Purtenance is one of the many death metal bands from the early 1990s that released a nearly forgotten album, then, which is now a cult release. Even the re-release of their debut album is hard to come by at a fair price. They broke up after the release and only many years later reformed and already released a couple of albums. I can’t remember ever seeing tour information back then, so I guess this is the first time around they are touring. I arrived a bit late at the venue for this metal matinee as there was a marathon still going on which shut down most of the roads in the area. Nevertheless the first band had not yet started.

That first band was Hyban Draco. A Spanish black metal band, I had never heard of, but they already exist for 12 years and released 4 albums. They could really keep my attention. Musically its rather friendly and not grim and frostbitten, leaning more towards death or thrash metal riffs but lacking the punch. A pretty dull, mediocre band.

The second band is Sepiroth. One of Ben’s many band, I think this was his first band. They are active for more than 15 years. Musically this is mostly brutal death metal, many blast beats, lots of fast palm-muted riffs and little melody. Even though they played it all quite solidly, not really my favourite genre.

Then it was finally time for Purtenance. They have that awesome crunchy Finnish death metal tone. Stylistically, they hold the middle ground between the typical peculiar Finnish sound of say Demigod and the Stockholm death metal sound. After the long intro from tape – John 3:16 – they started with an old demo track, followed by Invocatio of their latest album. Most songs of the set were taken from the debut album. With a few newer songs included. The new vocalist sounded a bit generic and wasn’t all that audible, not the deep reverberating grunts of the original singer. And his English was quite horrific as well. Quite a good gig, by a band that was long forgotten.