Memoriam are already about to release their second album, only a year after their debut, and after existing only for some two years. In the mean time they collected quite some following. Quite a feat, indeed. This weekend they did a few gigs in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands to promote their soon to be released second album.

They brought along Fractured Sanity from Belgium. Exactly the same band I had as the support act, last year. Brutal, quite technical death metal, played tightly. Yet I don’t really care much for this band. I don’t like the mechanical riffs, and they could do with better songwriting. At this time there weren’t all that much people in the audience and the band got very little response.

That would be a bit different when Memoriam started. Although the gig wasn’t sold out, which I guess had something to do with the Cannibal Corpse gig at the same time in Eindhoven. These guys were joking already during the time they needed to set-up, particularly bass player Dave and singer Karl. “You’ll never sound like Bolt Thrower” Karl shouted while standing in the audience as Dave was setting up his gear. I guess that set the atmosphere for the rest of the gig, as they never stopped joking and fooling around. If they had brought some frying pans to hit each other with on the head, it could be easily mistaken for a Bottom sketch. Nevertheless, they managed to play some songs as well. And in fact, it sounded quite good. Scott now has a proper guitar (BC Rich Warlock) and that mostly seems to fix the squeaky sounds that I hated most on the previous gig and the live videos on youtube. The set contained a whole bunch of new songs – five- which I generally found to sound stronger than the songs on the debut. The rest were as Karl said “old” songs, being less than two years old. And they sound like Bolt Thrower and I guess they don’t intent to. Fortunately the covers have been removed from the set, so only original material this time around. I managed to get one of Andy’s drum sticks – so I now have a drum stick from both long standing Bolt Thrower drummers. Quite a good gig with a band they actually puts the fun back in old school death metal, without being cheesy.