The annual Dutch Doom Day was taking place again in the Baroeg. A two day doom metal festival, and I only went the first day. The second day didn’t have an all that interesting line-up; so I opted to go to another gig on the Sunday. Strangely enough there were 5 gigs in two days I would have wanted to go to. So choices had to be made.

The opening band was the Frisian O.L.T.A.S. I have no idea what the band name stands for. They play some fairly simple doom death metal. Enjoyable sort of for an opening band, but nothing really interesting.

VIIHB or Seven Houses Burn (from the town of Zevenhuizen – literally seven houses) is another Dutch band. They play more traditional doom metal. Their former singer Luther Veldmark – best known for Hooded Priest I think – passed away last year, never the less the band continued in his memory. Not really a style I enjoy a lot.

Lucifungus comes all the way from Australia. They have released a couple albums and were now doing a short tour through Europe. Musically it’s mostly stoner doom and with only two members a drummer and a guitarist, who both do vocals. Not my favourite style but kind of cool for a few songs and their songs were mostly quite short for doom metal, also not all that slow; mostly midpaced. Not bad.

The fourth band was also from the Netherlands. Dodenkrocht plays black metal with quite some doom metal influences. It is a combination that isn’t heard too often. But for them it works. The fast tremolo picked melodies combined with the slower riffs over a generally slow rhythm. A faster section here and there. The vocals are somewhat in between grunts and black metal vocals. Interesting band I want to check out some more.

Purification is another band I had never heard of. They come from the US and apparently quite a few in the audience came specially for them. Another more traditional sounding doom metal band. Some interesting riffs and sections here and there, but in the end it is all too samish for me.

One band I wanted to check out was the Dutch Sad Whisperings. The made one album in the nineties, which has now seen a rerelease. They play doom death metal with some gothic influences here and there. I found out about them much later that when they were around but their album is pretty good. And them now playing on DDD was good opportunity to hear how they sound live. I would have expected them to play a lot of the material from the album, but they played only 3 songs and a number of songs from the various demoes and promos they made, and a new song. The vocals sounded a bit less deep as on the album. Musically it was all pretty good – largely midpaced death metal and not too much doom. Pretty cool gig, for a band I missed in their heydays.

The headliner of this first day was the Irish Mourning Beloveth. Their first two albums are among the best doom / death metal out their. Unfortunately they haven’t been able to follow up on them with the same quality. Nowadays, guitarist Frank seems to have laid down his guitar, as I understood due to an injury. And they have a new second guitarist, while Frank is handling the clean vocals. They started with The Sickness. Musically it was quite solid, but Franks additional vocal contributions, apart from the clean vocals already in the song made it sound very chaotic and his dramatic stage theatrics seemed out of place (maybe a little too much alcohol). Old Rope is a weird song , from their latest EP, that they played. The gig was eventually cut short after only 45 minutes after their guitarist throw his guitar on the podium and apparently it would play any more. Quite a disappointing gig.