I’m starting of my posts of the Sotkamon Syke festival with The Man-Eating Tree, which is the first band we caught. I first noticed the band when they initially announced their existence a couple of years ago. After all, I’ve been following where the members of Sentenced land and this was where the drummer Ville Ranta landed…
I’m always terrible in describing what niche of metal any given band belongs to, but comparisons to Sweden’s Opeth do come to mind. And Tuomas Tuominen’s vocals remind me of Rush. But what generally works for me is metal with doom, gloom, clean vocals and good melodies – all of which can be found in The Man-Eating Tree’s music.
They were on fairly early in the evening and the rainy day certainly didn’t help the turn out so I didn’t get any of my typical shots with lots of crowd in the foreground. When the stage front is two people deep and most of the folks are in the beer tents there isn’t much of a crowd to shoot. Luckily the lackluster audience didn’t limit the band’s playing and I was especially surprised by the energetic performance of the session (?) guitarist Antti Karhu.
As always, more pictures in our gallery.
