CD Release Baldrs Draumar + In Extremo
Photography: Dorien
Baldrs Draumar
Today is the release of the New Baldrs Draumar album. Our Frysians celebrate this with performing as a support act of the German giants In Extremo. In a week they’ll blow the roofs of their hometown Dokkum, in a home-town release party, in that show they’re the main act, and that’s where they belong with an album like this.
CD release means for the editors of Folk-metal.nl, you need to be there, so we drove for 2 hours to Sneek and 2 hours back, a big advantage of this is you get to listen to their new album almost 4 times. In the picturesque town of Sneek, we couldn’t park our car nicely, very close to the new build venue het Bolwerk. Entering the hall, you immediately notice the somewhat strangely build stage. The stage is not the full width of the (small) hall. This causes there are speakers in your line of sight, which isn’t a pleasant view, we come to see the band and not the speakers. Besides this the venue is tidy, new and things are well managed.
The gig starts of with the fine new intro, as can be heard on “Forfedres Fortellinger”, this is a very fine start of this performance. After this we get in a high rate a bunch of songs from the new CD, like “Slangen Gorgiftet den Utkledde”, “Og Dere Skal Sorge” and with the beautiful and perfect played bass-intro “Hels Krav”. But much to soon, there came an end to this performance. The band finished with an older song “Hva Faen”. Bit of a shame really, at a CD release you expect to hear all songs of this CD. This did not diminish the quality of the performance. About that we can only say it was very very good, in spite of the limited space on stage.
In Extremo
When these German Medievalrock-giants enter the stage is, they immediately blew us away. When you hear the first bagpipe-notes, you know: This is of very high quality.! Despite the fact the gentlemen play festivals like Summerbreeze for an frenzied crowd of 20.000 people, and they play in Germany in very big venues, they often bother to come across the border to play in the Netherlands for a modest audience of a few hundred. But this can’t be noticed, they go for a complete party and nothing less. And that’s just what is going to happen. The band rocks one song after an other and despite the fact the vocalist keeps telling us he’s ill, it can’t be noticed, the band simply rocks and the quality of the sound is very good.
The sound is nearly perfect and this is highly required by this kind of music. The bagpipes sound very good, which is very nice with songs like my all time favourite ‘Liam’. The venue is quite full and people are cheering, singing and dancing along from the front of the stage to the back-rows. And there’s even a pit every now an then.