In 1993, an album was released that is one of the definitive albums of the doom / death genre. And that isn’t from My Dying Bride, but the Australian Transcendence into the Peripheral diSEMBOWELMENT. Groundbreaking in every aspect, and at the time never heard before. I still rate it as one of my all time favourite album. Unfortunately the band quickly dissolved and there never was a successor. Albeit it is hard to believe that they could top this one. But now they more or less reformed under the name dUSK and started rehearsing their old songs again. They were announced to play the Roadburn festival this year where they’d play the entire album, and they opted to add a few gigs to that in Europe. Actually this is the first time they even play on European ground. In the mean time they changed their name to Inverloch and even recorded an EP with three new songs. So there you have a bloody good reason to travel to my former hometown on this Tuesday evening. Good thing I found out it was happening just on Monday evening. And I think that more had overlooked this due to very little promotion as the club was frighteningly empty. Though a few of them even came from abroad to check them out.

There was just a single support act, namely Dutch doom/death outfit Faal. Although their musical style is far broader that just doom/death, blending all kinds of styles, including black metal and shoegaze into it. They had just released new album. So they played all of it. The sound quality was quite good actually, especially for this kind of club, which is basically a bar with a stage. And it just proofs again that Faal is simply a very good band. And this was a very good live preformance, better than when I saw them half a year ago in Tilburg.

Then, it was time for diSEMBOWELMENT / dUSK / Inverloch. They are now a five piece, with two original members – the drummer and the bassist who now plays guitar. After an ambient intro, the band stepped on stage to kick off “The Tree Of Life and Death”. The opening of the track is fierce and brutal and executed tightly. Much tighter than than the actual recording, especially the drums. The continued with “Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory” my favourite song off the album and I can’t say but that it was brilliant. Unlike on roadburn they didn’t play the entire album, but then switched to Inverloch, playing a few songs off the EP (actually all three of them). Those were surprisingly good and the diSEMBOWELMENT influence is pretty obvious, but it is far from an exact copy. So we also got the song “The Spirit of the Tall Hills” and “Cerulean Transcience of all my Imagined Shores”. And ending the gig with a demo track “Extracted Nails” an earlier version of Excoriate. I must say I was quite excited to get to this gig before and I can’t but say that this was definitively one of the most impressive gigs I have seen. Too bad there were only like 30 people to experience it.