A World-War II-themed, old school death metal band town with veteran musicians playing in their sort of home. Can you wrong with that? Probably, but Hail of Bullets are way above average. And doing a one-off club gig aside all the festival gigs they do is a good chance to sort them out.

But first the Autopsy cover-band Cadaverine (formerly Modellbau) was set to play a bunch of classic Autopsy covers. The good thing was I knew all the song pretty well. The bad thing was that it wasn’t Autopsy playing them. A couple of big mistakes were annoying, but overall it was enjoyable. And it is not all that often one sees a girl drumming in a death metal band. So a nice warm-up for the head liner.

Then, after changing the stage, it was time for Hail of Bullets. The venue was reasonably full when the intro (The Eve of Battle) started after which the band kicked off with the opener of the latest album – Operation Z. It was going back and forth between the Russian front and the Pacific with the crowd going wild. The band played very tight but with many of them having more than 20 years experience, who’d expect anything different (Theo Van Eekelen- Bass, Ed Warby – Drums, Paul Baayens – Guitars, Stephan Gebédi – Guitars, Martin van Drunen – Vocals). Yea so they bring nothing new, but what they do, they do quite well. And after an hour or so the air raid siren sounded over the PA to signal the end. But they came back for two more songs.

• Operation Z
• Advancing Once More
• Red Wolves Of Stalin
• Kamikaze
• Nachthexen
• Full Scale War
• Warsaw Rising
• On Coral Shores
• Berlin
• Guadalcanal
• Tokyo Napalm Holocaust
• Ordered Eastwards
• –Encores–
• The Crucial Offensive
• General Winter