Cryptopsy has been doing a lot of touring lately and this would be the second tour that visited Europe is half a year. I saw them play in The Hague that time. This time they dropped by the Baroeg in Rotterdam. They brought no supports on this tour so the venue arranged some bands themselves for this metal matinee.

The first band was a very young Dutch band called Blood God. I was pleasantly surprised by the creative and progressive riffing that vaguely reminded me of later Death, or early Cynic perhaps and a pretty good bass too. If only they arranged those to some better songs and tighter playing, it could become a really interesting band.

The second band is also Dutch called Bleeding Gods, also quite new, but with some more experienced members. They presented their debut album this afternoon. And compared to the first band their playing was much tighter, it lacked severely in the riffs and songs department. It’s all pretty standard death metal, much in the vein of Sinister perhaps. But no memorable songs.

Severe Torture had cancelled shortly before the show, and were replaced by the rather harmless death metal band Bodyfarm, that seems to pop up everywhere lately, so their marketing champaign is running quite well. I saw them before and they made a very weak impression on me, uninspired songs, of watered down death metal, mostly midpaced, no crunch, no power, all blant. So I decided to get some thing to eat only to catch the last half of the set. And that was so boring I nearly fell asleep.

Then finally Cryptopsy. Only drummer Flo is an original member, and they only have one guitarist nowadays. They started with the opening track of None So Vile including the Exorcist III intro. And that was tight, fast and brutal. The single guitar leaves some gaps during solo’s which I think is a bit of a pity. They played lots of old songs, such as Mutant Christ, Benedictine Convulsions, Graves of the Fathers, Emaciate, White Worms, plus a handful of newer songs, skipping And Then You’ll Beg and Once Was Not entirely. I failed to recognise one of the songs. They came back for a three-song encore consisting of Defenestrate, Slit Your Guts and the mandatory Phobophile. I could do without the “we’re an independent band” rants, and actually withouth that singer entirely, as the vocals are pretty terrible. Lord Worm wasn’t putting much effort in articulating, but at least put some heart and soul in it. This is monotonic mixed with pig squeals. But other than that actually a very great show, bit short perhaps, but very intense.