Finally the Domination tour, headlined by Cryptopsy made their stop at the Baroeg, as one of the last gigs of the tour. When I arrived, no later than about 18.15 on a Tuesday evening, not many people had showed yet.

This fact was certainly noticed by the first bandHurtlocker from the USA. The band played a short set, and the singer often complained that there were only few people. Anyway, I thought this band was quite dull and didn’t mind the short set at all.

Next up were the Polish band Vesania with members who used to play in Behemoth. I never dug Behemoth much and the same goes for this band, and their sorta kinda corpse paint and gothic image didn’t make it any more interesting.

Things were slowly getting better when Dew-scented appeared on stage, that is instead of the planned The Aborted. Not that this band ever would get to be my favourite, but they were enjoyable up to a point.

The Aborted had switched places with Dew-scented and so they were the fourth band to play the night. Possibly because it was their last show of the tour. The Aborted is a brutal display of grindish death metal; which as is common in that genre lacks variation. At least these guys were enthusiastic and giving their best. The singer announced each song as “Post Humankind” and as such making fun of Vesania of which that is a song. Interesting side not: the fretless bass is handled by a girl. And she was quite good at it too.

With the fifth band, things started to get really interesting. Swedish old-school death metal band Grave started their set. As they did not really have to promote an album they played a mixture of all albums, except Hating Life, starting with the classic “Deformed” and ending with their very first song ever written “Into The Grave”, during which Alex Auburn, the guitarist of Cryptopsy joined the band (Ola saying he had practiced all afternoon to learn it). In the meantime, they also played “You’ll never See…”, “Turning Black”, “Rise”. “Soulless”, “Last Journey”, “And Here I Die”. A very good gig, but too short.

And then it was time for Cryptopsy, I missed their previous gigs, so this was actually the very first gig of them I saw. And now that they have their original singer back, enough reasons to check them out. Well, this band is quite a difference from Grave, who play generally rather simple death metal; Cryptopsy plays highly technical death metal, incorporating extreme speeds in their music. On their albums that sounds quite good, the question usually is, can they pull it off on-stage? Yes, is the only correct answer. Opening with “Crown of Horns” immediately showed what this band is capable of. Lord Worm is a great singer, and has a great stage personality. The entire band in fact seem to enjoy playing and got really into their songs. The consists of tracks from most album, but oddly enough the “Whisper Supremacy” was skipped. Some more songs they played: phobophile, we bleed, graves fo the fathers, abigor, The Pestilence That Walketh In Darkness, The Frantic Pace Of Dying, back to the worms.