This weekend there was another instalment – the eighth to be exact – of the annual doom metal festival Dutch Doom Day, held in Baroeg, Rotterdam. Once again, 2 days of doom. Nevertheless I decided to go only the first day. Not only because I had some other things to do, but mainly because the line-up wasn’t all that interesting. And that goes for both days. The only band I really was interested in was The Prophecy, who played the Saturday. On Sunday there was Ereb Altor, who is interesting, but not all that. All the other bands I didn’t know or don’t like much. And I guess that went for many more people as there were no more than 100 in the audience.

The first band of the day was Tekhton who were playing their final song when I entered the venue. Not really my thing as this is sludge stuff. So not much to say about them.

From Belgium came My Lament, a doom / death metal band. Actually a quite okay band, but no more than that either. A rather generic doom / death band, with some burst of speed, going more into the plain death metal songs. With some really odd-placed breaks and tempo changes. Or perhaps they didn’t play it all that tightly, I wasn’t familiar with their album. The final song called ‘Silent Nights’ was the most interesting and much better composed. Now if they only had more of these songs, it would all be much more interesting.

The first British band of the day were Unsilence, another band I didn’t know. This one is a more mid-paced doom band with clean vocals and lots of NWOBHM influences. Again, not a bad band, but again I wasn’t really floored either. The vocals were quite good, but the music felt a bit samish and too upbeat for me.

Then the Portuguese Process of Guilt came on stage. I had heard only there first album, which is a pretty plain doom / death album, but I heard they changed their style a bit for the second. And my sources were correct this time. Instead of heavy use of melodic guitars, they applied a lot of dissonant lead guitar and abstract riffing, with rather extreme vocals, vaguely reminiscent of Ataraxie. Perhaps I should listen to their music on album first as I usually don’t really appreciate this music much live without knowing it.

Then we got Saturnalia Templefrom, oddly way to high on the line-up if you ask me. With only a 7″ under their belt. Their stoner doom isn’t really my thing, so it quickly bored me to death. And mistreating intstruments seems a bit out of place in this genre too.

But then we finally got The Prophecy on the stage. I had seem them a few times before, but on neither case I know their material well, that had changed now. The new album is a great slab of doom / death with progressive touches and had strayed far from the original My Dying Bride-esque kind. They opened with a song I didn’t recognize at all, so I guess it was a new one. But then continued with the more familiar sounds of “Into The Light” album, including Don’t Forget, Belief means Nothing, Hope, and the awesome Echoes. The vocalist really stand out with both grunts and clean vocals. They touched both earlier albums by a single song: Ashes of the first and Rivers of the second. When they came to the end of their set, it turned out they had some extra time left, so that gave them one more song to play even. To conclude a great show and a band that deserves more credits than they seem to get.

The last band of the day was rather a new name, but with some familiar names: Lord Vicar. Guitarist is Peter from Reverend Bizarre – the bass player is at DDD the second day with Spiritus Mortis. And the singer is Chritus, formerly of the bands Count Raven and Saint Vitus. So I guess that is what got them the headlining position at this festival. Even though it was quite okay all, I wasn’t all that impressed. The Ozzy-like vocals weren’t really my thing, and I’m not really into this type of classic doom. And unlike the aforementioned Reverend Bizarre, it wasn’t all that special, just okay.