It was the hottest day of the year (at least so far) with temperatures hitting 39 degrees, when Massacre was playing in The Hague. Not the best circumstances to bike 11 kms through the city. I guess quite some folks skipped this gig due to the heat, as it wasn’t sold out by a long shot. Maybe that they played in Haarlem a week earlier didn’t help either.

Anyway, the opening band was the Belgian A Goat As My Shepherd. Band names seem to get crazier as all the simple cool death metal names are already taken – such as Massacre. They are a fairly new band and play mostly mid-paced melodic death metal. Quite decent playing really. The songs are quite varied and some good riffs. Nothing too interesting though.

After the change over it was time for the sort of legendary band Massacre. Fronted by Kam Lee of course but now with a totally now band again compared to the recording Resurgence album they released a few years ago. It wasn’t a bad album, but not spectacular either and they released another album since as well as a few EPs, which I haven’t heard yet. Anyway, their debut From Beyond is a small underground classic. And they started with the opening track of it: Dawn of Eternity. A bit of a sloppy start for the first two songs. But when they played Biohazard it seems all alright. And even for Musicon the sound was pretty much alright. After From Beyond they improvised some snippets of other songs like Angel of Death and Enter Sandman which was kind of weird. They throw in Provoked Accurser from the EP from the same time and a few newer songs. But eventually they played the whole From Beyond album, ending the set with Succubus with another Slayer snippet, this time of Raining Blood. The encore was the semi Death cover Corpsegrinder. Followed by an early version of Evil Dead also an old Death song from their first demo with Kam on drums and vocals. And as they had some playing time left they came back for a second encore namely Eldritch Prophecy which was crossed out on the set list half-way through. Kam still sounds pretty good. Still wears his shades on stage most of the time. And these fairly simple old songs just work quite well in a live setting. Cool gig by Massacre.