Well, the official documentation of the eighteenth year of the Wacken Open Air-festival, a.k.a. W:O:A, is now available. I’ve got the doubleDVD for review, but there’s also a tripleDVD, a “special premium edition”, containing two extra dokus (“Let There Be Light” by Christian Rapp about the Saxon lightshow and “LEA Award 2007 für das W:O:A”) plus 22 extra live tracks. Playing time for the two different editions is 6 hours and more than 8,5 hours.

The filming and cutting is generally very good, and the sound (both 2.0 and 5.1 available) depicts the sound of a festival like this: not studio quality of course, and the guitars might seem a bit low in places, but generally it is ok.

As a participant for ten years in a row, I can agree completely to some of the statements on the footage on the DVDs: “The greatest metal-festival I know”. “There’s nothing but real metal here, and in practically every genre – from Lacuna Coil to Napalm Death - there’s something for everybody”. “For 3 – 4 days and nights, around the first week end of August every year, you live metal – along with about 70000 other more or less screamin’ and pissed metal-heads”. This sort of covers it, and this release shows in three documentaries (“Wacken 2007 Documentary” by Guido Weiss, “W:O:A 2007 Behind The Scenes” and “W:O:A 2007 Camplive”) and  selected live highlights from the three days, the “spirit” of the festival very well. More than 70000 people on a sold out festival in a field in northern Germany can’t be mistaken – this is the metal festival...

These “collections” with so many different bands and styles can be tiresome to get through, but this release works differently, it’s more like a diary or capture of the mood of the festival, supplemented with live tracks to show the diversity in music played here.

You can also just select some of your favorite tracks and bands to listen to, or maybe discover something new and unexpected (as I do practically every year on W:O:A) by listening to some of the bands you don’t know yet, even though you were there in 2007 (It’s impossible to get to see every band, so here’s a chance to fill out some of the gaps...).

Only band I personally miss in the compilation from 2007 is All That Remains, one of the great positive surprises for me last year.

If you were (mostly) too drunk to remember, had to walk too f**kin’ long (like me) from your camp to see every band you’d like, or for other reasons wants something to take you back to these days in August of 2007, or you maybe want an introduction to the W:O:A and what to expect before you go there, this is a good place to turn.