have several years of experience on their backs. Here are people from Slow Death Factory, Illdisposed, Panzerchrist and Demolition Inc. among other things. A geography student might see where I’m going with this – Satanic Stormtroopers is yet another Aarhus death metal band, and you know how crazy these guys are! Funny thing is, I was actually thinking about Slow Death Factory during the show, but I didn’t make the connection at the time...

“What’s the difference between drinking and hammering? You can’t drink a sled up your ass...”
- Søren Kirkegaard (vocals)

Satanic Stormtroopers came armed not only with a lethal dose pure uncompromising metal, but also with a just as pure and uncompromising dose of Aarhus humour. I have in an earlier review blamed the odd behaviour of the inhabitants of this city on their road-system, but honestly, by now there must be some form of permanent gene alteration going on over there; nowhere else in this fair country is there produced so much brutal music, and definitely not with as much weird humour going on at the same time!
Which proved a good thing for Satanic Stormtroopers; after the wild show of Huldre, things had calmed quite a bit down during the break between bands, and Satanic Stormtroopers needed something quite special to get things going again.
What they did was to begin with a hefty pummelling of us with their 18” boot kick in the teeth music, after which they dealt the final blow between songs with some really dry jokes. And alcohol, there was a lot of alcohol going round during this show I can tell you!

The thing is, it worked!
Admittedly, primitive death metal like this has never been my forte, but this was still one hell of an enjoyable show. Sure, some enjoyed it more than others, and different people had different ways of showing their appreciation. For my part, I enjoyed the laid back and down to earth delivery the most, with little comments heightening the experience; like the time drummer Simon Nygaard had to step out the back shortly because of some troubles with his instrument, at which time Kirkegaard said; “Hey man, we’re actually trying to play a gig here, you can’t just walk away!”
Now, as I said, different people had different ways of showing their affection for the band; for the most part, headbanging and shouting seemed a fitting response, but there was one (seriously drunk I hope) man who decided to take it a step further, and walked up to the edge of the stage and pulled his pants down.
The band handled it quite well, it was almost as if they weren’t even surprised by this sort of behaviour, and after a quick yank on the noodle by string-bender Lasse Bak, that was the end of the story.
Interestingly enough, there was also a sense of humility in the band, as seen when Kirkegaard called for a big hand in honour of festival creator and mastermind Ria Rasmussen; obviously this was a band with more than one trick up their sleeve, which is a good thing.

The one thing I couldn’t quite wrap my head around with Satanic Stormtroopers tough, was the seemingly very peculiar mismatch in the member setup; Kirkegaard looked the part of the modern vocalist with his shaved head and well-built torso, Bak had the hobo-style down with dirty pants and gaffer taped leather jacket, guitarist Rasmus Henriksen and Nygaard wore your average metal-man outfit, and all of these were headbanging away and getting into the music. And then there was bassist Jacob Olsen, who in appearance reminded me of a kind family-man more than anything, and who more or less just stood there throughout the show. Anything goes, sure, but he just seemed too misplaced among the other guys...

As I touched on above, musically this will probably never end up doing it completely for me, not because of the bands playing skills, but simply because the genre as a whole doesn’t speak to me.
Performance ways though, this was about as entertaining as it got on the festival, and I surprised myself by having a good time throughout.