- Review by: Alan Ralph @AlanHasPicks and Emily Anderson @wisefoolfilms
- Onstage Photos by: Alan Ralph @AlanHasPicks
- AFI/Avenged/Korn Photos by: Kyle Kellogg @ Kellogg Foto
Discovery Park in Sacramento was once again the site for Danny Wimmer Presents annual Aftershock Festival, a four-day rock and metal music festival featuring four stages of many of today’s bona fide headliners as well as plenty of promising new blood. It is also a bit of an endurance test. There are the crazy fans who run in as soon as the gates open and stand at the barricade for basically 11 hours, with no food or even the means to leave to find a restroom (because they’ll never get their spot back). Security did hand out plenty of water up there though so that nobody passed out in the mid-90° heat! There are others who try to take in as much as possible by going from stage to stage to stage all day long to see as many bands as they can. Many just get drunk and sit around on their picnic blanket or at the VIP section tables, while others take it all in stride and hit up the myriad of food trucks, beer tents, alcohol and cannabis vendors… all while everyone is dealing with a heat wave that much of Northern California happened to fall victim to over this very weekend.
Then there’s Spinning Platters. As members of a fairly sizable contingent of media onsite to cover all things Aftershock, our crack team of reporters hardly stopped at all for the entirety of their four days here. To assist the press as a whole, DWP provided a little spot in the back corner of the VIP section known as the Media Lounge. This lounge was also connected to a backstage Artist entrance, where many of the bands had an opportunity to enter and participate in interviews and photo ops (usually setup in advance).
It’s not only the up-and-coming bands either! All of Megadeth was briefly spotted here, as well as Brendon Small of Dethklok, members of The Cult, Wes Borland of Limp Bizkit, Chris Daughtry, Avatar‘s Johannes Eckerström, Escape the Fate, and Eddie Hermida of Suicide Silence. Local guitar legends Wayne Lozanik of Hatebreed and Gary Holt of Exodus were there too. Sully Erna of Godsmack even became a celebrity bartender for about ten minutes.
This year of Aftershock, however, will go down as the first year that the artists and media were provided a little sustenance to help maintain sanity and curb hunger amongst the multitude of distractions. Unbeknownst to probably every one of the attendees of Aftershock, celebrated Food Network chef Chris Santos was there twice each day to feed the innumerable number of artists and media… and the majority of those probably didn’t even know who was feeding them!
While Chef Santos was here all four days of Aftershock, the big story of the Day One was Pantera and their late-in-the-game cancellation.
To summarize the 7-month saga, originally scheduled in March to perform as the headliner on Saturday, October 7 on the 2nd main stage, due to guitarist Zakk Wylde‘s obligation to Ozzy Osbourne for a competing festival booked over the same weekend called Power Trip, Pantera ended up trading days and set times with Turnstile for Thursday, October 5. A few months later, Ozzy cancelled due to poor health, leaving Zakk now with no prior commitment. Two weeks before Aftershock was set to begin, Pantera cancelled altogether (rather, postponed until Aftershock 2024).
One insider source said that Pantera cancelled because they wanted to headline. Fair enough! Since the initial announcement in 2022 of their return, Pantera has headlined stages at every festival they’ve played at. Performing as direct support to Avenged Sevenfold (and Incubus on the other stage) was not really the right move, although if they had just swapped with Incubus for their 2nd main stage headline spot in the first place, there would have been no reason to cancel!
After watching all of Pennywise and AFI, and a few songs of Stone Temple Pilots, The Cult, and Incubus, Thursday headliner Avenged Sevenfold opened their show with two songs from their new avant-garde (i.e., experimental and different) album, and played four in total. The rest of their set was a good mix of songs from their entire discography, including 20-year-old favorites Unholy Confessions and Bat Country.
Click below for Day One photos, including galleries of AFI and Avenged Sevenfold (courtesy of Kyle Kellogg @ Kellogg Foto).
Starting off the day with an appearance on the Coors Light stage, anyone who failed to see Hanabie. missed out on what may have been the surprise set of the weekend. Frankly, there was too many bands (and not enough time) to properly listen to each prior to arriving at Aftershock, and Hanabie. simply did not get the preliminary attention that they deserved. After witnessing this set though, just imagine early System of a Down circa 1998, combined with the sheer craziness of Maximum the Hormone and maybe The Dillinger Escape Plan, throw in some clean metalcore vocals, and picture this coming from four petite mid-20’s Japanese girls… go watch this and this right now and come back to read on!
If that wasn’t enough, a folk metal band from Mongolia called The Hu was up next. For the geographically uninformed, Mongolia is bordered by China and Russia and is roughly 1,900 miles west of Japan. The Hu incorporate traditional Mongolian instruments and Tuvan throat singing. Their cover version of Through the Never by Metallica is even sung in Mongolian!
Interesting, entertaining, and compelling things always seem to happen when this many bands and their crews all roll up to the same place at the same time. About to walk over to see Megadeth, a long-time friend of Spinning Platters who was working for Limp Bizkit had alternative plans to bring us onstage for their set instead. While waiting for Limp Bizkit to begin, Megadeth could be heard in the distance, and while they sounded great from afar, sadly that was the extent of our Dave Mustaine experience.
If Hanabie. was the surprise knockout set of the day and possibly the whole weekend, Limp Bizkit was the expected tour de force band, and they definitely delivered. Billed on-screen as Nü Metal Cowboy, singer Fred Durst performed their entire set in full cowboy attire along with a cowboy hat (and stayed in character the whole time), while guitarist Wes Borland, with his usual elaborately painted face, ran around the stage like a madman.
Fred wanted to “party like it’s 1999 in this motherf*cker” and from the first note of Break Stuff to the last note of Break Stuff (played twice for absolutely no reason), they had huge mosh pits on both sides of the center security barrier, and DWP is unmistakably grateful that no fires were set and nobody actually broke stuff (see Woodstock ’99 for reference).
After that, Tool closed out the night with their usual array of unbelievable and stunning visuals, lasers, and lights, while Maynard roamed the back of the stage in darkness for the entire nearly two-hour set.
Click below for Day Two photos.
After remarkable yet short sets later in the day from Avatar, Babymetal, and Fever 333 (who took over Corey Taylor‘s timeslot as he also bowed out at the eleventh hour), Parkway Drive‘s drummer turned it up several notches and channeled his inner- Tommy Lee circa 1987 by playing their last song while his drum set rotated 360° and flames shot out of the rotating drum cage.
With all of the changes made to accommodate Pantera, it was Turnstile who benefitted the most. Now in Pantera’s original 2nd main stage headline slot, they did a spectacular job performing their brand of melodic hardcore. Turnstile started blowing up in 2022, and while they deserve everything that has happened up to now (Blink 182 tour, numerous European and US festivals), it kind of felt improper to be sandwiched in-between a rotating flaming drum cage, and Korn. Turnstile’s set was very low-tech, as the music and their individual musicians speak volumes over any distractions from a video wall or lasers or a rotating flaming drum cage. While they were one of our must-see bands of Aftershock, and they definitely delivered, in the absence of Pantera, Parkway Drive might have been a better choice to have closed out the 2nd main stage.
Korn of course closed out Day Three, and going right up against them with nearly the exact set time was the one and only Dethklok. Not surprisingly, they had a huge turnout at their stage. While Korn has been to Aftershock several times, Dethklok has not even toured much in the past few years, so there was much anticipation, even more so due to the new Metalocalypse movie that was recently released. Speaking with Brendan Small earlier in the day, “we did [DWP’s] Louder Than Life in Louisville, and that was really… fun, we’re in the waning part of the day, we usually like to be at night [because] our show is better in the dark. It’s like watching a movie, which is better in the dark.” Unfortunately for them, many times they run up against the main headliner. “They had us up against Pantera [at Louder Than Life] and we’re like ‘We’re not playing against Pantera!’, so we went earlier in the day (laughs).” Apparently, they have no qualms about going up against Korn…
Click below for Day Three photos, including a gallery of Korn (courtesy of Kyle Kellogg @ Kellogg Foto).
As explained later in a quick interview with the man himself, “two songs in, our sound board decided to take a shit, and we were told to get offstage until they got it worked out, and five minutes later, we were back out rocking. We were a little worried the crowd was going to start to get aggro, but they started cheering us on, so we felt like they had our backs, and we went out and gave even harder.”
The rest of the afternoon and evening consisted of Rancid, Queens of the Stone Age, and the heaviest band of the entire weekend Suicide Silence. Of course there had to be a set time conflict with the two final bands of the entire festival, although thankfully, Guns N’ Roses got under way 35 minutes after their announced start, which left plenty of extra time to witness more of Suicide Silence completely demolish their stage.
With real life persisting quickly on the horizon come Monday morning, it was time to bid Aftershock 2023 adieu and look forward to 2024’s endurance test… and a full headline set from Pantera!
