Disharmonic Orchestra were supposed to headline a festival in the same venue a while back, but unfortunately they had to cancel their appearance and so the festival was left without a headliner. The venue opted to invite them back on this day and add a few bands to the bill.

The Frisian band Stoflik Omskot would have the honour to open. I was curious what they sound like, being from Friesland myself. They sing in Frisian which is kind of unique for a death metal band. Musically and lyrically however they are fairly standard death metal with punk drumming and no guitar solos. The guitars were a bit low in the mix, especially the first half of the gig. Not bad and they seem to have a lot of fun doing it. So pretty decent opening act.

The second band was from Turkey, namely Inhumane Depravity. I had never heard of them before. Nor do I know a lot of metal bands from Turkey at all. This band plays brutal, technical death metal. So that means lots of blast beats. The guitar riffs are quite technical but that makes it hard to distinguish the songs. The vocalist, a lady sounded very softly when she speaks, but has a pretty brutal, deep grunt yet with little variation. All in all, the songs all pretty much sound the same and have little memorable parts.

With a name like Grindpad you’d expect a grindcore band. Yet this Dutch band plays mostly thrash metal, although they throw in some death metal songs as well. Speaking of throwing, they also threw two inflatable sharks into the audience as a shark seems to be their mascot. Lot of the songs sound like classic thrash, you can almost pick out the riffs from like Metallica, Exodus, Evil Dead or Sodom. They artwork they used reminded me a lot of the old Repka drawings too, turns oud they are actually Repka’s.

Then it was time for Disharmonic Orchestra – all the way from Austria. They have been around for ages and have changed styles pretty much for each album, whereas they take influences from other genres, like britpop, or hiphop – and somehow make it work too. Their first two albums are small classics varying from grindish death metal on the debut, and more Swedeath on the second album. Later albums shed most of the death grind elements for a more progressive sound and that doesn’t really work for me. Live however these newer songs seem to work quite well amidst the older songs. There are strange riffs and odd drums in all songs and the bass is quite prominent – the bass player was forced to sit as he broke his knee skiing a while ago. They played a couple of songs from every album, but for Not To Be Undimensionally Conscious we’d have to wait pretty much till the end of the set. They returned for two more songs with one being from the split with Pungent Stench and the weird Return of the Living Beat. No Successive Substitution though. Quite a good gig.