Loud Park 13 Report
In contrast to the previous year, this years Loud Park was two days instead of one but I went only on the last day, the 20th of October. On the 18th they announced that the headliner of the 20th, King Diamond, had cancelled with the reason of not having managed to get their equipment to Tokyo in time. On the Loud Park homepage they said they had offered the band to play with spare equipment but the band refused. Not nice for the fans who paid for expensive tickets, but I guess this falls under the category of “shit happens”.
A few words on the organization of Loud Park which was in stark contrast to the festivals I just visited in Europe during the summer. Somehow this did not strike me as such the year before, probably because I hadn’t seen any big European festivals yet…
The amount of security personnel at Loud Park is insane. The number of places where you are not allowed to hang out for non-obvious reasons is equally insane. It smacked of the desperate try of the organizers to control the individualistic crowd. Oh god! These metal heads might want to have fun! We must see to it that they don’t completely freak on us!
To enforce such (stupid) rules, fences etc. are supposed to guide you around and the one and only cloak is at the end of the world outside the building and you had to go back through the main entrance once more after unloading your stuff there and it was just ridiculous and annoying how they tried to channel the crowd. A big minus for that for Loud Park … Sometimes less is more. You need some rules to channel 30,000 people yes, but we ain’t kindergarten kids… well, maybe we are worse? 
Anyway:
The first band on the menu was a Japanese band called Metal Clone X, rough vocals, they invited a, I presume, famous enka singer lady for one song, much like Heino appearing on stage with Rammstein, only that she seemed to have more fun Later someone told me she is actually not an enka singer but a blues and jazz singer, well, but she looked like enka in her pretty kimono.
Finnish band Mokoma that does mostly rough vocals in Finnish has played this year in May in Japan already at Loud and Metal Attack – by Finland fest.
They were a big hit there which is mostly due to the fact that most of the Japanese audience doesn’t really care whether they understand the lyrics or not. Most don’t speak English all that well, so it doesn’t matter that nobody understands Mokoma’s vocals. The guys are so wonderfully quirky and the Japanese audience just loves them.
After an excellent Amorphis, who never really seem to get their sound right during the first few songs came something WEIRD: Baby Metal… Three Japanese teenage girls who are about 14 years old supported by “invisible” real musicians clad in masks. They hop around on stage like AKB 48 and whine in girlie fashion = a hundred miles away from any real female metal vocalist.
Nevertheless they are so popular that they had their own goods queue…
Totally weird and absolutely awful from my humble perspective, but you can’t argue about taste can you…
Apart from Amorphis, Stratovarius was my personal highlight, who gave a solid and great performance and as far as the gigs are concerned that I did not watch from the arena this one was the one that fired up the audience most of all.
Last In Line was good but the audience a bit lame, maybe due to an apparently new singer? Finally, Yngwie Malmsteen’s line up of some ten fat amplifier towers next to a lost looking drum set was not enough to generate enough sound? Just joking. They had sound issues and at times they seemed rather un-noisy and the mikes were not working well. Among those ten amp towers something created a feedback loop and an annoying “feeeeeep” made your teeth hurt. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen such an amp tower arrangement!
To escape long queues at the cloak corner and full trains, I left before Yngwie was finished. Sorry! Would have liked to see Carcass and Angra on day one, but too busy with books and work I was and am.
Despite the police state character of the event, I guess I’ll go there next year again, depending on the line up if course
