“Triple Dose Of Darkness” is a short tour that the Swedes from In Aeternum head lined. On this Sunday afternoon show, the club Baroeg added a fourth band to the bill, so that title doesn’t really cover it at all. Any way, the first band just started playing as I entered the venue. A French band called Venefixion. I never heard them before and it seems they only released some demos and an EP. They play a grim mixture of death metal and black metal more in the vein of Hellhammer than say Dissection. Not a bad start really. One of the songs started with the intro of Am I Evil and then continued with original song. The lead guitarist seemed to have the day of his life, especially at the end of last song he went into rockstar mode, picking with his teeth, swinging the guitar, playing with the guitar on his neck, funny poses and lots of guitar wankery. Slightly overdone perhaps. The vocalist on the other hand tended more to the dull side. His stage act was rather calm and he spoke little between songs. And his vocals were rather monotonic.

The second band was the band Lucifericon. This Dutch outfit I had come across a few times before as a support act. They seem to lean more towards old school death metal with some black metal elements. But I always feel that the music is lacking something. Somehow the songs just aren’t very engaging, even though they played well enough.

The band that I actually wanted to see was Soulburn. Which sort of the other Asphyx, with Bob and Eric from the classic Asphyx line-up. After one album in the late 90s they renamed to Asphyx, but since a few years now they have reformed the band and already recorded two albums which actually outshine the latest Asphyx releases. Musically they tend to go back more early black metal like Hellhammer, Bathory, Venom and so on, yet the riffs are in the very typical Daniels’ style. The drums have been stripped down to the basic rhythms with few fills and so is the bass quite mimimalistic. They started off with a song of the second album and alternated mostly between both last albums. Only to come to the debut with the set closer Feeding on Angels. Pretty good gig and it seems I wasn’t the only one to come especially for this band.

The last band was In Aeternum. According to my administration I have seen them before, but I have no recollections of it what so ever. Usually not a very good first sign. During the first song the guitar sound is very low in the mix, it gets somewhat better during the second song but is hardly optimal for the rest of the gig. Musically this tends to be first wave black metal with some death metal elements, reasonably simplistic songs. The older material has more melody, the newer songs sound messy. The guitar solos sounded very shrill and were played horrendously sloppy. The bass and drums sounded pretty solid. All in all they hardly made an impression on me. During the last song the bass player got the guitar from the singer, and the bass player from Lucifericon came on stage to play the bass. The second guitarist had already left the stage, I guess he had a bad day. So they played what I guess is the cover from War off their latest EP in this alternate setting. Not a terrible gig, but I can see what I don’t recall the previous gig. I expect I won’t remember much about this gig after a while either.