After years of line-up issues and actually splitting up, Sinister recently got back together and recorded a new album titled After burner this year. Many things have changed tho, in the lineup. Former drummer Aad is now the singer; Alex switched from bass to guitar and they recruited a new drummer and bass player. Now the time was right do to some gigs again. And on this Friday, they played in the cult club Baroeg in Rotterdam near their home town (Schiedam).

The opening band Carceri had to cancel unfortunately shortly before the gig, because their guitar player couldn’t make it. Therefore a replacement was found in the band Sepiroth, a very young band. Now, Carceri is a pretty damn good band, but that cannot be said of Sepiroth, who play a brutal and simple style of death metal, which is dull and too simple to be of interest. Lots of blast beats and simple chords with rather monotonous vocals. Maybe it was because their bass played failed to show up, but I doubt that his bass lines could improve this.

The second support was the band Obtruncation who don’t even have a bass player. This is yet another brutal death metal, with little originality. Nevertheless they were a lot better to enjoy than their predecessors, but failed to impress me, despite some interesting drum work.

It took Sinister a long time to set up the stage and after about 45 minutes they were finally ready. Despite all the changes Sinister hasn’t changed much – they still play their own brand of brutal death metal that they played nearly fifteen years ago. Nothing too complex or original, yet they fills a niche and it is executed quite well generally. I must say that I wasn’t really impressed by Aad’s vocals too much, who lacked aggression and are a bit bland – he tried to make that up by stage performance and did that reasonably well. The set consisted of a mixture of good old tracks, like Sadistic Intent, Cross the Styx, To Mega Therion, Enslave the Weak, and tracks off their latest offering, such as the title track, Afterburner, and Altruistic Suicide. After an hour it was over though, no encores.