Messed!Up
The first ‘real’ festival always starts with an old tradition: a walk to Roskilde city and pay a visit to the amazing Rib House. We don’t need to go into details, let’s just say we didn’t walk back but took the bus.
After a detour to Camp Vienna United and a beer, I set off to the festival area to watch the first interesting band of the day, Scowl. Being labeled ‘hardcore’s hottest breakout band’ they would attract anyone with one foot in the hardcore scene and their How Flowers Grow album from 2021 just adds a bit of excitement as frontman Kat Moss belts out the screeches with pure hardcore dedication throughout the album. And it’s furious from the start as Moss grins with mischief, purpose, and just a hint of vindication. Live and on record, she is a tornado of piss and vinegar and she proves herself being one of the most magnetic leaders in rock right now. But was it only me finding the sound horrible? Sure, many hardcore bands may struggle a bit with a lack of skills but compensate with dedication – that’s how it always is – but the speaker sound was nothing but a smear of unidentifiable sounds and I couldn’t stand it through the gig, and I left after eight songs.
Instead, I ended up at the Fever Ray show at the Arena stage. I’ve never been a fan of Karin Dreijer’s latest moniker at all as it’s too much of an experimental sound, just to artsy. But it may be because I’ve always loved everything else she’s been involved in, especially 90s indie pop band Honey Is Cool and electronic duoThe Knife together with her brother Olof. But her show is an amazing adventure, like a 60-minute scene from any Tim Burton movie out there – it’s a mix of something darkly comic and hilariously terrifying at the same time. But music is what governs my interest and sticking around a for full show would have been too much. It’s just too complicated music for someone like me that loves melodies and harmonies, you won’t get it from Fever Ray. Fever Ray is a visual experience where music and art float together and my quite limited interest in that kind of music and visual art makes me leave after half an hour.
As there was nothing on my schedule until Queens of the Stone Age four hours later it was heaps of time to discover something new – and I made an awesome discovery. Chat Pile, a band described as noise rock and ‘crushing’ sludge metal coated in social criticism, wasn’t on my list (I did my homework before the festival as always and listened to the playlist) but the Gloria stage – an indoor stage which feels like a sauna a normal summer day – always offers something exciting, and tonight I hit the jackpot. Chat Pile were brutally honest on stage and any attempt to pin down what their music is about will fail. Doomnoise, death grunge, noise rock; so many attempts at identifying what kind of music Chat Pile are making, and while the effort to do so makes sense, it is a bit futile.
Bassist Austin Tackett, or simply Stin, hits the bass furiously from the start while frontman Raygun Busch (yes, it’s a moniker) walks around in circles on stage spitting out words about the horrors in American society. It’s quite comical to watch and after just two songs Busch warns us that he’s about to take off his shirt because he’s high and hot. The rest of the show was cathartic; the half-spoken delirious vocal delivery, the heavy percussion-based compositions, and the detached lyrics are all whipped together into tracks that really could only belong to this band. So far, that was the gig of the festival. But then I had my eighth Queens of the Stone Age experience.
Josh Homme and the lads have just released one of their best albums, In Times New Roman…, since 2005’s Lullabies To Paralyze, and although you would have thought that they would start with any of the singles from the album, they trusted themselves on stage and played “No One Knows” and “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” – that’s how you should start the riots. Their music is unique, clever, beautifully twisted and, most importantly, rides that heavy danceable groove that few rock bands can find. Homme isn’t a man of stage banter, he proved it once again, but when the band wasn’t ready to start a new song he did some sort of a forced band presentation followed by the mandatory “We love you Roskilde”. But it only adds to the myth of him being somewhere else when he’s onstage. The band pulls off a series of songs off In Times New Roman… although my own personal favorite, “Negative Space” is left out, before they reach the crescendo with encore songs “Go With The Flow” and “Song For The Deaf”. Epic end of the night! Call it rapid. Call it raucous. I can go home now.
The first festival day will be hard to beat for any bands out there but at least we have Prisma and Nova Twins to look forward to.
