The Ultimate Domination tour featuring Decapitated and three other Polish bands came to Rotterdam, so it was time for me to visit the Baroeg once more. The opening band of this Sunday afternoon gig were Crionics. A black / death metal band with keyboards, seemingly highly inspired by Emperor. Not that I could hear that too well, because the sound was awful – the guitars were hardly audible as were the vocals. Anyway they concluded there set with a cover of Emperor – the Loss and Curse of Reverence and for as far as I could hear it, they did it quite well.

After a quick change of the set, Hate took the stage. Luckily the sound was a lot better, tho still heavily dominated by the bass and especially the drums. Dies Irae are a brutal death metal band playing nothing new or terribly interesting. But what they played they played well

As I said four Polish bands, but no Vader – well a little bit of Vader, as the drummer of Dies Irae is no less than Docent formerly of Vader. And this time the snare wasn’t triggered like he used to do with Vader (only the bass drums are triggered for all four bands on this tour). This band plays a reasonably technical form brutal death metal, but with many mid-tempo pieces. The bass player had a huge bass which he played a lot with his thumb, which is afaik quite rare in metal music. Not a bad band – a reasonable performance, but nothing special here further.

Decapitated are the band that I came for. Their highly technical, brutal death metal was put down quite flawlessly through this rather short set. The sound had improved a lot and all instruments could be heard quite well, though the drums were still too dominant for my ears. They worked through a set list comprising of only songs from the Nihility and The Negation – a shame they didn’t play anything of their debut album. After some 45 minutes it was time for a single encore. A cover of Napalm Death was played – Suffer the Children. This performance made my trip to Rotterdam certainly worthwhile.