Gorguts is doing a short European tour this summer in between some festival gigs. Apparently it is a quadruple rotating headlining tour, but for this gig Gorguts would be playing last, yet all four bands got some 40 minutes to play. The opening band Venom Prison started at 18.00 already, so I had to miss that due to work. But since it was labeled as deathcore I didn’t mind that much anyway.

So the first band I saw, was the US band Revocation. When I listened to their album before I thought they were just okay. Live though it all sounded a lot better. I think this they said this was the first club gig in Europe. The lead guitars specifically were quite good. So overall quite an enjoyable show.

Next up was Fallujah also from the USA. Who play some sort of technical deathcore. I had seen them before and didn’t much like them then. The music is way to jumpy for me, particularly the drums are all over the place. Not really my thing.

Then Havok, again from the USA. I had also seen them before but like many of the new batch of thrash bands they failed to make an impression as I couldn’t remember a bit of it. They seemed to be a bit of those party thrash bands that are a bit goofy. The singer chose to wear a old fashioned summer dress, and the base player wore a pink shirt with chest hair and nipples printed on it. O-kay. Anyway, musically they played mostly straight-up thrash metal. There was lots of energy on stage, but the songs are well like most newer thrash metal songs, similar to 80s thrash. The vocals sounded a bit like early Schmier – so high pitched shrieks. Not bad, but I think I don’t remember much of this gig next time they come here.

Then finally Gorguts. They were done early setting up the stage, so when they were asked if they wanted to wait until the planned starting time Luc said no, they’d rather play more songs instead. Good! Gorguts are easily the most technical and progressive death metal band around. There really isn’t any band that sounds a bit like them. The riffs consists of uncommon chords with all kinds of harmonics and dissonants thrown in, yet there is always structure and flow in these songs. They started with the title track of From Wisdom to Hate followed by Obscura’s title track. The latter is one of my all time favourite albums so that was really great. And it is just so impressive with how much ease they play these songs. There more songs followed from those two albums; Inverted, The Carnal State and Nostalgia. Then Luc changed to his seven-string which could only mean that they would play newer material. Three songs from Coloured Sands followed – the first three of the album. An album that I can’t get into as much as Obscura. But still live they sound great. Impressive even. Though I would really like to hear songs off the first two albums as well. Great gig really.