Heavy Montreal Day 1 recap (Metallica, The Vandals, Madball and more)

Heavy Montreal
August 9-10
Parc Jean Drapeau

Day 1 of Heavy Montreal featured a record-breaking sell-out crowd of 40,000, there to catch the summer’s only North American appearance by Bay Area metal legends Metallica. From even a casual glance at the crowd’s vast selection of Metallica tees, this was ostensibly a Metallica show, albeit one with a huge number of openers.

The most controversial act on the festival was hands down Baby Metal, a group of Japanese teenagers who sing and perform cutesy choreographed dance moves while backed by a death metal band. The band’s bizarre mix of metal, J-Pop and dub-step has made them You Tube sensations, and their addition to Heavy Montreal was a bold move. We unfortunately missed their early-afternoon set, but by all accounts it was an amusing, if perplexing, set of pure zaniness.

Speaking of You Tube, Unlocking The Truth, the group of 13 year-old African American teenagers from Brooklyn that inked a $1.8 million dollar deal with Sony earlier this year after becoming a viral video hit, commanded a large crowd at the tiny “Forrest” stage early in the day. They may not have their songwriting down pat just yet, but they definitely know their way around a riff, and exuded a flabbergasting level of presence and confidence for a group of kids on tour with their parents.

Positioned against the completely intolerable Three Days Grace over on the main stage, Tennessee’s Whitechapel brought all the kids in mosh shorts over to their breakdown-heavy set at the aptly-named “Apocalypse” stage.  Check out a slideshow of the band’s set below.

This year’s edition of the festival featured a greater than ever number of punk bands, focused primarily on 90’s California skate-punk, including The Offspring, The Vandals, Bad Religion, and Pennywise. While each of those bands was featured predominately in my high school Walkman tape rotation, some have aged much better than others. Somewhat surprisingly, long-standing punk veterans The Vandals are still as fun as ever, their goofy sense of exuberance still intact after being sidelined by a lawsuit by Variety for the past few years. The band ran through a quick set mostly focused on their more melodic Hitler Bad, Vandals Good LP, but threw a nod to the older-set by dipping all the way back to 1982’s Peace Through Vandalism LP for “Anarchy Burger.” Hopefully it won’t be another decade plus before the band rolls around again. In the meantime, you can scroll through a slideshow of the band’s set below.

While The Vandals may have aged well, the same can’t be said for their current tourmates The Offspring. Riding the 90′s nostalgia wave to the hilt, the band are performing their 1994 breakthrough album Smash in its entirety on this tour, which sounds like a good idea in theory, unless you’ve actually re-listened to the album since middle-school (it doesn’t hold up). Decked out in a Sgt. Peppers-esque black coat emblazoned with badges, and with his blonde spiky hair intact, frontman and private jet owner Dexter Holland appeared to be on auto-pilot, running through the album cuts faithfully, but with little emotion.

A few minutes of The Offspring was enough to realize we weren’t missing anything by running over to catch Madball on the “Apocalypse” stage. The New York hardcore vets were as on point as ever, busting out classics like “Set It Off” and “Down By Law,” alongside cuts from this year’s appropriately-titled Hardcore Lives LP. “This is as ignorant as it gets right here!” proclaimed vocalist Freddie Cricien at one point, as if there was any doubt.

The entire island was packed like a can of sardines as Metallica finally took the stage, preceded by a cheesy video of the band explaining the “Metallica By Request” conceit, as they pretended to watch the voting results come in on their respective laptops (though Lars should know better than to ever be shown alongside a computer at this point). All ticket holders were issued a code that allotted them a vote for any Metallica song for their setlist, which for this night worked out pretty well, resulting in a greatest-hits set that featured nothing recorded in the past 20+ years.

Opening with the one-two bunch of “Blackened” and “Master of Puppets,” the band were absolutely on fire. Metallica can be a bit of a risky proposition these days, often playing it too loose, like at Rock Am Ring in Germany this summer where they flubbed “And Justice For All” numerous times. The pressure must have been on for this, their only North American show all summer, because they were totally locked-in from the get go. Stripped of most of their usual live gimmicks due to the outdoor setup, (without even the “One” pyro!) the band had only their catalogue to rely on, along with 40,000 drunken back-up singers. If there was any lingering doubt that Metallica are the biggest rock band in the world, all one had to do was survey the odd mix of old-school metalheads, frat bros and a shocking number of toddlers all losing their minds to “Master of Puppets.”

The band may have embraced the “connectivity” idea of this tour a bit too much, actually asking fans to text during the show to determine the song of the night, the results of which were broadcast sporadically on the giant screens bookending the stage (at least “Fuel” was knocked out of the process – there is some hope).

By the time the giant Metallica beach balls (!) were dropped for closing number “Seek & Destroy,” it was clear that while the band seemingly can’t restrain some of their cheesier arena-rock shenanigans, they at least still have the chops to compensate for them.

View a gallery of the band’s set below, and be sure to check out our coverage of Heavy Montreal day 2 here.