Thursday, July 10, 2008

Maryland Deathfest VI


Happy Thursday! I'm backtracking a little bit and I'm going to describe my out of town trip to Maryland last May, whose highlight was being at the world renowned Maryland Deathfest. It was held at the Sonar in downtown Baltimore. I actually stayed in Baltimore for 5 days and hung out in DC for 1 day before jetting back to Chicago, so this was pretty much my "Metal vacation" if you could call it that way. MDF was held over the course of Memorial Day weekend, and it was definitely a mega monstrous blast. This was my first time seeing a show outside of Chicago in a long while, let alone being in one of the most grueling marathons of Death Metal, Thrash, Grindcore and Powerviolence this side of the Atlantic. The whole weekend can be summed up as an orgy of Metal, countless bottles of Natty Boh's and Yuenglings, greasy food outside the venue, a crust kid tent city by the parking lot, getting more food, water and booze (and dodging the shady pimps and nasty, toothless hookers) at "The Block", chilling on Gay St. and a lot of new and awesome friends. It was really cool to see a lot of the bands just mingling with the crowd out in the street and in the lounge areas, and Sonar's security were chiller than the ones we have here in Chicago. I also spent at least $200 in merch, mostly shirts and import cd's, there were 2 rooms that had distros from all over the country selling stuff at discount prices. Too bad I wasn't able to get any Carcass sweatpants though.





Since there were a lot of bands that played that weekend, I'll just list the top 5 bands I saw who had the most impact from each day, in no particular order:



Day 1: Grave (Sweden), Squash Bowels (Poland), Ingrowing (Czech Republic), Phobia(US), Skarp (US)


Day 2: Anaal Nathrakh (UK), Ghoul (US), Coffins (Japan), Disfear (Sweden), Trap Them (US)


Day 3: Nuclear Assault (US), Blood Duster (Australia), Macabre (US), Dead (Germany), Gruesome Stuff Relish (Spain)





Sleeper hits: Hellnation (US), Engorged (US), Behold...The Arctopus (US), Flesh Parade (US), Gadget (Sweden)


Not so great: Torsofuck (Finland), Defeated Sanity (Germany), Infected Malignity (Japan), Monstrosity (US), Kalibas (US)





Most of my shots came out like shit, although there's a lot of awesome shots that can be found on Return To The Pit. Maybe I need to invest in a D40 that can withstand the pit action when I go next year...

No comments: