Il portale della musica Heavy Metal

Hellsinki Metal Festival - Winter Edition 2024 - 12/14/2024 - Kaapelitehdas - Helsinki

While heading downtown to Kaapelitehdas (also known as cable factory), I was trying to remember when was the last time I had been at a concert in that venue. Must have been more than a decade since then, as what came to mind was Amon Amarth touring with Carcass and Hell, somewhen around 2013.
The place has not really changed much since, aside from some glass covered terrace dividing the corridor outside the two main wings of the building. Once inside it was evident that the full venue was in use, but the area accounted instead for about half of the capacity.

This winter mini-festival edition of HMF came a bit as a surprise, as there was not a lot of notice beforehand. However - and despite the many overlapping events and the fact it was full christmas party season - there was a pretty good amount of people, enough to at least fill eventually all the space in front of the mixing table and to create pretty long queues at the only available toilets in the common area (as opposed to the “R.I.P.” section that included the biggest facilities in the venue).
Everyone came to see some familiar bands from the two first (summer) editions of the festival (Dark Funeral, Kyy, Omnivortex), the “other” Batushka - as opposed to the one that played at HMF before - and good old Helmuth with his Belphegor.

Most people were still coming in when Kyy started to play in the middle of this Saturday afternoon. The band - promoted from afterparty slot to winter edition - entertained the first comers with a focus on the newer material during their brief set. Needless to say that Kaapelitehdas has never been the best sounding venue (basically being just a corridor of an old factory where the acoustics can muddle quite a bit), yet the guys from Lahti were able to warm up the audience - including the two evil Santa people - in preparation for the evening with a straightforward display of satanic black metal.



We switched genre and gears with the local thrashers Omnivortex. Younger but very much active band when it comes to playing live, the guys had a bit of an own following in the front, or at least there were some pretty excited people in the audience. The most active and energetic of the combo was perhaps the guitarist Mikko Pylkkö, in a show that could be defined as “low-key entertaining”, good enough to get things going in full gear, they set up the stage for what I guess is now the only Batushka.



While there isn’t such a huge difference in the stage setup, costumes and presence of this ritualistic Polish band compared to the earlier incarnation of other version that goes now under the name of Patriarch, many people seem to prefer the earlier material from this version of the band - the Krizsztof Drabikowski one, which we got to see recently perform at Steelfest. Because of this, part of the audience seemed quite thrilled during the show, although the sounds didn’t really help the case and we took the chance to grab a pint and sit down for a bit. After all, despite having only 5 bands, the schedule stretched out long enough so that there was plenty of time for that.



Nearing the end of the evening it was Belphegor who hit the crowd with a blast - or several - of sound which was a tad chaotic to be honest, depending on where one was standing. Still they had their usual the intensity that makes people enjoy this band so much. While they performed mostly from their latest material, the set was rather balanced and included a few oldies like “Lucifer Incestus”. The frontman took as always much of the spotlight in a show that included eventually a burning goat skull among the gimmicks that the band is known for when playing live. It was in any case a welcome change of pace before the grand finale of this event. It was also very hard to see the band on stage in between the smoke at times, but that’s another thing.



Performing at the first edition of the festival, Dark Funeral came back here after a quick stint to Eindhoven Metal Meeting on the previous day before heading back to Sweden. This was undoubtedly the strongest performance of the night - which makes sense, them being the headliner and all, but not always to be taken for granted. You can tell that they have had a stable line-up for quite a while and the guys work well together on stage, with everyone who occasionally took turn to pose at the edge of the stage, riling up their fans.
Starting from their most recent discography and working their way back to the classics, the Swedes know how to put up a good show and so they did tonight, on a stage again at times filled with smoke - but no flames cause you know, we were indoors. The band played with the right attitude, drawing the audience in the more the gig progressed, up until the final “Where Shadows Forever Reign” from the homonymous record.



That concluded the first winter edition of HMF, which seems to have worked out quite nicely after all. If this will become a staple of the dark and gloomy season or it was just a one-off, only time will tell, but needless to say HMF has been growing well and quite fast, taking already the spot as favorite summer festival for many old-school fans (also known as middle-aged metalheads). In this sense we would not mind a little bit of the same in the winter, or it would be even welcome. If the event then gets a bit bigger it might even end up taking place for instance in the ice hall, which is already part of the summer edition area. We’ll see how things develop, while eagerly waiting for HMF III this coming August (check out info and line-up here!

Report a cura di Marco Manzi