Bromstad Billionaires, Montée and Haust @ Hove Festival.
Tromøya, Norway 22nd June 2009
Billion-dollar Bromstad babies
Bromstad Billionaires had the pleasure and honor of opening the Amfi-stage at this year’s Hove Festval, and to those select few who showed up, they served a gig filled with heavy beats, dialect-rap and extensive gunfire (a foreshadowing of the hiphop shows that followed later this evening). The boys still have a way to go before they can be said to fulfill their potential, but there is definitely potential, if only they would dare to take themselves a little more seriously and throw off that ennerving scent of novelty-rap that follows being a gangster act from Trondheim.
Mucked Up Mix Up Makes for Mixed Pleasure Montée
Too soon in the daylight, and without a properly warmed-up audience, Montée were off to a shaky start at Hove Festival’s main stage. It really doesn’t take more than a slightly off start-time and a soundmix that doesn’t make up for a band’s lack of bottom to completely ruin a concert, and faced with both of these obstacles, one has to admire Montée for giving us the show they managed to.
The first four songs or so were marred by the fact that at any sharp sound it was like having a knife driven through both eardrums, and when a band sports 2 funk guitars turned up to ten and no less than 2, sometimes 3, keyboards playing discorock on a festival mainstage, sharp sounds are frequent… Too bad, because in between the deafening sounds (and I was standing by the mixing desk. I don’t even want to think about the back part of the moshpit…) Montée do try to invite you to a dance night DJ’ed by the cast of Miami Vice; a 70s sound with an 80s feel, and when the sound gets at least a little bit restored around the 6th song, the sea seems to settle a little, the crowd looks warmer and happier, and the real party can begin, and by “Say It Louder” even I am dancing.
In retrospect, I would rather have seen them a bit later on a smaller stage, but Montée is one of the few new popbands in Norway that really does have what it takes to play main stages without embarrasing themselves. Too bad the soundguy tried to do that for them.
Arendal in tha Haust
A couple of hours before this reporter’s vocabulary and abdominal muscles were extended by Jadakiss’s phenomenal(ly funny) backup rapper (”Waa scheera, Arendal!” with a very strange accent), punk/core/metal band Haust from Notodden turned up to blow a few fuses and trigger headbanging and pogodancing side by side in perfect disharmony. The young-looking and mature-sounding band are to other acts in their genre(s) what Raymond Carver is to Tom Wolfe, each song a short story to each mamooth novel, saying more with 3 words than others do on a whole album.
Onstage the on-point-quality of their short tracks is turned into hardcore guitar distorting mayhem, and with leadsinger Vebjørn Guttormsgaard (in a bear costume from ca. song 3) in mischievous top form, Haust kicked off this year’s Teltscene-program with a, yeah, I’ll say it, bang.
Between the tightness of the band and the attitude and vocal dexterity of the leadsinger, there is still the sensation of their youngness, their immaturity, their gratitude to the people that showed up to see them, and in between songs the applause is both well-earned and well-executed. There was love in the air tonight and it went both ways. Well done.
Photos: Fredrik Klingenberg
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