Probably the technical death metal band from the nineties – Atheist – are doing a short European tour of some 8 gigs this summer around some festivals. In the Netherlands they did a single show in a club I had never been to – not too far off even. About an hour drive. They brought two support bands with them for this tour.

The first band is half Atheist though (the drummer, one of the guitarist and the bassplayer (who plays guitar in Atheist tho). Anyway the band is called Gnostic. Thrashy technical metal, that sounds not too much like its bigger brother really. I didn’t know the band beforehand, so I don’t remember any song titles. One of the songs really stood out with some really good, fast riffing. So probably I’ll have to listen to this stuff on disc some time. One of the letdowns on the other hand was the vocals, which sound too screamish (Pantera-ish?) for me. The band had some trouble with the sound, where one guitar was way too soft, probably only played over the stage speaker. And the sound kept causing trouble throughout the afternoon. I guess the sound man had been smoking some bad weed or whatever.

Anyway, the second band was German’s Obscura. A band that has been raved about much in the beginning of this year, when they released their second album “Cosmogenesis”. What is certain is that this band doesn’t focus on originality, but is much a mixture of some classic technical death metal, like Pestilence, Cynic, Atheist and Death plus some of the modern more brutal death metal, like Necrophagist (who donated a few members btw and with a former Pestilence bass-player who plays a 6-string fretless bass). And that is how the singer mostly announced his songs…. “This song sounds exactly like [fill in some of the mentioned bands]”. Not that it is any bad tho, but mixing in more original stuff might make it much more exciting. O and the sound was mostly bugged by a way too loud bass drum, but got fixed halfway through the second song. A decent gig, but unfortunately they only played songs of their new album and got a mere 30 minutes.

Finally then it was time for Atheist after a long time preparing the stage again. Guess what, the bass drum problem was back, and I guess the sound man was completely wasted by this time as it remained too loud, droning out everything during double bass parts. Fortunately, Atheist doesn’t rely much on double bass, so it wasn’t devastating, but really annoying though. Imagine a band like Bolt Thrower having such problems, there wouldn’t be much sound left. Anyway, Atheist seemed to be in a good shape with a mixture songs from all three albums, including Unholy War, Air, Mineral, Mother Man, And The Psychic Saw. Nothing new was played though. But they promised to come back in spring next year, with a new album in the stores. After only 50 minutes the band disappeared from the stage, to come back for just one more song. The title track of the first LP – Piece of Time – was played. Way too short actually.