07-08-2015 Vagos Open Air

[schema type=”event” evtype=”Event” name=”Vagos Open Air” sdate=”2015-08-07″ description=”written by: Sandra Nunes” country=”PT” ]

If any of you plan a visit to Portugal someday, specially in the first weeks of August, make sure you don’t miss a good metal festival like Vagos Open Air.

Located in the small town of Vagos, near the center of the country and is located about 240 km from the capital, Lisbon; Vagos was really small to welcome more than a thousand metalheads for the seventh edition of the festival, where I could meet, for example, people from Italy, Finland, Spain, Russia, Germany, Ukraine and even from Brazil, so it means the bill was good enough to attract foreign metal heads to the place and that’s good.

Well, I arrived on the first day, a very windy but a sunny one and had to miss the first bands, Scar For Life and Moonshade entering at the only main stage, due to helping my friend, picking him up at the bus stop and guiding him to our camping site, there were 3 different choices for camping: one at the forest; one next to the festival entrance, and another one with tents already set up and secured vigilance plus other services – this last one was our home for the 3 days of the festival.
Although I couldn’t see how both bands were interacting with the audience and vice-versa, I could listen and notice they were trying to gain the audience’s trust, even having technical problems with the sound. The timetable for this day was anticipated for one hour earlier due to the scheduling itinerary issues on the route of the headliners, Within Temptation.

Scar for Life is a hard n’heavy rock band hailing from Lisbon and were founded in 2008 by the guitarist Alexandre Santos. Since then, the band has suffered various line-up changes and only in 2013 seemed to get some stability with a new vocalist, Rob Mancini, and here they were in Vagos, promoting their last opus from 2014, and the fourth of their career, “Worlds Entwined”.

The second band that had the honor to play at the main stage is a small but a good one and still has lots to evolve, formed in 2010 and coming from Porto, Moonshade plays melodic death metal and have released by themselves 2 EPs, “The Path Of Redemption” (2010) and “Dream|Oblivion” (2014) until this moment. From what I could listen, I really enjoyed and do hope the band gets more opportunities to play live, so I can check better their performance, marked already on my agenda.

Then the real start was with Vildhjarta, the Swedish collective haven’t released anything yet since their first release from 2011, “Måsstaden”, though a vinyl edition of it is coming out in the end of this month by their label, Century Media, and haven’t played live that much, for this year they only put 2 dates on their route, Brutal Assault (Czech Republic) and this one from Vagos Open Air.
Vildhjarta immediately warmed up the public with their sound, combining brutal moments with atmospheric ones but surfing on Meshuggah’s waves, provoking the first crowdsurfs virus that lasted the whole concert, the public simply enjoyed it and the security staff began to have lots of work on removing the crowdsurfers.

The following band was a very known one, though only played in Portugal fifteen years ago and plays a metalcore, demanding for moshpits, wall of death and so on…Heaven Shall Burn need no introduction. The Germans literally hunted Vagos with themes like “Hunters will Be Hunted”, the cover from Edge Of Sanity “Black Tears”, “Voice Of The Voiceless” was one of the highlights with a huge wall of death, luckily I could watch from the huge screens located on the stage sides.

The vocalist Marcus Bischoff even remembered to ask from the audience who were at their first show, noticing that there were many young metalheads between the audience and only one hand was raised, so he replied “oh, so you are old enough” but the funniest moment was reserved to the end of the show, in which they requested the presence of a very young fan, a 6 year old kid that headbanged, despite the language troubles, no problem, headbang is the universal language in the metal world for enjoying the music.

Another band that attacked the stage and put almost everyone with this nostalgic feeling and some stubborn tears rolling out from the eyes were Amorphis, so no introduction needed. The Finnish progressive metallers did a dream show, playing in its entirety, the highly acclaimed and legendary album “Tales From The Thousand Lakes”, celebrating its 20th anniversary the best and impeccable way, no sound troubles, all about intensity and true feelings from the heart.

The audience’s response was simply overwhelming, everyone singing along, some moshpits formed again and Amorphis showed they liked to play here and the vocalist Tomi Joutsen even asked if we would like to hear old songs and a “yes” was pretty audible, so a “Sign From The North Side” was revealed and followed by the Abhorrence cover “A Vulgar Necrolatry”, some hits from “Elegy” weren’t forgotten such as “Better Unborn”, “Against Widows” and “My Kantele”, to the end they reserved “Folk Of The North” as an outro and on tape this funny theme “Vaivaistalossa” – a cover of Amorphis “House Of Sleep” done by their countrymen, Eläkeläiset. Amorphis were the co-headliners of the day, according to the number of the t-shirts visible.

Intensity is the word to describe the first day and even being a little out of context but anyways making lots of fans running to the front rows and coming purposefully on this day, Within Temptation are one of the bigger bands of the symphonic rock/metal camp, with already 20 years career and there were some divisions in the public, the fans that liked their gothic metal times era (“Enter” and “Mother Earth”) and the ones that preferred the latest works, but everyone was happy in the end of the concert because the band proved to deserve the headliners place despite all the conflicting tour schedules.

Starting the enchantment with “Paradise” (What About Us?) from the latest release “Hydra”, Sharon den Adel never stopped her incredible interaction with the audience, which was totally enthusiastic, jumping and singing all the songs; the surprise of the night was a Lana Del Rey cover “Summertime Sadness”, but the very old themes like “Memories” (dedicated to us and not played so often, according to Sharon’s words), “Angels”, “Mother Earth” and “Ice Queen” were the true highlights that conquered everyone’s hearts. Every other apology out of the band’s control is forgiven; Within Temptation gave their hearts of everything to Vagos, rocking the cold night. The other elements of the band played with this confidence that everything was going well. And it went like that.

Links:
Vagos Open Air Website