Much like last year the line-up of the Dutch Doom Day wasn’t very interesting, generally with too much classic doom, sludge, stoner, etc. Many of which I had never heard. Except that the festival was extended to 3 days instead and the first day has two interesting bands. So I only visited the that day.

Opening band was Monuments, a Dutch doom band – labeled black doom on metal archives but I heard no black influences. This band is only around for a short while and the band stands a little ill at ease on the stage. Musically it is not bad, though hardly original and a bit thin on good ideas. The longs songs have a lot of repeating riffs. The last song they played was definitely the best song, with somewhat more variation.

The second band really was why I wanted to go anyway: Dread Sovereign. Apparently Primordial isn’t enough for Alan Averill to fill his time, so he founded this band. They play a very differnt style compared to Primordial, although over the vocals are very similar. Musically, this is based in traditional doom, rather up tempo in general. The bass lines are thick in the mix, and there is a lot of guitar melodies and solos. Live it all sounds much better than on the album. Excellent gig, really, except for the unnecessary Venom cover.

Then, headliner Conan played. I found this to be completely boring, actually. Low-tuned, extremely distorted guitars and bass, played in very minimalistc way, completely void of any melody. The shouted vocals, one of them providing higher and the other low shouts are sparse. Only the drums were kind of interesting. Essentially all the songs sound very similar, with little variation between and in the long songs. Oh and it was loud, much louder than usual in this club.

The final band was Procession. This Chilean doom metal band plays doom much in the style of Candlemass, but often a bit more upbeat. After the too long intro, they start with two songs of their latest album. And what followed was mainly a lot of works from their previous albums. This band has grown a lot since I saw them the first time some 6 or so years ago, and they have a real live band. And where the older songs are very basic, the newer songs are much more complex and layered, so they have grown musically as well. After the regular set they even returned for a encore “The Road to the Gravegarden”, and so they played a lot longer than the 45 minutes they were given.