The Sounds of the Extreme tour counts no less than 8 bands with three headliners and varying support acts. At the Baroeg there were no less than 3 supports slots hence the obscene starting time of 18.00 sharp. No wonder the venue was nearly empty when the first band started to play.That band was the Belgian Pestifer who turned out to be from the French speaking part, hence they did the announcements in English. This band plays technical death metal, mostly mid-paced not unlike Pestilence in the 90s. Obviously they are very skilled musicians, but somehow the songwriting is a bit dull, so none of the songs really stand out. Maybe it works better on CD – I should check them out.From Australia, Truth Corroded appeared next. These lads play a thrashy death metal with some hardcore overtones that has been done hundreds of times before. Although generally well played, it never got any interesting at all.

Quality metal from Italy seems to be quite scarce, so I was a little anxious that Karnak wouldn’t be interesting either. Too bad, it turned out I was right. They play rather unstructured hyperfast death metal that I don’t really care about. Half way through the PA got shut down, but the band played on, I guess on the raw sound of amps and drumkit. It didn’t even sound that bad, but it took more than 5 minutes to get the PA running again.

Then we got to the headliners, first up was Vital Remains who apparently still exists, though I hadn’t heard anything about them since their last album from 2007 or so. It seems Tony has got a new line-up together after Dave Suzuki left so I wonder how that would turn out live with the unplayable drums and the very catchy lead guitar work. After the intro, they started their set with only songs of the last two albums. Well at least Tony brought his guitar with the cheesy (shall I say childish) red lights in the shape of 666. The new singer was decent not all that much unlike Glen, but his stage act was a bit static. The drums were fast but kinda unaudible during the fast parts. And the lead guitar decent as well. The problem with Vital Remains is that half their songs consists of blistering fast blasts that are quite dull, but they spice that up with midpaced sections that have really good lead guitar work in them. But generally not bad, but they could have spiced it up a bit with a song like Battleground off the Forever Underground album or so.

Malevolent Creation are much like Vital Remains a band that has been around for a long time and has been through a similar amount of different members. However I haven’t followed them really, but seen them live a few times before. And the experience was a bit varying a couple of gigs were quite dull, and others were quite good. This time it turned out to be somewhere right in the middle. Even though the band mostly played songs off the early albums, it didn’t get all that interesting mostly. And it all suffered a bit from having only a single guitar this time. So pretty much okay.

Lastly there was Krisiun – a Brazilian band of three brothers that haven’t had a lineup change since the early nineties. And neither have they changed style much, even though they beefed up their latest album with some slower parts, most of the songs consists of rather staccato riffs over extremely fast drum work and equally fast guitar leads. Their set consisted of songs from most albums, including such songs as Bloodcraft, Ravager, Hatred Inherit, The Will to Potency and even the old Apocalyptic Victory was performed. Like always Krisiun are extremely tight and energetic – I haven’t seen them do a bad gig ever in all the 7 times I’ve seen them. However this was the first time I saw them playing Black Force Domain – the excellent title track of their first album which fits in very well with the rest of their set. That made this gig a bit more special. After the regular set they came back to do one more song – well extending their scheduled time by some 20 minutes.