Skogsröjet part 2: Day 1, Friday!
So yeah. First day of the festival, Woohoo! Despite going to bed so late, we still woke up early. I guess it’s somewhat of a curse when it comes to festivals. No matter how hard you try, you will always end up waking up early. Well well. Tiredly we went off to pick up both our table and our breakfast that we had conveniently left in our “minifridge” in the car, and at last, we could sit down and enjoy breakfast to the sound of whatever obscure songs I had decided to put on the iPod for this event.
This day it was actually rather chilly outside. The last few weeks has been immensely hot here in Sweden, but the winds were chilly as hell. Gladly, I had my precious Sweden Rock blanket with me, and Michelle… well she used her sleepingbag. Which worked fine. Until she fell over. Jesus fucking Christ. Only Michelle.
Anyways. Sooner or later, we decided to exchange our tickets for passes and headed for the festivalarea for the first time. See, Skogsröjets festivalarea is not big, as you might now. There is a reason we call it the coziest festival on Earth. Because it’s small. And sweet. And cute. And also, no bands collide. The stage-schedule had been delayed, but when we finally god a hand of it, I must say… I was a little disappointed.
I love getting programs for all festivals I go to – as a souvenir, if you like, but mostly to read about all the bands. For this years edition, Skogsröjet put in little to NO information whatsoever about the bands, barely even what stage they played on (‘cept from the schedule) and even better, they forgot eight bands, including Steel Panther. I’m not sure what happened this year – Skogsröjet is usually very well arranged, but this year it seemed to have dived right down.
Anyway. We started our whole festival so to speak with Dream Evil. It’s been a little while since I saw them, and I was beyond happy to see them again. They delivered pretty good, if you ask me!
We later continued on to watch PAIN on a distance, meeting up with a friend we met at last years fest! It was awesome seeing you again, Metal-Danne! PAIN gave us a powerful gig and sure proved to us that he ain’t going anywhere. I was impressed, to say the least!
After PAIN we headed directly towards Tube-stage for what was to become the best gig of the entire festival – Alestorm. Most people should know by now that I have an immense fascination for pirates, so a band that combines metal and pirates are no strangers to be. I still remember when I saw them back in 2010, only I was surprised as fuck to hear them play one of my all time favorite ESC songs, Wolves of the Sea.
The gig was intense, and it was fantastic. Pretty much as I would expect it. But I got to tell you this.
So, we were standing like, in the middle of this little crowd right, and there was an ongoing mosh-pit right in front of us, so we had full-display on the thing, without being involved in it. There is this one guy that hit himself pretty badly, and was bleeding profusely from his nose, all over his face. He was happy regardless – jumping around. The medics tried to get him to come out to get patched up, but he didn’t care. Eventually, the medics came out in the crowd (which was pretty calm aside the little moshpit) and took him with them. He came back later, cleaned up with some paper up his nose.
He comes back just in time for “Keelhauled”. And the first thing he do, is to hit himself again so badly his nose start bleeding just as much as it was previously. HOW THE HELL DID HE EVEN MANAGE I DON’T GET IT?! The look on the medics faces were hilarious though, they literally looked like “YOU AGAIN?” and threw out paper to him in the audience. Haha, sorry, but I just find it hilarious in a way that the same person manages to hit himself so badly twice in a row.
But yes. Alestorm delivered an AMAZING gig, and perhaps half of it was made by their amazing crowd. I’ve started to notice that some fangroups, even within metal, are more dedicated than others.
After Alestorm we decided to grab some food as we were starting to get real hungry. Michelle went for langos and fries and me myself I went for thaifood. I just fucking love asian food, people. After eating and collecting some sweaters for the chilling night, we headed back to catch Avatar.
Avatar is a band I first saw back in 2011 together with Maria when they were the supporting act for Hardcore Superstar here in town. They were pretty good, intrigued me more than anything (here we go with the bands with images, again) and we were very happy to see them. They delivered a powerful gig and it also helped me and Michelle get our first real slayer-neck for the festival AND get rid of energy. I mean, we were about to hit the sack soon…
After Avatar we headed to the main-stage to catch a few songs of Megadeth, but pretty much all our motivation was lost when our phones started to act up + getting tired, so after a couple of songs we hit the road in an attempt to load our phones, get our some angry energy screaming like this (I realized I didn’t link it in the original post, damn it). We travelled all the way to Vingåker in order to very… criminally obtain a few posters. It’s not like they had a million of them sitting all over the place, haha.
We got back around 2am, and hit the bed and feel asleep immediately…
TO BE CONTINUED
// Sara
Sara Hammerzmith 
Leave a Reply