After Breda Doom and Delft Doom, Utrecht now hosted this festival on the rather small stage of the rehearsal studio DB’s. Unfortunately there weren’t all that many people. Even though there are many doom bands around, there seem to be few fans as I guess about 50-60 people showed up to see the 8 bands.

First band was the Dutch Ortega of whom I had never heard before. Decent doom metal really with a bit too much whawha pedal-work for me. But not bad at all for an opening act.

The second band was a bit out-of-place on a doom metal festival; Terzij de Horde plays more black metal with some doom influences. Not really my thing.

It all became much more interesting with the third band, German death/doom act Ophis. They have just released their second album which is very good. So I was eager to see how it’d work out live. They started with a song of their first album called Beneath Sardonic Skies with a slightly thin sound. That was corrected for the later songs, both off Withered Shades, namely Necrotic Reflections and The Halls of Sorrow. Three songs is way too few for this band despite the length of 10-15 minutes. An excellent performance.

The playing order had changed a bit so next up was the French Funeralium. In the 50 minutes they got, they managed to play 2 whole songs. So those are quite long and drawn out. And the small stage was quite filled with the two bass-players, two guitarist and a drummer. The first song they played was off their debut album, the second one was a new song. The latter actually sounded better than the first, more varied and better written, so that is promising for their forthcoming album.

Then they needed to take everything off the stage for Pombagira which took almost an hour and set up a new drumkit dead centre of the stage and no less than seven amps and speakers for the guitarist. I can’t say that the music was very interesting to me. But then again, sludge, drone and stoner have never really appealed to me much.

For Switchblade it took another long time to set up the stage. This duo is an instrumental drone band, that I found extremely boring, was way too loud and caused the whole place to vibrate annoyingly.

Then it was time for Ataraxie who we were promised to play a special set because they exist 10 years. Two guys from Funeralium also play in this band, but their guitarist/singer swapped his guitar for a bass. They opened their set with the first song of “Slow Transcending Agony”, which is a kind of intro, followed by the second album track. They only played the title track of their second (even though there was one more song off that album on the set list, which they didn’t play). But interestingly enough they also played two demo tracks when they were still more death metal oriented. A pretty solid performance.

I skipped the last band Eagle Twin as I was getting tired, it was late – much later than planned and the band didn’t appeal to me much either.

Setlist Ataraxie:

• Step Into The Gloom
• Funeral Hymn
• Anhedonie
• The Isle of the Dead
• Slow Transcending Agony
• Eternal Sufferings
• L’Ataraxie