The first gig of the new year for me, is immediately a very interesting one, namely the sort of international all stars grind band Lock Up. Once started by the late Jesse Pintado to play grind music more in the vein of Terrorizer.

The first band however was a local band, named Rectal Smegma. It should be obvious I guess from the name that this would be some semi-humourous porngrind along the lines of the Dutch porngrind tradition of bands like Kutschurft, Cliteater and the like. I never really bothered them out before, as mostly they are way too simple and the humpa-humpa riffs annoy me. Anyway Rectal Smegma is just that, quite simple, straightforward, rather repetitive and frankly quite boring, tending somewhat to the brutal death metal style, which seems quite popular these days.

The second band is the Dutch Entrapment. From the logo it’s easily derived that they play Swedish style death metal – if you only glance quickly you might even mistake the name for the mighty Dismember. Nevertheless they sound more like Carnage than Dismember. Well, you can’t really go wrong with Swedish death metal, even if the band isn’t from the Netherlands. And musically it is all quite okay, but  the gig seemed uninspired.

Then there was Lock Up. With Shane Embury on bass (Napalm Death), Nic Barker (ex-LotsOfBands) on drums, Tomas Lindberg (At The Gates) handling the vocals and Anton Reisenegger (Pentagram Chile), standing in for Jesse on guitar, one cannot conclude anything but a very international, all star band. It makes me wonder how they rehearse. Anyway, it was over 10 years since they played in the Baroeg, so it was about time they’d return. Kicking off with a song off their latest album – Brethren of the Pentagram, it was immediately clear what this was gonna be. Fast. Fast. Fast. In fact this is one of the few bands with an abundance of blast beats that I actually like. They put a lot of sort of melodic riffs on top of the grind. And to top that off, there was a lot of energy on stage. The set consisted of a cross section of their catalogue, with a grand in memoriam to Jesse, by playing two Terrorizer songs (Storm of Stress and Fear of Napalm). Great gig.