Gavin Spearhead's Blog

During the reunion season, yet another long split-up band decided to reform just for a couple of gigs. This time the old cadaver of the American Massacre had been re-animated and decided to tour Europe. A tour that I heard didn’t go too well with approximately 50 visitors per show. At 2 November, they made […]

This has been the sixth instance of the annual Dutch Doom Day festival with 15 international doom bands in two days. It is one of the few doom only festival, along with the German Doom Shall Rise. The festival typically hosts doom bands from all sides of the extreme – from classic doom, drone/sludge doom, […]

The Sunday of Dutch Doom Day featured another seven bands of various types of doom metal. The day started with the Dutch band Akelei who play melodic doom metal with Dutch lyrics that are sung clean. They use three guitars (and aren’t the only one this day), which were used to create multiple layers of […]

Houwitser have reformed a short while ago and are playing a couple of gigs in the Netherlands. Now I never really cared much about Houwitser, but they had Putrefied as support. They album was pretty decent – it reminds me most about the first Incantation album – and I heard good things about their live […]

Certainly one of the more colourful people of the metal scene these days, this Kvarforth. The main difference with most attention whores is that he actually composes great music. And that makes it worth checking out his band Shining went on a short European tour in the late autumn. And so I went to the […]

Albeit one of the oldest death metal bands Master have been more or less overlooked among the other early death metal bands, such as Death, Possessed, and Massacre. Nevertheless Paul Speckmann has kept the band going for ever since and as such it is probably the oldest band that is still active. Meanwhile Speckmann moved […]

A new album is forthcoming by the Swedish death metal veterans of Dismember and the band went on the road to promote that album already. I went to an apparently rather new club in the heart of Purmerend, named P3. The first band World Escape from Germany had nearly finished their set when I entered […]

I got into Impious a couple years ago as I found a copy of their album “Terror Succeeds” for no more than 50 cents at some crappy store. Considering I know their style was thrashy Swedish death metal, I was willing to take the risk. It turned out to be actually quite a decent album. […]

On this Easter monday afternoon Immolation stopped at the 013 club in Tilburg, which was a good chance for me to check them out again, despite the wintery weather. This was the second European tour to promote their latest opus “Shadowns in the Light”, less than a year after their previous tour. This afternoon there […]

The Baroeg was sold out this evening Death Angel played, just as the other two nights in Utrecht and Eindhoven. I suppose that must mean that thrash metal is back. Anyway, they had a new album out that I haven’t heard yet, but their first three albums are good enough to warrant going to Rotterdam. […]