After a visit to Brussels during the day, I went to a gig on the return trip in Antwerp. I had already planned my trip and only remembered that Napalm Death were playing in Antwerp that day, so it coincided nicely. They brought three support acts on the tour.

The first band was the Polish doom metal band DopeLord. They play Black Sabbath inspired doom. Some riffs could even have been written by Iommi himself. Anyway, I’m generally not much into stoner doom, but this sounded better that most stoner I have heard. It isn’t all that slow. It has some cool riffs and guitar solo’s. Vocals sounded okay. Only the drums were quite basic. Pretty decent opening act actually.

The next band was a whole different genre: The Varukers from the UK. They play UK style hardcore punk. So social political lyrics, simple riffs – mostly just power chords, d-beat drums, shouted vocals and a few simple pentatonic guitar solos. It doesn’t get more basic than this really. And like most hardcore punk it, becomes a boring to me after a song or three as there is too little variation. And punk now wear smartwatches too, so they care about their health now? They care about how many steps they made? What is this world becoming.

Then it was time for the thrashers from Whiplash. Of course they would play a ton of old songs. Unfortunately the guitar sound dropped out during the first song – Last Man Alive. And it took a long while to fix too. The bass player tried to fill the time with some talks first, then later improvised Anasthesia (Pulling Teeth) which was kinda cool. Some drunk dude also grabbed the mic and produced some gibberish. Anyway after the guitar was fixed they returned to the set list with Killing on Monroe street. Things got a bit more energetic when they started Spit on your Grave and Red Bomb. Followed by the killer track The Burning of Atlanta. They had some newer songs listed on the set as they are about to release a new album, but they skipped them due to time constraints, closing the set with Power Thrashing Death. Cool set, it sounded a tad slower that it supposed to be, guitar solos were a bit sloppy too. But it’s cool to just see Tony still playing his songs.

Then it was time for Napalm Death. Shane Embury is still on leave, which is a shame as his bass playing is real killer. Anyway, they opened with the good’ol Instinct Of Survival. And what followed was a mixture of songs from many albums. Plague Rages was a need surprise. I Abstain is always a great choice. Suffer the Children is always on the set, and so are Scum and You Suffer. They picked a few other older tracks I don’t remember them playing, like Moral Crusade, Mentally Murdered or Practice What You Preach. These were mixed with some of the newer songs like Everyday Pox, Strong-arm or Narcissus. Barney was quite active again, running around on stage, where as the rest of the band just seemed to play their songs. The Slaughter cover – Incinerator – was a bit unnecessary. And the other cover Nazi Punks Fuck Off is relevant as ever. Pretty good gig. Napalm Death never lets down.

Barney is usually quite vocal when it comes to socio-political commentary, but one of the things that I noticed was that when it comes to what is happening now in the US he was quite reluctant to express strong opinions. Same goes for Rat from the Varukers. It seems the are muzzled, afraid of being refused entry to play there. That is a pretty absurd thing really that is expected for countries like Russia or China.