Afer three earlier gigs this month featuring a couple of oldest Dutch death metal bands, including Ceremony, Acrostichon and Thanatos, this Sunday afternoon gig was headlined by none other than Pestilence with their Reduced to Ashes tour, for which they would play the entire Consuming Impulse record. Even though Pestilence may be the biggest name in Dutch death metal history, it wasn’t as full as last week with Thanatos. Nevermind. They brought two support acts, both also Dutch.

The first band is Magnacult. They play a mixture of death metal, modern sounding groove metal and metalcore. That sounds quite uninteresting really and that is what is was. The only thing that really stood out was the drummer. His drum work was quite original and well played.

Bleeding Gods play thrashy death metal, yet the twist is that there are also keyboards. And boy are they superfluous. And way too loud in the mix. During one of the songs they brought Pestilence’s bass player on stage. The two basses created a really thick sound. Other than that, there wasn’t all that much of interest here.

Then there was Pestilence. They took quite a while to set up. But when they eventually started, it was right with the opening track of Consuming Impulse and the played the songs in order of the album. It is a classic and all the songs are still sounding very relevant nowadays. Patrick remains a bit of an oddball, not only with his appearance but also with his commentary between songs. Anyway, the band was much better and tighter than last year. After Reduced to Ashes they played 3 more songs of Testimony of the Ancients, which I like a bit more and Horror Detox of Resurrection Macabre. Peculiarly they played nothing from their latest album. Pretty great gig.