One day after the Krachtstroom festival I drove to Tilburg to see the band A Forest of Stars. A bit of a hard to classify band, rooted in modern black metal, but with obvious doom and folk influences and layers of complexity. I was curious, yet even a bit skeptical if they could actually pull […]

It’s been nearly 15 years since I went to a gig in Leiden; I don’t think there has been much metal ever since. However now, a new venue named Gebr. Nobel opened its doors in 2014. And they organised a neat festival on this Sunday of the pentecost. I rode on my bike to Leiden […]

In the early 1990s Rotting Christ were one of the first Greek black metal bands. Their debut album Thy Mighty Contract from 1993 is awesome. And I was fortunate enough to see them live on the legendary Fuck Christ tour with Blasphemy and Immortal, where they promoted that album. There actually is a low quality […]

Rotterdam death fest return to the Baroeg this year for two days of death metal. The first day was reserved more for technical, modern death metal, the second day aimed more at old school death metal. For me there was only one major attraction really, the New Zealand trio that go by the name Ulcerate. […]

All or nearly all gigs of The Overture of War tour by Bolt Thrower were sold out entire. I recently saw them at the Baroeg Open Air festival, but that gig wasn’t all that on par with the usual Bolt Thrower experience. Although that wasn’t all their fault really. Anyway, I much prefer club gigs […]

I skipped the second day of this festival, as it featured only few bands I actually knew. Of which  I have seen Suffocation quite a few times, Lock Up appeared only a month or two ago in Rotterdam, so the only band for which  I actually would have to drive to Tilburg would be Brutal […]

De Raggende Manne are a curious, yet legendary (at least in the Netherlands), genre-defying group active mostly in the 1990s and broke up in 1999, somehow quite popular under metalheads too.  All of a sudden they did a reunion gig earlier this year. And now in the last month of this year another two. This […]

The King is back. After some medical problems a while back, King Diamond  is touring the major European summer festival but also managed to slip in a few club gigs. Like the one in 013. The gig got riddled with confusion, after erroneous announcements that they would play a three hour set, shifts in the […]

This weekend was reserved for an extensive portion of doom metal music. In the Baroeg in Rotterdam (Rotterdoom), the fifth installment of the Dutch Doom Day festival took place. Fourteen bands played over a period of approximately sixteen hours. The first day started at 17.00 sharp with the relatively new Dutch doom metal band Abysmal […]