Like many bands, Immolation came over to do a couple of festival shows during the summer season. They added a few club shows to it and one of these shows was in a very hot Baroeg on a thursday evening.

The opening band was the Dutch Nox, who were sort of revived. I missed most of the performance really as I’m not really interested in this kind of all-blasting death metal.

I didn’t know Gorod, but read that this French outfit sounded a bit like Psycroptic and Spawn of Possession. So that created my interest. Basically that’s it, but they take longer slower, melodic breaks in their songs. All in all it’s pretty all-out brutal, technical death metal. They have quite some instrumental skills with some interesting moves here and there (bass players aren’t often seen doing any tapping), but I didn’t much like the vocals. Compared to the aforementioned bands they are just a step down in quality. Nevertheless they put on a decent show and displayed a lot of enthusiasm, especially from the bass player. I’ll need to check out what this band does on albums. This kind of metal usually works best when you know the music well.

Next was the Polish band Vader. I got bored by this band ages ago. The sound was terrible as most of what I heard was the triggered drums, but I heard others say that the sound was great. Apparently the place you are in this club is highly influential on what you hear. Anyway, they brought the guitarist from Decapitated (will that brilliant band ever resurface?). But the stuff is way to easy for that guy anyway. Most of the songs sound very much the same; lots of blasting and double bass drumming and simple riffs. After an hour or so they finally stopped.

Then it was time for the Yonkers’ masters Immolation. With no new album to support, they played a mixture of songs from all their albums. So we got a bunch of classics like Into Everlasting Fire, I Feel Nothing, Once ordained, Father you not a Father, and newer songs like World Agony, Den of Thieves and Hate’s plague. Unfortunately the sound got plagued a bit again, as Bill’s guitar was hardly audible. And the band seemed in a rush to as they played mostly song after song, with only a few breaks in between where Ross said a few words. Though definitely a great show, but it won’t top their appearance in the same club from 7 year or so ago or the show they did in Vera, a couple of years back. The funny bit was that the whole band Melechesh was there and were standing right next to me on the front row.

Setlist:

• Hate’s Plague
• I Feel Nothing
• Passion Kill
• Swarm of Terror
• Unholy Cult
• Into Everlasting Fire
• Once Ordained
• Father You’re Not a Father
• Harnessing Ruin
• Den of Thieves
• Close to a World Below
• Challenge the Storm
• World Agony