In the United Kingdom, the birthplace of the Download Music Festival, it was treated with tinted glasses. As the most influential metal music festival in the UNITED Kingdom, the Download Music Festival began in 2003 in Leicestershire, eastern Ireland, and many metal giants have appeared.
In 2015, without prior notice, the local police in Leicester conducted facial recognition scans of all audiences attending the festival, comparing the database to the European Crime Database. Participants were also forced to wear RFID smart bracelets to travel through the stage area with the bracelet consumption. Afterwards, the consumption data collected by the bracelet is collected for business analysis.
Matt Bellamy, lead singer of the band "Muse," sings "Uprising" to make the police angrily scold the police: "Fuck the face scan!" ”
Before the festival opens, there is a long line of Japanese spectators rushing to buy the band's merchandise.
On March 21 this year, the Download Music Festival landed in Japan for the first time. Audiences enter with paper tickets, no smart bracelets and no face recognition; Japanese audiences' interest in the surrounding areas has made the surrounding areas continue to grow, excess hormones are consumed in consumption; on-site alcohol sales are not booming, and ice cream is sold out early.
The widespread prejudice between Europe and the United States that "metal is the music of losers" and "people who listen to metal love violence and are not too smart" (although a British survey of 12,000 students in the top 5% of the UK showed that the top students' favorite type of music is metal music and not others), does not seem to exist in Japan.
Not many people who choose to sweat at the Chiba Prefectural Makuhari Exhibition Hall on the day of the Spring Equinox Festival are not dressed as typical metal parties. In addition to the fact that the men's toilets are always lined up and the women's toilets are extremely short, there is no obvious difference between Japanese Download and other mixed music festivals.
At the edge of the crowd, there are young mothers pushing strollers and holding little girls to turn powerful music into gentle twisting, middle-aged men in suits and leather shoes and partners in kimonos holding hands and standing silently, and fathers with work cards who put their children on the cement floor to sleep, and occasionally glance at sleeping children while watching the performance. The "women's clothing gangster" is very beautiful and eye-catching in the crowd.
When the music enters a powerful rhythmic passage, the audience in the circle pit begins to run in a circle at a fast pace, and the huge energy in the circle can still be felt even if it is far away
Successive lead singers on the stage tried to encourage the audience to roar, but the sound wave never reached the climax. The audience gathers all the extroverted energy and releases it in the irregular push and shoving of the crowd. Japanese audiences don't like pogo (violent jumping, skillful body collisions) and mosh (fist-waving and air fights), but they love the circle pit (a rapid version of a crowd train, that is, running in a circle in a line with a little physical collision).
Once someone starts a circle pit, the circle becomes larger or smaller, and it will cause a ripple-like change in the flow of people. It is as if you are in a four-dimensional space to feel the music in all directions, the tighter the rhythm on the stage, the greater the volume of sound, the stronger the squeezing feeling of the body, and the more scorching the steaming heat.
Among Asian countries, Japan was the first to become interested in metal combustion. Flower Travellin' Band's debut album Anywhere was released in 1970 and became the first of Japan's heavy metal. The british heavy metal wave has a very short time difference from its beginning to its spread to Japan. The metal bands Judas Priest and Scorpions, which toured japan in that era, enjoyed the highest treatment of sold out and fanatical fans.
The huge cross-shaped light clusters hanging above the lounge area also illustrate the festival's metal theme
The 1980s was a glorious decade of heavy metal in Japan, and the influence of Loudness, the first heavy metal band to sign a major American label, surpassed that of Japan. There are also a number of excellent bands in the Categories of Percussion Metal, Black Metal, doom metal and so on. Riding on the east wind of Japanese anime and the metal sung in Japanese, it has become the memory of the times in Asian countries and countries further abroad with the attitude of one work.
By the 1990s, a separate style had been born among the growing Japanese pop metal – Visual Kei, Onmyouza, Black Dream Kuroyume, X-Japan and other leaders were not enumerated. The "Visual Department" is not only distinguished by its opulent and bizarre costumes, but also because some bands combine traditional Japanese music.
After the new millennium, the Japanese music industry hatched the world's unparalleled "idol metal". The Japanese idol metal, represented by Babymetal, which successfully broke out of Japan and sold well in Europe and the United States, led the way with its beautiful and brainwashed melody and comic-like exaggerated dark black people. Man With A Mission, the only Japanese band to appear on this year's Japanese Download, can also be included in this category. The secondary two setting of "The Ultimate Life Form Composed of Five Wolf-Headed Humans" is the (most) important part of the band as a whole. If you hadn't witnessed the activities of the mysterious wolf-headed musicians on stage, their music would have been quite ordinary.
The new metal bands that appeared before the Swedish melodic metal band Arch Enemy are warming up. In the field of metal music, the word "new" unfortunately did not open up new territories.
Lead singer of arch enemy. © DOWNLOAD JAPAN
Alissa White-Gluz, the new lead singer of "The Great Enemy," has a deep line between her eyebrows, and the tough former lead singer has not disappointed fans with Alyssa Whitegratz, exuding the "power of metal" that "Judas Priest" lead singer Rob Halford has been shouting for decades. The foundation of this power is based on the power of the primitive flood of extreme voices and the exquisite and complex structures belonging to civilization. Coupled with the generations of metal musicians using various cultural symbols to show anti-bone, dragon slaying, skeletons, locomotives, Satan... Symbols are only carriers, lyrics are priests' prayers, and the fear and blood courage that span civilization to touch the era of human ignorance is the essence of metal.
In this way, Ghost, also from Sweden, is lackluster outside the visual. The leader Tobias Forge has led an uncertain army of "ghouls" (musicians wear masks and anonymity) all the way to the dictatorial process, the Grammys have also taken it, and the anti-pope stage image is unique enough, but the soft music really can't afford the cult face. When Foo stares at the grim fake pupils and calls out to the audience for interaction, he is particularly like a doll that pleases tourists at the Disney parade.
Lead singer of the band Ghost. © DOWNLOAD JAPAN
Of the three heavyweight groups of "old men"—Anthrax, Slayer, and Judas Priest—the most notable is the band "Killer," which is on a farewell tour. When the penultimate gear came to the stage, the door to the men's toilet was empty. At the end, a large crowd left the scene, abandoning the Judas saints who were watching the finale. Maybe it's because "Judas" just came to Tokyo a few months ago?
Among the "Riptide Big Four", the killer is the heaviest, fastest, most evil, and most arrogant and does not look back. While other bands naturally threw themselves into the gentle countryside of pop metal as they grew older, they still didn't change their hard style.
Live, lead singer/bassist Tom Araya and guitarist Kerry King are not old enough to retire. In contrast, Judas, who was in the old circle, still sacrificed motorcycles and leather whips on the field. After Araya was unable to control his voice to summon Satan as he did as he was when he was younger, the band's strategy of being deeper, slower, but not less powerful still works today. Although Alaya is still as strong as the old sea god, the control of his voice is still good, and his words are fast and his words are like a heavy hammer stick.
Guitarist for the band Slayer. © DOWNLOAD JAPAN
Slayer was a frenzied live music fan while performing
At the end of the performance, bid farewell to the solemn-looking Slayer lead singer on stage
The finale Of judas saints who quit Ozzy Osbourne's pneumonia and were called to save the scene changed a different song list from last November's Tokyo scene. Of course, the classics are sung, and once again the hair is upside down for the screams that Rob Halford shouted with all his might.
The degradation of sound is the common destiny of mankind, but the band's musical formula consists of the ultimate simplicity and elegance, the optimism and self-confidence of the early industrial age, the gorgeous self-drowning, and the loud noise of the locomotive exhaust dust at all times, which is like a shot in the arm at all times, specializing in the symptoms of mental atrophy that are particularly popular in this era.
Lead singer of the band Judas Priest (right). © DOWNLOAD JAPAN