There are not that many bands touring these days, post-corona and with the high-inflation. During the festival season some bands play some club gigs in between festival occurrences. That was what I Am Morbid was doing. The club arranged some opening acts.

The first band was the Dutch band Ecocide. They released one album some 10 years ago and then broke up, reformed, broke up again, but they are finally back together and promised a new album even to be released in October. Even though Eye of Wicked Sight was never a groundbreaking album, it is a quite solid old school death metal album. I never managed to see them live when they released it, so now I had the opportunity to catch up. The started with a new song – the title track of the forthcoming album Metamorphosis. They haven’t changed styles and it actually sounded quite good. The riff work is solid. The vocals are a bit generic. The double bass drumming could be tightened up, as it sounded sloppy at times. The presentation could be improved too. Other than that a pretty good band and solid gig. I’m looking forward to the new album.

The second band was from also from the low lands, but than the other half – Belgium, namely Carnation. This band has the typical HM-2 sound (even though they don’t use a HM2). This time the singer didn’t take a bloodbath before the gig, but used some sort of corpse paint. Musically, it is fairly generic death metal, well-performed but done before. One of the newer songs used some more clean intro and clean vocals, which sounded rather out of place, even though the vocals weren’t bad. Decent gig.

Then it was time for I Am Morbid, the Morbid Angel spin off or whatever featuring David Vincent and since a while also Pete ‘The Feet’ Sandoval, joined by two guitarists. Before the gig “This Train (is Going Straight to Hell)” by Danny B. Harvey sounded over the PA, and then followed by another intro. Finally the band came on stage to start with Immortal Rites, Fall From Grace, Visions From the Darkside and Blessed are the Sick. This time around they toured to celebrate the release of Covenant 30 years ago – I went to that tour in 1994 with Dismember and Grave – and so they played quite a few off that album. Rapture, Pain Divine, but also less often played songs such as Lion’s Den and Vengeance is Mine. The band was quite tight although Pete lost track a couple songs. The guitar solos at two-thirds of the gig were a bit unnecessary, even though both guitarist are quite skilled. The last five songs started with Dominate and obviously included God of Emptiness and World of Shit. No Terrorizer songs this time around – as far as I am concerned they could have swapped out the solos for some Fear of Napalm or Dead Shall Rise. Quite a good gig. After the gig they once again played This Train over the PA. It seems I have seen I Am Morbid more often than Morbid Angel.