Sara Hammerzmith

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

Wohoo! Time for me to at last write about Skogsröjet. It’ll be in four parts covering all four days.

First of all, I think this festival ended up being the most deorganized EVER for me packing-wise. I sat all day chatting with Ludvig and Michelle before I realized it was a mere two hours before Michelle was arriving, and had to fast-pack everything at the quickest pace I have ever done so. Somehow, I did manage to get everything with me. Who would have thought.

Anyway, I went to pick up Michelle, we went home again to tuck in all my stuff in the car, we went downtown to pick up food, and then home again because I did forget something – my pink vest. After that, we FINALLY started driving towards Skogsröjet. But not until we had, thanks to ducttape, set up the stereo and GPS system. The car was pretty overloaded, I might add.

The road down was awesome. We hadn’t talked for a few days, making sure to have subjects to talk about for the long journey. And so we did. And screaming. Loads of screaming. You know, this kind of screaming. After going for a while, we figured it could be a good time for a pitstop to have some food, and after missing a few of the spots we had planned to stay at, we finally found this place called Våtsjön where we pulled over and walked down to the lake… And I tell you. I’m glad we missed all the other spots, because seriously… the beauty of that place was insane. We just sat there, staring at the view, eating our subway and listened to a very explicit SlipKnot. What a combo.

After the stop, we headed onwards to the festival. We got there around 22 (10pm) and to our dismay, there were NO parking guards whatsoever, so we really just drove in there, parked somewhere we hoped were right and went to ask the information if they knew 1) where we could exchange the tickets 2) what to do with the parking. Of COURSE, the ticket-exchange had JUST CLOSED, and we asked them how the hell they had thought this was gonna work with the camping, and they told us it would “hopefully” work if we just brought our tickets.

And of course it did. Because just as they lacked parking guards, they also lacked guards for the camping, so pretty much anyone could go in and out. We went in, located a spot we liked and then proceeded to get our tents and get set up. The only downside, I guess, about our location was the high grass. It was HIGH AS FUCK, but on the other hand, we figured it would be very soft to sleep on!

See this shit?

After setting up our tent as well as Ludvig and Albins tent, we headed back to the car to finish the rest of our subways and check some things online. Right in the middle of the pitchblack night someone knocked on our window and asked if we were up for hanging out a bit, and sure why not.

Just that we didn’t hang out for an hour or so, but for many hours until I somewhere around 4am said fuck this shit, we are going to bed. Said and done. We met up with some sweet Sabaton fans on our way back that was surprised to see us, and wondered when the hell we arrived, given it was 4am. Hahaha, I can understand the confusion!

Later than we had planned, we went to bed. Great. This wasn’t exactly the start you wanted to get, but oh well!

TO BE CONTINUED

// Sara