REVIEW: MARYLAND DEATHFEST: THE MOVIE (HANDSHAKE INC)

It's a bit cleaner and a bit hairier, and a bit death metal, but Maryland Deathfest is the Atlantic answer to Obscene Extreme – founded after the organisers of the former spent a summer at the latter. For a European, it's more than a little frustrating to know that there's something every bit as awesome as the gasmask-filled Czech spectacular, but with an effective £700 entrance fee and a seven hour queue in the air separating us.

This isn't an unfamiliar situation. The vast majority of kids in the UK at least who got into sick mosh in the early '00s owed the kind of immense debt to Hellfest and New England Metal & Hardcore Fest DVDs that preceding generations credited to Peel Sessions and Bleeeeeurgh! Comps – without them we wouldn't have been given the visual clues that it wasn't okay to like Eighteen Visions and Atreyu anymore, or have accidentally skipped from watching The Promise or Shai Hulud clips for the thirteenth time and happened upon something totally new. Intimately and expertly filmed footage (sound by Scott Hull, amazingly, and co-production by Richard Johnson, equally amazingly) of an array of bands too staggering good to list without completely overshadowing every other word on this page, and sometimes awkwardly rambling interviews conducted by Landmine Marathon's likeable growler Grace Perry, there's a refreshing hint of good natured irony throughout – the opening talking heads that basically consist of two kids enthusiastically going “Fuck...man, fuck...Asphyx” over and over again are a triumph of inanity.

'Maryland Deathfest: The Movie' is not only bitter pornography for the teary cry-wank of anyone unable to go, but by all rights should occupy the same space in a young crusty's musical evolution as those aforementioned mosh-aids.