DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL
VENUE castle donington
DATE 08-10/06/2018
“TESSERACT FILL THE TENT TO TINNED SARDINE CAPACITY AND
APPEAR TO HAVE SPENT AN ENTIRE YEAR’S TOUR BUDGET ON A SPECTACULAR, OCCASIONALLY DISORIENTATING
LIGHT SHOW.”
While Download 2018 will be remembered for an entire festival line-up playing sideshow to a Guns N’ Roses set dotted with unexpected cover versions (an instrumental Wish You Were Here, anyone?), there’s plenty to enjoy in Donington’s murkier corners.
Friday’s adventures kick off with Gold Key, who belong to that modern breed of angular alt-rock acts whose sound is heavy on the atmospherics, with ringing chords and choruses not designed for shows under canvas. Steve Sears’ vocals tend to wobble dangerously off-key, but Creep In Slowly lurches along with malevolent intent.
Later, on the same stage, TesseracT fill the tent to tinned sardine capacity and appear to have spent an entire year’s tour budget on a spectacular, occasionally disorientating light show. It’s clearly a statement of intent, but the set is equally commanding. Every change of key or sudden, unexpected pause serves a purpose, as if to ramp up the drama further, with Smile and King both being shattering highlights.
Last time the
Von Hertzen Brothers played Download, they didn’t go down too well with some of the battle-jacket brigade, but Saturday’s set on the second stage shows the brothers to be as capable of bombast and fury as anyone. War Is Over finds them throwing rock shapes and tearing up the stage, and an epic New Day Rising pumps along vigorously.
Back at the Dogtooth,
Plini claims to be the first purely instrumental act to play the festival, and while the audience might be thin – he’s competing with the undignified jostle for viewing spots for Axl & Co. – the band’s tumultuous set of prog-metal-djent-jazz-wonk goes down well.
Sunday service starts with KOYO. Last time Prog saw them was in the basement of an East London pub, but here they perform like natural-born headliners, and Tetrachromat is given a furious working-over, aided by a blistering saxophone wig-out from Nick Baya.
To the uninitiated, Meshuggah might sound like an army of demented robots clanging into battle, but they possess a hypnotic, melt-your-face intensity, switching baffling time signatures around with abandon, and both Pravus and Straws Pulled At Random compete for the weekend’s most terrifying song award.
Meanwhile,
Myrkur’s quieter, Norse folk moments don’t translate terribly well on a big stage, but Ulvinde is a towering, exultant piece of black metal shoegaze.
It’s left to
Baroness to round off the weekend as far as progressive music goes, and it’s a triumphant set, as befits a band whose songs are triumphant by design.
They soar, and Shock Me is possibly the most jubilant moment of the entire festival, a fact amplified by the large inflatable lobster being joyfully tossed around the mosh pit.