Katoomba High School & Baroque Room, Katoomba. 26 – 27 August, 2022
Katoomba’s Winter Magic Festival was once one of the biggest regional festivals in New South Wales. As recently as 2018 it was drawing 30 000 people into the heart of the town for a day of cultural events that were generally outshone by hundreds of market stalls, a late night fireworks display, and the centrepiece Grand Parade of local community groups up the main street. Increased security and insurance costs killed off the Parade before the 2019 event and the subsequent pandemic years pushed the festival aside altogether.
With major events returning this year, many locals hoped the festival could return to re-energise the Blue Mountains after severe bushfires in 2020 and greatly diminished visitor numbers since the COVID outbreak. But security and insurance costs don’t go away just because you want them to and gathering tens of thousands of people in a narrow street to wave to people dressed up as fairies and wizards, and the local furry community for some reason, still isn’t going to fly for the present time.
Enter the Winter Magic Revival festival, this year setting out to refocus the event and help generate income for future ones by pulling together an arts and music program and spreading it throughout the town. Normally, an arts and culture festival wouldn’t be getting too much column width here at LOUD, but amongst the visual art displays, dance workshops, comedy galas and doof beats, there was also a bunch of metal, punk and assorted heavy rocking bands tearing things up, starting with locals Litter opening the first day on the Baroque Room stage, welcoming the early drinkers with some fast and fun rambunctious old school punk driven by some off-the-hook drumming. Sound problems beset doomsters Magma One early on but looked to be sorted by the time they got to their sprawling eponymous tune with window-rattling heaviness and off-tap drumming, something that became a bit of a theme as the next band had the same drummer as Litter. Acid Amora had stepped in to replace melodic deathsters Besomora but apart from similar names they were very different, in a vibrant indie/garage rock sort of way. Naugrim turned things back onto the darker path with seriously heavy grooves, caustic vocals and yet another clock-stopping drumming display. Hoon, 12Gauge Rampage and Clay J Gladstone were still to come in this room and former iNsuRge insurgent Chris Dubrow was due to perform his new solo set at a venue across the street later but for a bunch of reasons we piked out at this point.
The next day threatened much heavier rain than actually delivered but that would not have stopped Foothills in any case. An appreciable crowd had amassed at the Baroque for their set, lacking for nothing with a stand-in for regular bassist Max Steel, bulldozing the crowd with earth-moving, sludgy doom. Down at the main stage, an open air space in the grounds of the local public school, the crowd density was much sparser for local legends Red Bee, who delivered their usual onslaught of energetic stage craft, technical metal rifferama and time-signature defying arrangements. Out-of-towners Downgirl was one of the few non-Mountains bands on the bill but with their street-level charisma and attitude and catchy grunge-flavoured punk rock it’s hard to say no to them. Ending their set with a song called Why Do You Suck So Much Cock? at a family-focused event is also pretty awesome. As night fell over the main stage Cousin Betty stepped up with plenty of hard-driving Detroit-flavoured rock and roll to warm up the crowd as much cooler night temperatures set in.
Back at the Baroque room Vilify was handing down a sermon in acidic and crushing metal-laced hardcore with plenty of vigour and venom, ferocity and surprising and timely bursts of melody. An excursion to find a feed and to see what else was happening led eventually back to the Baroque in time for Astrodeath who are fast becoming one of our favourite two-piece sludge bands. The awesome amount of power and volume these two guys manage to wring out of a standard drum kit and a single guitar is nothing short of amazing as Tim slams the room with heavy distortion and Yoshi pounds the hell out of them. Only a few took up the invitation to join them on stage for Children of the Grave, though.
Minus their bass player for the night, Bare Bones nevertheless ripped into the crowd with a furious set of fearless and blazing hardcore, closing the evening in a room that was now pretty stacked. Several of the other rooms had already wound up and the cops were apparently refusing entry to at least one of the others.
While the local community’s reaction to the format of the event remains sharply divisive, if anything the Winter Magic Revival festival showcased a killer set of bands. Scheduling clashes and distances involved meant we missed out on a couple more we wanted to catch like Celestial Oath and Quoll, both of whom we were advised were also great. Whether this format is retained in future or incorporated into the festival’s more usual presentation remains to be seen, but from a local music perspective this was a great time.
