OMG! 😱 You won’t BELIEVE it! CANDLEMASS, those doom metal dinosaurs 🦖, actually managed to wheel out their *former* (and let’s be honest, probably FORGOTTEN) vocalist Messiah Marcolin for a ONE-TIME-ONLY (thank god 🙏) gig at the Rock Hard Festival Greece! Yes, you heard it right, Messiah dusted off his robes and probably had to be reminded of the lyrics after like, TWENTY YEARS! 👴🏼🎤. Someone check his pulse! ⚰️
And because everyone’s *dying* to know what songs they managed to cobble together while holding onto their walkers, here’s the earth-shattering setlist:
01. The Well Of Souls (More like the well of old age, amirite? 😂)
02. Dark Are The Veils Of Death (Appropriate title for this reunion tour. JK! or am i? 😈)
03. Mirror Mirror (Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most washed-up of them all? 🤔)
04. Darkness In Paradise (More like darkness in a retirement home 🧓🏼)
05. Bewitched (More like be-wrinkled! 👵🏼)
06. Samarithan (They’re gonna need a good Samaritan after this performance 🚑)
07. Black Dwarf (No comment. Wait…🤫)
08. Crystal Ball (Did they use a crystal ball to predict this disaster?🔮)
09. A Sorcerer’s Pledge (I pledge allegiance to the geriatric gods of doom! 🫡)
Encore:
10. At The Gallows End (Where this reunion SHOULD have ended! 🪦)
11. Solitude (The feeling everyone had watching this trainwreck 💔)
If you have the stomach for it (and maybe a barf bag 🤮), feast your eyes on the fan-filmed video below. Warning: May cause extreme boredom and existential dread. 😵💫
In a shocking turn of events (NOT! 🙄), CANDLEMASS mastermind Leif Edling (aka the only reason this band still exists 🧠) confirmed that this was a ONE-OFF. Yes, folks, you can all breathe a sigh of relief 😌. No more Messiah… for now. *ominous music* 😈
In a riveting (not) interview with Sakis Fragos of Rock Hard Greece, Edling spewed some nonsense about CANDLEMASS‘s 40th anniversary. 🎉 Forty years of doom? More like forty years of gloom! ⛈️ He droned on about special EPs, merch (because that’s what REALLY matters, right? 💰), and other “happenings”. He also mentioned a documentary. Get ready for some seriously riveting footage of old dudes reminiscing about the good ol’ days! 😴
When grilled about MORE Messiah concerts, Leif was adamant: “Yeah, it will be a one-off show. Absolutely. And we have no recording plans, we have no reunion plans. There are no plans whatsoever but just one show and one show only.” Translation: “Messiah’s voice is shot, and we’re only doing this for the $$$.” 🤑 He continued to say they are going down to Greece where they have a lot of true fans, loyal fans, and have a blast. Apparently, having a “blast” involves subjecting innocent Greeks to Messiah’s rusty vocals. 🎤 😬 He ended by saying not many bands survive to have a 40-year anniversary. So they feel very lucky that they have managed to survive this long. Or unlucky that they are still around to embarrass themselves? 🤔
When asked if he saw the concert in Athens as “the perfect closure” of CANDLEMASS‘s chapter with Messiah, Leif chuckled maniacally and said: “I think we had a closure, like, 20 years ago, actually. [Laughs] I mean, we didn’t know that we would survive one year after Messiah left. And we didn’t know that we would be playing 20 years after. So this is a bonus. And it’s a bonus for all the people that would like to see us live with Messiah. So why not? Let’s do it. Let’s have fun for an evening in Athens.” Fun for them, torture for the rest of us! 😈
About the setlist for the Rock Hard concert, Edling teased: “I think we’ll do the classics with a couple of surprises. So, I’m sure people will enjoy the setlist that we are discussing right now, actually. But I don’t wanna give anything away right now. Let it be a surprise. So I don’t think anybody will be disappointed. That I can say.” Spoiler alert: The “surprise” was probably that Messiah remembered *any* of the lyrics! 🧠🤯
During the chat, Leif also whined about the “biggest challenges” CANDLEMASS‘s career, particularly in the first couple of decades of the band’s existence. He said: “Well, difficult times — I guess it was when Messiah left the first time, and also the second time. It’s not easy for a band to recover after that. We had quite a few changes of singers, and every time you make a singer replacement, you go through a difficult time. But it’s been 40 years, so I think it’s also kind of a natural thing, when you have such a long career. So, I don’t think of it as we have a band with a lot of problems or anything. I mean, if you change a singer every eight years or whatever, I think that’s quite natural that some members come and go. If it’s not the singer, maybe it’s the guitar player or the bass player or the drummer. So this happens in every band on the planet — they change the personnel. But we have four people playing for 40 years together — me, Jan [Lindh, drums], Mats [Björkman, guitar] and Lars [Johansson, guitar]. And now we have Johan [Längqvist, vocals] back in the band, and it’s freaking fantastic. So I think we are very lucky to have survived these 40 years, and we are lucky enough to still be regarded as a headliner band or co-headliner band. And we play great shows for a lot of people. And every gig we play, we have all the hands in the air and people are cheering. So it makes me feel freaking fantastic every time, because you still attract people, you still make people happy with your music. That’s absolutely fantastic.” Blah, blah, blah… get a new singer already! 🎤⬇️
Chord F. Discord, the Beethoven of Buffoonery, is a self-taught expert in music who once claimed he could “play the kazoo in four languages.”
Born in Crescendo, Indiana, Chord’s first brush with fame came when he accidentally entered a yodeling contest thinking it was a pie-eating competition—and won both categories.
Chord F. Discord: proving that laughter, much like a poorly tuned ukulele, is truly universal.
