Milwaukee Metalfest
Milwaukee Auditorium, Milwaukee
July 28-29, 2000

By Deena Dasein

I've always faced an all-you-can-eat buffet as a personal challenge to consume vast quantities of everything in sight. And that's how I've always worked Milwaukee's Metalfest, which has been serving up gargantuan spreads of the choicest morsels of molten metal since 1987. As the festival expanded to two days, multiple stages, and over a hundred bands, biting off more than I could chew was my personal summer-feast strategy.

This year, with more than 150 bands on the bill, I swore off my gourmandizing ways and went for quality instead quantity. God knows, there were enough great bands to tempt even the most discriminating headbanger's palate. The wonderfully air-conditioned Milwaukee Auditorium, with four acoustically perfect stages all within a minute's walk from one another, was awash with thousands of discriminating metal t-shirted fans checking the posted schedules, buying hard-to-find CDs and shirts, and mainly listening attentively to the music they'd traveled so far to hear.

Friday's headliners were the Danish KING DIAMOND, whose theatrical presentations and wide-ranging vocals form a genre unto itself, and MAYHEM, from Norway. Maniac, Mayhem's vocalist in corpse-paint, rasped maniacal screams like "Join us to dethrone god!" At their best, these founders of black metal sounded like an abattoir abutting a jet runway, but that wasn't often. With their main creative force Euronymous killed long ago by a rival, Mayhem's name describes its history better than its current sound.

Winning Friday's best-of award, with a room so fully packed that eager fans simply listened from the hallway, were local boys MACABRE. Their set was fiery, leaving the audience alternatively gasping in disbelief and singing along with well-loved tunes like "The Vampire Of Dusseldorf." Especially savored were the Chicago-area band's sophisticated hyper-speed ditties about Milwaukee native and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Saturday's headliners were Swedish death metal masters ENTOMBED, whose set lacked the intensity that I'd come to expect from them, and reunited 1980's German thrashers DESTRUCTION, who lived up to its name: think devastating tornados and hurricanes, and then some. Destruction appeared to be Saturday's piece de resistance -- that is, until I caught back-to-back jaw-dropping 'round midnight sets by two wildly contrasting bands.

Mexico's TRANSMETAL, in studded black leather and swirling long black hair, carried intensity to a new extreme with their brand of majestically ferocious death metal. I was a bit afraid for the next band, and not only because of what came before. It was CHILDREN OF BODOM's first U.S. gig, which I'd been most looking forward to hearing. Black metal is an unforgiving style live; it's ruined if the mix is not perfect. From the opening note, the five Finns made everyone realize that this was the most special music they'd ever hear and kept confirming that belief until 1 a.m. when their set ended. Singer and lead guitarist Alexi (a rare combination in a genre that demands virtuosity in both areas) lived up to his guitar god rep, but creating this overwhelmingly gorgeous music was a team effort.

Despite more offerings by bands I'd wanted to catch, Children Of Bodom's music was so very sublime that I left, fully satiated and far more than satisfied.