Already the forth installment of this small indoor doom metal fest in Dordrecht. This years episode has actually a very interesting line-up. I missed the first two bands, Doomed and Abysmal Darkening.

The first band I saw was the Belgian Monads, who play funeral doom that vaguely reminded me of the mighty Esoteric during some passages. I didn’t really like the highly distorted, screechy vocals. But other than that a pretty solid gig. I think I ought to check out their sole release at some time.

The French Lethian Dreams was the second band. The early material sounded quite a lot like sister band Remembrance, but the newer albums have switched to a doom style focused more on  atmospere, and got rid of the harsh vocals. In stead all vocals are now handled by Carline. Live they played mostly songs of their latest album, with only Dawn of the previous album. The band nevertheless seemed a bit uninspired and left early.

Then there was Ataraxie who play doom/death metal. Their debut album Slow Transcending Agony is one of the  great  albums in that style, of which they played two songs. And live this band is always great. And that includes this time. They had a session drummer, and replaced one guitarist with two, making it no less than three guitarist on stage. I don’t think they actually need that, but it makes a nice full sound. Throughout the really long songs they go through the entire speed spectrum, from really slow to full blasts. Excellent performance once again.

And if you think you can’t get any slower, there is always Worship. I don’t think they ever go beyond 30 BPM or so.  And yeah that is really, really slow. They started their gig with a couple of songs off the Dooom album. The very shrill lead guitar tone very much defines their sound, too bad Daniel often makes quite some mistakes during the leads, fortunately not too many this time. The ended their set with two songs of the debut, namely Whispering Gloom and Worship. All in all a pretty solid gig.

The last band of the evening was the American Funeral Doom outfit Loss. A bit odd to have a band headlining that isn’t too well known and has only release under their belt. But they are touring together with Worship. Never mind anyway. I wasn’t all that familiar with them, I heard their album a few times, and that sounded pretty good. And live they were actually really good. The songs are quite complex, and not all that slow. Some of which feature some long clean guitar melodies. And that all was spiced up by the drummer who laid down some interesting drumwork. Most of the songs came of course from the Despond album, with the addition of Depression’s Hammer song off the latest split with Hooded Menace. Sometimes it feels like doom metal can be quite a restrictive genre, but bands like this and all the other bands playing today proofed that it can actually be very broad and varied and definitively kept interesting despite the generally slow pace of the music.