On this Easter monday afternoon Immolation stopped at the 013 club in Tilburg, which was a good chance for me to check them out again, despite the wintery weather. This was the second European tour to promote their latest opus “Shadowns in the Light”, less than a year after their previous tour.

This afternoon there were no local supports, so the opening band was Greece’ Sickening Horror. A band often hailed as great, but I gu ess this is largely because Nile’s current drummer played on the debut. Nevertheless he has been replaced. Apart from that I can’t see what the fuzz is about, as the music consists mostly of blast beats and technical riffs that went no where. The wanky solos topped it off to be a entirely boring band. At least the bassplayer tried to add some nice touches.

Second there was the US band Goatwhoro. Nothing too original here though, with a blackish thrash metal band clad in leather and spikes. Most of the songs consist of simple riffing, but they bring sufficient variation with them to make it sound interesting.

The originally Israeli band Melechesh – now living in the Netherlands – were the final support act. Aside from their founding member – guitarist and singer Ashmedi – the rest of the band is also Dutch. Their albums always seem to leave me in a state of ambiguity, some part of it is great mixture of death, black and thrash metal, other parts are totally boring – the vocals being one of that. And that is exactly how this show has left me, even though the songs seemed a bit more compact.

Then finally Immolation appeared on stage; the band that most people came out to see. Although the sound wasn’t too good, the lead guitar and vocals were way down in the mix, they brought 75 minutes of totally brutal death metal. As complex the music is, they bring it nearly flawlessly. The set consisted of songs from most albums. Even the good old song Immolation was played along classics as Burn with Jesus, and Once Ordained, complented by newer tracks like Swarm of Terror, Harnessing Ruin, Shadows in the Light, Condemned. After the regular set they came back to play one encore: Bring them Down. Immolation is always good live and their music is consistently of a very high quality. D efinitively worth checking out.