Poland’s Metal Mind Productions and Music Video Distributors have joined forces to bring one of Europe’s premiere heavy music festivals to DVD for a North American audience. This event, held in Poland each year since 1985, is called METALMANIA and hosts some of the world’s finest young metal talents combined with the veterans of the hard music industry. Like many European festivals, these shows have become a melting pot of various hard music styles including Gothic, Punk, Progressive, Power, Black & Death metal (with this year in particular focusing on those last two genres). I’ll tell you what—every year in the U.S. we get the same old Ozzfest with the same old roster of bands (how many times we possibly sit thru BLACK LABEL SOCIETY, SLIPNOT, and other alternative dreck), while Europe is home to some of the most mind-blowing musical festivals ever imagined (such as WACKEN, AARDSHOCK, DONNINGTON etc.). Little attention is paid by promoters or the press here, but that is beginning to change with the emergence of what I have coined, ‘the Festival Disc’. What constitutes a Festival Disc you ask? Basically, these all-day music festivals ranging from 6 to 12 hours are condensed and re-edited to showcase the best songs and performances of each band in the event. The end result is a DVD that gives the viewer and taste of what these bands and festivals are all about. These Festival Discs are beginning to become common place in Europe, but Metal Mind Productions has released the first such title for North America, containing the entire line-up of Poland’s 1993 METAL MANIA line-up:

• LOST SOULS - Eastern Aculiim Miser
• LOST SOULS - Delight
• DELIGHT - The Fairy Tale
• DELIGHT- Stained Glass
• ENTER CHAOS - Industrial Diseases
• ENTER CHAOS - And the Angels Sing
• ENTER CHAOS - Lost in Ecstasy
• GOD DETHRONED - Poison Apple
• GOD DETHRONED - Art of Immolation
• GOD DETHRONED - Boiling Blood
• MARDUK - Azrael
• MARDUK - Of This Fire
• MARDUK - Fistfucking
• THE EXPLOITED - Fuck the System
• THE EXPLOITED - Beat the Bastards
• THE EXPLOITED - Sex & Violence
• ANATHEMA - Release
• ANATHEMA - Phantom of the Opera
• ANATHEMA - A Dying Wish
• VADER - Carnal
• VADER - Silent Empire
• OPETH - Deliverance
• SAXON - Princess of the Night
• SAMAEL -SuperKarma
• SAMAEL -One Who Came Before
• SAMAEL- Black Trip

Overview: Sadly, the METAL MANIA Festival disc is dominated by cheesy, evil poseurs with white facepaint, and David Vincent-inspired vocals, who believe they are the greatest, most original things in metal today (even though they steal their music, sound, and lyrics from MORBID ANGEL). I could not even stand to sit through all the lousy rantings of the laughable SAMAEL, the idiotic MARDUK, and the anti-Christian rantings of the terrible GOD DETHRONED. That’s why God gave us the Fast Forward button on the DVD player--to skip over the cheesy Death Metal bands.

Anyway, let’s start at the beginning of the METALMANIA disc. The shows starts of with 2 songs from the generic Black Metal approach of LOST SOULS—sorry guys, old MORBID ANGEL can’t be touched, so pick a new influence. Next up is 2 songs from the Gothic Metal group, DELIGHT. This band has a young female singer, lots of keyboards, and is obviously influenced by THE GATHERING and NIGHTWISH. The band is good at what they do and the female vocalist is very talented. Unfortunately, they lack any stage presence and watching the young vocalist perform with the biggest set of braces ever seen on film makes you want to laugh out loud. Next up are 3 songs from ENTER CHAOS, a bogus death metal band with a female singer—er, grunter that surely won’t win any beauty pageants. Then we get another 3 songs from GOD DETHRONED (Fast Forward time). After so much Cookie-Monster grunting Death Metal, watching Metal Punk veterans THE EXPLOITED perform was a breath of fresh air, and you could tell the audience agreed with me through their 3 song set. However, the real surprise of the evening was ANATHEMA’s 3 songs, who really captured quite a bit of the audience’s attention, and the first band of the evening to exhibit both genuine songwriting ability and musical talent. I’m not a big fan of ANATHEMA (I don’t even have any of their albums), but up until this point they are clearly the high point of the show. And their note-for-note cover version of IRON MAIDEN’s Phantom of the Opera had the audience begging for more. VADER has the unenviable task of following ANATHEMA, but these Polish Death Metal veterans performed their 2 songs admirably in front of their home audience. The great OPETH come next performing their trademark song, Deliverance. OPETH shows all these cheesy meatball Death Metal band what its live to play with talent and conviction. Another highlight of the disc is British New Wave legends SAXON, performing an energetic version of their classic Princess of the Night. Speaking of cheese, SAMAEL closes the show with 3 songs with their keyboard dominated Death Metal that makes me want to throw up. Why these people got the headlining slot over great bands like SAXON, OPETH, & ANATHEMA, remains one the hidden mysterious of the Universe.

So even though the bulk of this disc are terrible Death Metal bands, I have to hand it to the folks at Metal Mind Productions; they sank a lot of money into the filming and production of this DVD. The METAL MANIA 2003 show was shot on real film using professional multi-camera set-ups which buzz around the performers on stage making for a truly memorable visual presentation. The kinetic camera work captures each song with eye-pleasing angles and tracking shots over the not only the bands, but the audience as well. The show is presented in 1.33.1 format; the image is very movie-like, with crisp clarity and image depth. METAL MANIA 2003 includes Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 audio options, both of which exhibit crystal clear fidelity and decent bass. The DD 5.1 has superior depth and sound imaging. The only negative thing I can say about Metal Mind’s DD 5.1 presentation is that the volume level seems to change everytime a new band takes the stage, so you may find yourself adjusting the volume to compensate for this. From the Special Features menu, you can view detailed textual overviews of the history of each band on this disc. There is another interesting text based option that examines in detail the history of Poland’s METALMANIA festival, including the bands who played at each show. There is also a Photo Gallery of the bands that played at METALMANIA 2003. You can access some desktop images as well. Metal Mind Productions also included an accompanying audio CD featuring the following bands/songs:

• ELYSIUM - 4:46 for Sara
• CRIONICS - Hallowed Whores
• DOMINIUM - The Howling
• ANAL STENCH- Torment in the Shebean
• MISTERIA - Children of the Snake
• STORMOUHELD - Era Depressions
• NEVER - Mind Regression
• VANASIA - Mystherion, Crystal Eyes
• PARRICIDE - Behind the Scenes
• DEMSIE - Affliction

Since METALMANIA 2003 consists mainly of Death Metal bands aimed at the low-I.Q. crowd, I can’t really recommend it for real music lovers. With the exception of ANATHEMA, the higher caliber bands on the bill (such as OPETH and SAXON) only contribute one song each. Why is this you ask? I can only speculate that it has to do with royalties. Those two bands probably wanted more money than Metal Minds Productions was willing to pay. Metal Mind Productions probably ponied up enough money for one song each, just so they could advertise some quality bands were on the DVD. Most of the budget went towards the filming and audio mastering of this day-long festival—because the disc looks and sounds excellent--and in this area the disc excels beyond the poorly conceived DVDs of the Metal Blade, Nuclear Blast, or Century Media labels.

 METALMANIA 2003 is available from DVDEmpire.com