The choice today was to either go to Sacred Reich in Zwolle or Possessed in Rotterdam. I chose to go to Possessed as I had seen Sacred Reich a few times before, but hadn’t seen Possessed nor the support act Acrostichon.

Acrostichon is one of those Dutch death metal gems from the early 90s that suddenly dissolved then, but in the recent spur of reunions were reactivated. At first for a one-off gig, but they are now playing some occasional gigs. So this was an excellent opportunity to see how they were doing live – there’s been circulating plenty stores varying from them being utter crap to excellent. It was pretty obvious that they are doing this just for the fun. Nevertheless quite a good gig and their old school yet varied death metal style still sounds excellent these days. The set list seems to focus mostly on the debut album, which was re-issued a while back with songs like Dehumanized and Walker of Worlds.

Then there was Possessed – often called the first death metal band, but also a band I always kind of forgot about, even though some of their songs are quite good. They have resurfaced since some time but with only Jeff Becerra as an original member, and since he is stuck in a wheelchair he’s no longer playing bass guitar, just handling vocals. So one can wonder if it is not just a Possessed cover band. Anyway, it took over an hour to set up the stage properly, but when they were done they started off with Pentagram and what followed more were only the classic 80s material. It seemed tho that they were playing a bit faster than originally which took some the atmosphere away. And the same can be said for the triggered drums. But all-in-all a decent gig really. Next time though I probably would go to Sacred Reich instead.