Report

Coldworker Having One Hell Of A Tour, Anders Jakobson Checks In From The Road

Coldworker drummer Anders Jakobson checks in from the road, currently on tour with Misery Index and Dew-Scented throughout Europe, to vent some much needed misery at the ongoing challenges they face as they take thier fledgling Swedish death metal to the masses.

"The (München, Germany) show was OK, we are sort of suffering from "first band disease" which means that the people who are coming to these shows are basically there to rock out to Misery Index and Dew-Scented. But never mind - it's fun to play anyway."

The three bands went on to play Schweinfurt with Converge, Rise and Fall, Animosity, Job for a Cowboy, Bring me the Horizon and a few others, but things weren't really looking up. Jakobsen tries to look on the bright side, "The crowd was a little bit held back, but the venue was quite cool and of course I got to see Converge again.
The night ended with a loud thunderstorm, which was rumoured to come during the festival, but fortunately it came while we were in our hotel beds."

Going into Switzerland is always a drag for a band due to the customs, and of course they caused a lot of trouble for this touring party. "We were sort of in a hurry to make it to the show and also to leave it, so being stuck at the border for quite a while wasn't really something that we prefered. It took a long time until the customs said what they wanted (which ended up with a 1300 Euro deposit for the merchandise) and then we finally entered the country."

Unfortunately the show in Erstfeld was one of the worst for Coldworker. The huge venue had almost no visitors when they played and three songs had to be cut from the setlist due to the delayed schedule.

When Misery Index had finished up the set, the band embarked on a hellish drive for 12 hours to Hellfest. Met with rain and mud, Dew-Scented (who was supposed to open up on the main stage) was forced to cancel their show as the stage wasn't finished (?) and a generator caught fire which caused a lot of commotion. A few other bands, including Lamb of God, were also forced to cancel their shows. Jakobsen mourns,"At the same time the other two stages' schedules got all (delayed) and in fact, once we were on stage last at the Discovery stage, everything was delayed almost one and a half hours, so we played against Machine Head, which was a drag since I'm really into their new album (and thus missed the performance). Oskar (Pålsson - bass) and I tried to catch a few songs by Mastodon but the sound was so bad it was impossible to stand there in the mud trying to enjoy the show. Earlier on the day I met Brann (Dailor- Mastodon, whom Jakobsen toured with in 1999) so that was cool, catching up and all that stuff. It's hard to understand that a guy you shared a van with eight years ago is in one of the biggest metal bands of today."

So was there anything good about Hellfest?

There were some things to smile about. "During this tour the Misery Index guys, mostly Adam (drummer) , has come up with different versions of our band name, but they all got beat by Hellfest who named us 'Clockworker' on the door to our backstage trailer. Someone is mixing up Sweden and Switzerland again...Our show was good - we were psyched about playing at Hellfest eventhough everything was more or less crappy during the day so we gave a little extra."

The second day at Hellfest was more relaxed, the band opting to stay in France for their day off rather than head onwards to Manchester, UK. Once there on day 10, Jakobsen had the opportunity to jam out a Nasum (Jakobson's former band) song with Misery Index during rehearsals but not even that could coax things to turn out for the better. "Unfortunately, a Sunday in Manchester wasn't really the best of days for metal. The number of people that attended the show was not impressive, but we are of course thankful to those who came to the show. There were two or three headbangers in the front of all bands. We spent the night in two appartments and if I ever need to illustrate the word 'rathole' I'll take you to where we slept..."

Day 11 in London was overall a much improved experience, but Jakobsen admits the band is growing tired.

At the the time of this report, Coldworker had only two more dates to endure in Exeter (UK) and Arnhem (NE). They are scheduled to play a homecoming show in Örebro on July 7.

Relapse artists Coldworker (comprised of Jakobson and a few ex-Ruin members) did their first show together this time last year with Gadget and Radioskugga and then immediately started recording their first album "The Contaminated Void". The album was recorded by the band and later mixed by Dan Swanö (Katatonia/Bloodbath/Nightingale), finally mastered by Peter In De Betou.