Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Nightmare Before Christmas 2007, Sunday: Blood Island Raiders

(Reds)

These were the last band we saw; there were others playing, but by now I was getting puppy tired. Blood Island Raiders are another metal act, probably from Geoff Barrows' label. They are a somewhat odd band. Musically they seem to be uncompromising, but they are metal in a fairly old-school way. By this I do not mean so much lamer false metal, but more like metal from way back before the young people were even born. The other funny thing about them is that although their singer sang lots of songs about proper metally things (like TEH DEVILLE, Armageddon*, the shiteness of humanity, and so on), his in-between song banter established him as something of a lovely bloke. This maybe ran against the OMG EVIL nature of the band's music, but it did make them a surprisingly pleasant band to round off a festival. One particularly amusing bit was when he was listing all the other acts that Blood Island Raiders had seen and enjoyed. "Anyone see Atavist?" he called out to the crowd. "ATAVIST!", the metallers grunted back. "Or Black Mountain? They were great!" "BLACK MOUNTAIN!". "Or what about Lucky Luke – they were one of my favourites!" "LUCKY LUKE! HAIL SATAN!" replied the throng, the air full of goatfist salutes.

In contrast to the singer, Blood Island Raiders' guitarist came across as a more straightforwardly evil character, not the kind of chap you would like to meet in a dark alleyway, especially if you had a haircut.

image source

*"Armageddon, what went wrong? / why'd you have to take so long?"

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