Even though I have been living in the area, I had never visited the once legendary club ’t Paard van Troje (Trojan Horse) in The Hague – just one of those clubs that had all the cool metal gigs in the 80s and early 90s along with venues Nooderligt, Atak, Dynamo and Scum. But ever since it reopened after a long time refurbishing, metal gigs have been quite scarce really. But this night there was a small festival with only four Dutch death metal bands. So that was where I went.

The first band is Victimizer and the only one I didn’t know in advance. They play a rather generic form of brutal death metal with lots of blast beats. In the end it all sounded a bit too similar but aside from the rather untight faster double bass drum parts it was played quite skillfully.

Next up was a band from around here, called Carceri I had seen them live years ago when they hadn’t released anything yet but they sounded quite good then. So finally last year they released their debut album and they are doing some gigs again as well. Stylistically though not all that different from the previous band, but much more variation in tempos and riffs. Apparently one of the guitarist couldn’t make it (or quit?) so during some of the leads the sound seemed a bit empty despite the solid bass. Probably one of the better death metal bands in the Dutch underground scene at the moment.

Okay, so after that there was Izegrim. A band I had seen a few times before and always completely bore me. And they didn’t fail at that this time. The highly distorted, rather sluggish thrash/death metal with bland semi-grunted vocals lead to completely uninteresting music, vaguely similar to Arch Enemy.

Then the headliner of this evening was Toxocara who also have a new album under their belt which they wanted to promote. They amazed my first time I saw them some years ago by playing a very fast brutal death metal full of varied, interesting and original riffs. Yet their new album is slightly different bearing some industrial influences, but still sounds pretty good though. Nevertheless they opened up with an old song – T34 – and it was fast, tight and brutal. And as a matter of fact most of the – too short set – was filled with songs off their first two albums with just 2 of the new one. So a great performance again.

Unfortunately I can see why there are few metal gigs in The Hague area, as there were just about 50-60 people all together and I must say probably one of the lamest I have ever seen. Scarcely any headbanging at all, and nothing even close to moshing. And at 23.00 the venue had to cleared out, as apparently there was gonna be some dance fest later on. So probably the last gig in the once legendary ’t Paard for me 🙁