Rotterdoom band Officium Triste were celebrating their 15 year anniversary in their home town Rotterdam by way of this gig for which they invited a couple of befriended doom bands. Some of which are quite rare to spot on the European stages. Basically this gig was two tours coinciding on the same stage.

Opening the evening was the Canadian band Longing for Dawn, of whom I only got the last song they played. They sounded quite okay.

Next up was the Swedish outfit Isole, that play mostly classic doom metal. Nevertheless they can never really convince me; not on album and live the songs just weren’t strong enough. Rather odd actually as I do like their side project Ereb Altor. Anyway they had some 35 minutes play time. Not bad really. Pim from Officium Triste joined them on vocals for one song.

Next was the band that I really wanted to see. Mournful Congregation are an Australian funeral doom / death metal band, that AFAIK never even played live before. Now they were doing a short European tour after just releasing a successor to the grand “Monad of Creation”. Most of their songs are long – 15+ minutes isn’t even unusual – and consist of several layers of guitars. Hence they brought 3 guitarists to the stage. They played their material pretty well and made it into a kind of hypnotic experience. Opening with a song of said album followed by the Suicide Choir. They ended their set by a song from the debut album, that seemed to be altered a bit tho. Anyway an excellent gig and not disappointing considering the band never played live before.

The Irish Mourning Beloveth on the other hand do play live a lot and over the years I had seen them a few times. Now with the new album out for half a year it was time for them to tour again. Opening with “The Sickness” of their latest opus, the band sounded better than the last time I saw them, much tighter. I didn’t really like the “heavy metal” style vocals that appear on their album here and there, and I don’t like them live much either, even tho Frank pulls them off well enough. “The Word That Crawled” followed from their magnificent “The Sullen Sulcus” album. The set was closed by the song “Apocalyse Machine”. Actually a pretty good gig.

I had seen Evoken only once before on one of the early incarnations of the Dutch Doom Day – 2003 I think it was. Now they were back again for a tour in support of their album “Caress of the Void”. Most of their set focused on that album too; with only one track of Antithesis of Light and one of Quietus. The older tracks are much more melodic than the newer ones and as such I like those old ones better. The abstracter riffing isn’t really my thing for a band like these. They still add a couple of melodic touches tho. Their performance was quite tight. So all in all a pretty interesting gig.

Then it was up to Officium Triste to close the evening. I seen them like 10 times before and I never caught them on a bad day. Nonetheless I never caught them giving a stellar performance either; it’s always just good. And so it was this evening; despite a couple of obvious mistakes. They had a new drummer since a short while who seem to play the songs pretty easily. They had also just released a new album featuring some older material from EPs as well as a new song, a re-recorded song and a cover, plus an acoustic version of “My Charcoal Heart”. The new song No Hope was featured on the set this evening of course plus a mixture of older and newer material. Surprisingly a lot of tracks from “Th Pathway” album. Only the debut album was skipped. Another surprise was the participation of their previous guitar player for the last two songs.

Setlist:

1. This Inner Twist
2. Fading Like A Dying Candle
3. In Pouring Rain
4. No Hope
5. The Pathway
6. Roses On My Grave
7. On The Crossroads Of Souls
8. My Charcoal Heart
   Encores
9. Divinity
10. Goodbye