Pitchfork

Welcome to Brandon Stosuy's Saturday Roskilde diary. Be sure to check out Brandon's previous entries: Friday, Thursday, Wednesday. Also, don't miss Jason Crock's impressions from Northern Europe's biggest music festival: Saturday, Friday, Thursday.

At this point in the festival you've developed habits, found shortcuts, discovered the special media bathroom (hand soap!), and recognized certain repeat characters, i.e., a guy with Teva's, the enthusiastic drunk couple in matching rain gear, the bug-eyed dread girl, the spliff-questing New Zealander with the "fiery" girlfriend. You also realize you're going to miss the place: I've gotten so used to the muck that when I walk on regular, non-mushy surfaces, I get "mud legs," like returning from a month at sea.


Photos by Jane Lea

Speaking of surfaces, when we arrived this afternoon the mud was almost solid, only a short, powerful rain blast around 4:00 p.m. transformed the ground back into stable soup. We caught part of the National's packed, white-wine drenched performance before slopping over to Machine Head on the opposite side of the park.

Machine Head [Arena Stage; 3 p.m.]

Photos by Terje Sørgjerd

Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn, decked in signature skull and heart shirt, wasn't shy about expressing his Roskilde excitement. Like many of today's performers, he was visibly (and vocally) moved by the crowd's response, repeating, "that's fucking awesome" like a metal mantra. Outside of prop-bearing Wayne Coyne, or those folks in the spoken word tent, he was the chattiest frontperson of the festival: "Security, let them have fun," as a toast to the pit; "And to that we shall drink," as a toast to Denmark; the self-explanatory "let me see your goddamn devil horns in the air"; and the insertion of "fuck" into any possible word set, "thank you very fucking much," etc.

Flynn told the audience, "We will not be doing 'Stairway to Heaven' this evening -- or Metallica." No need, Robb, when you've got nine-minute jams like "Halo" in the pocket. The crowd loved it: Two longhaired teenagers banged heads to my left, a couple managed to headbang and kiss at the same time to the right. The epic thrashers from Oakland played sturdy versions of tracks off their sixth album, The Blackening, while digging into the back catalog for "Descend the Shades of Night" from Through the Ashes of Empires, which Flynn mentioned was for those of us who've experienced "depressions, suicide, death." Way to ruin the vibe, Robb.

Gojira [Arena Stage; 9 p.m.]



Photos by Jane Lea

During Machine Head's set, Flynn had labeled Gojira the "Stoners of France." The French enviro-metal quartet had to deal with the smallest audience I'd seen at the Arena tent, but it wasn't their fault: Part of their set overlapped with the Who. Fighting against dinosaurs, they opened with calming, ambient whale sounds then jumped into "Ocean Planet", the gold-star track from their third album, From Mars to Sirius. It's a "save the whale" sorta anthem, so, as with many songs heard here, the whole water subtext took on added resonance. How can you not love a Meshuggah-style metal group with song titles like "Global Warming"?

Duplantier said it was the band's first show in Denmark. The crowd was definitely welcoming, some dude climbing a 1/4 of the way up a tent support to show his enthusiasm. Security caught wind of it before he could get too high, though, and helped him descend with relative grace... despite the extra hands he ended up falling flat in the mud.

Clipse [Cosmopol Stage; 7 p.m.]
"Ice on my neck, so I don't get nauseous/ While I'm shoveling the snow, man, call me Frosty" greeted us at the Cosmopol tent. Clipse's Pusha T and Malice, a red lava lamp projection behind them, showed Flynn-like excitement for their Danish audience, labeling them the "hypest motherfucking crowd." Beyond "Ride Around Shining" they rewarded that hypest audience with "What Happened to That Boy", "Cot' Damn", "Wamp Wamp (What It Do)", and "Mr. Me Too". We were reminded a few times about label woes, Philly, and that Hell Hath No Fury is "in stores now." Someone waved a Clipse flag throughout, but the best flag spotted during their set showed a foot giving the middle toe.

Soulsavers featuring Mark Lanegan [Arena Stage; 7 p.m.]



Bonde do Role [Cosmopol Stage; 10:30 p.m.]
We took a short break for the Who (Daltrey lost his voice the second he sang "a new song" about losing his breath), ate some Thai food, and then continued the dance party with Diplo discovery Bonde Do Role. Seeing the band live makes their limitations clearer (place familiar samples over forgettable songs), but their enthusiastic delivery, along with Roskilde's atmosphere-- projections, bright lights, smoke, real-life lasers-- drew me in.

The Rio de Janeiro baile funk trio was fun and the Europe, AC/DC, Tone Loc, and Grease samples did their job. But the talk of outrageousness is greatly exaggerated-- Marina Vello's crotch grabbing and sex simulation and Pedro D'Eyrot's Josh Homme references and jumps into the crowd seemed a tad tame. Still, gotta love DJ Rodrigo Gorky's frog voice, and Vello correcting D'eyrot when he said Denmark was their favorite place they'd played: Nope, looks like that honor goes to their native Brazil. Later, donning his raincoat, D'eyrot added: "That's why we loved Denmark; we got free stuff." After the crowd lubricating I'd witnessed all day, this was the most "transgressive" statement of the night.

Exeunt
On the way home, I noticed a truck for the Copenhagen restaurant, Barbarellah, featuring a logo of a woman squatting and pissing. Perhaps a bizarre ad design for a place that serves coffee and nachos, but a more than fitting echo for the festival grounds, where the fences had recently become an equal-opportunity lavatory.