Credit: axl a long long time ago

Donnington Park
Sunday 11 June

The rumour mill has it that I-Def-I are definitely worth checking out, even though it does require us to crawl into the arena for 11am, which would be a hellish enough time to get up on a regular Sunday, let alone after several days of bodily abuse underneath the hottest sun of the year.

I-Def-I scream “local band done good”, with at least half the kids bouncing around at the stage front seemingly on name-terms with the guys on stage. Apart from a slight wrong-foot with the crowd banter (“condemning the crowd for not having pint in their hands before the bars have even opened is a bit dense) but otherwise it’s a tasty cut of meaty metal

Over on the main stage, Hatebreed, one of the latest acquisitions in Roadrunner Records merciless graverobbing of other labels’ A&R efforts, are managing to whip the crowd into a dust swirl of limbs and fists pounding the air. The distinct lack of true hardcore bands on the bill has played into their hands somewhat, but unlike their club shows, this somewhat lacks the sweating-walls intensity that Hatebreed can normally guarantee.

Wasting no time with niceties, vocalist Jamey Jasta stomps up and down the stage like a pug that’s woken up to find itself shaved and is mighty pissed about it. The recent addition of  Frank Novinec has fitted in well, giving that extra push to the brutal riffs that the circle pits are convulsing to.

Somewhere, sometime, someone will explain to this review exactly what the draw of the quite frankly ridiculous Dragonforce is. It’s almost as if every other person at the festival has a Dragonforce t-shirt, but unless this is some kind of ironic joke gone wrong, then something has gone wrong on an almost moral level.

Even if Battle Metal wasn’t a ridiculous sub-genre to start with, then Dragonforce would still be a ludicrous proposition. Whether it’s the humourless and charisma-free frontman ZP Theart encouraging the crowd to throw the horns, or the quaint little simultaneous lamb-like leaps of guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman, it’s like a horrific nega-nostalgia trip, with all the worst bits of 80s British Power metal stretched out and pumped up to IQ-sapping proportions.