The Sunday of Dutch Doom Day featured another seven bands of various types of doom metal. The day started with the Dutch band Akelei who play melodic doom metal with Dutch lyrics that are sung clean. They use three guitars (and aren’t the only one this day), which were used to create multiple layers of melodies, clean picking and riffing. Never original, but what they played sounded quite ok.

The second band were from Mallorca, Spain. Helevorn plays a very steady set of doom death metal with some gothic touches. Full of enthusiasm they performed their set, and especially the singer was stood out being able to do good grunts but also steady, somewhat deep clean vocals. Then again this band wasn’t very original either, but performed well.

Malasangre is from Italy, but they have been using a session singer, who used to play in Bunkur. And that is the band they can be compared to. They are very slow, bass-heavy and most of all really, really boring.

Then there was finally the band I was most interested in: Indesinence. These Brits play a brutal form of doom metal, not heard again since the mighty Disembowelment. They use melodic, slow sections but combine that with fast sections incorporating blast beats creating well written songs that were generally excellently performed. They even obliged us with a new track. It is time for these guys to play a headlining gig here and play longer than the 35 minutes they had this time.

Serpentcult is a Belgian band I had heard and seen before, and I don’t like much. This female-fronted band plays a form of doom that bores me, it lacks melody most and is too bass dominant.

Then there was Esoteric who took a long time to set up, but they also have a huge amount of equipment that they use. The music is hard to describe, with three guitars they create complex, multi-layered, and generally long songs that blend melody and aggression, creating an almost hypnotising atmosphere. Their set consisted mostly of songs I hadn’t heard before, but then they are working on a new album. Only magnificent “The Blood of the Eyes” was played of their latest opus. An amazing band…

The headliner of the evening was on old band that was founded in the 70s but do not seem to have a huge discography and somehow I had never heard of Pagan Altar before. They seemed to have quite some followers that appeared on the show, as it was pretty full before the stage. The music is more traditional heavy metal / rock music with some slow sections. Essentially every song is built the same way. It starts out slow and then goes to mid-pace, featuring a lot of guitar solos. Although generally decently played, it wasn’t bad, but I didn’t like that much either, and the so-so vocals didn’t add much to it either.

So that was another Dutch Doom Day, that was in general interesting with a wide selection of doom metal bands, of which many I had not heard before. Highlights were definitively the UK bands Imindain, Esoteric and Indesinence. So it’s up to next year to put down an ever better selection of doom.