Finally, after seeing them as a support act a few times, a headlining show of the Tasmanian Psycroptic. Fortunately guitarist Joe Haley had recovered from his epileptic seizure or something like that, so the band didn’t have to play with a tape recording of the guitars, like they did on the first couple of gigs of the tour. They brought no less than three other bands with them. And as gigs seem to start earlier and earlier these days the first band hit the stage at 19.00. Not that I expected much from the supports tho. But at that time it’s nearly impossible to go to Rotterdam due to traffic.

Hence I missed a bit of Exhumer. An Italian brutal death metal band that apparently lost their drummer, so they played with drums from a computer. Nothing terribly exciting here. The music is fast, not all that technical, hardly original and in the end quite boring as all the songs sound quite similar. But reasonably well played.

The second band was the English Dyscarnate. I had seem them before and was not very impressed. The main issue is that the music is completely stripped of melody and there is no lead guitar work at all. So it’s nearly all rhythm with lots of interchangable riffs and blant vocals. Nothing really exciting.

Another Italian band was the final support, namely Hour of Penance. They also failed to impress me although the music in itself was much more varied, and with two guitars it makes the music itself fuller and more complex but it lacks identity. It was okay for a couple of songs but than, like most brutal death metal, all the blast beats get boring and it all starts to blur to me.

Psycroptic is a whole different cup of tea tho. Yep it is brutal death metal as well, but the technical skills of the brothers Haley (drums and guitar) make the songs stand out a lot more. The intricate riffs were executed perfectly over the bass lines. Only the vocals are a bit flat. They played a mixture of songs from most of their albums, with some focus on the latest. So quite an excellent performance.