There are a great many death metal bands from Finland that were founded in the late 80s or early 90s. Most of these have remained rather obscure with a cult following. All of these bands however had a unique style of their own with a typical melodic feel often releasing only a single album on an equally obscure label and then vanished. Some of these bands however have resurfaced and one of these is Convulse from Nokia. They released one pure death metal album in the early 90s – World Without God and then were hit by the mid 90s virus and produced a death-n-roll album or whatever it was. And finally they disappeared. Only to reform in 2012 and release some new material. And now they are doing a short tour through Europe, making a stop in The Hague.

The venue was still mostly empty when I arrived. And still was when the support band Deadspeak started to play. They are a Dutch – Frisian – band who play death metal largely influenced by a lot of classic 80s bands like Death and Morbid Angel with some more progressive, epic elements. It is actually quite a good band with cool riffs and quite solid songwriting. They played 6 songs off their debut album, which is worth a listen. Nevertheless they got practically no audience response. It was quite a good performance though.

Then it was time for the headliner already. The cult act Convulse. They started off with the introduction and then played the entire World Without God album. Live this kind of death metal works really well. It’s fairly simple music, and very riff centred with a few guitar solos thrown in. The songs sound a little similar but just enough difference to tell them apart. Quite an excellent performance. After said album they played two more songs which were quite different. At least the first song – Cycle of Revenge – sounded more like a proggy metal songs. They had to skip The Years of Decay off the second album due to time constraints. The second song they played – Days are Dark – sounded a bit in between the classic death metal and the proggy stuff. Whereas the majority of the set was really good, the ending was less interesting. Quite cool to have seen this cult act live though and quite a good gig.