Aeterna's Blog

So my past weekend was pretty great. I took the friday off and on thursday after work I drove off to Utrecht (Tivoli) to see Killswitch Engage with AxeWound as opener. This was actually AxeWound’s first show ever and especially knowing that, they did very well. Though they were extremely metalcore, they did have some songs with some thrash influences which were quite enjoyable.

Then Killswitch Engage came on stage and the venue rather exploded. This was the original singer’s 2nd show back with the band and you could tell he was excited to be there again. Him being there was also the reason for me to go to the show as I dig the albums the band put out when he was there and the new singer definitely changed their style.

It was a great concert and really physical, full of crowdsurfers and a real enthusiastic crowd. During some songs there would literally be 5 crowdsurfers jumping over/on me (I was standing at the very front, right before the pit). The singer at one time just said he felt like moshing and then jumped into the crowd and ran in the moshpit. Definitely not a show I”m going to forget anytime soon!

After that I drove over to a friend’s place and caught her while she was showering, kind of an awkward moment to ring the doorbell, but hey. So lots of talking and drinking ensued followed by roughly 3 hours of sleep. The next day I drove us over to Heerlen (De Nieuwe Nor) for the album release of Carach Angren‘s “Where the corpses sink forever”.

The show started with The Unknown, who started playing without a singer and it sounded really good, some nice thrash/deathmetal. But thenafter the first song the singer came onstage and.. his attitude really mismatched with the music. The music I have to say was good, but the performance was a bit weird with the vocalist.

After that Carach Angren put on a great show, a lovely mix of melody and black metal. I really can’t criticize them in any way other than that they didn’t play “Little Hector what have you done?”, which I think is a fantastic song. One funny thing was that me and my friend were almost the only ones headbanging where the music allowed it. The only others were standing around us, the rest of the hall just stood there nodding.

So after that show we went over to a friend’s place and had some drinks and laughs until again late in the morning and I had another 3 hours of sleep before I/we had to get up and then I drove back to my town and dropped my friend off at the train station and then I dropped my car home and immediately started walking to Fortarock.

Fortarock has a lineup that’s basically a mini-Graspop, not saying that that’s a bad thing at all. It’s a nice warmup for Graspop which is a couple of weeks after that, but bigger. When I got there I ran into some friends in the queue and hung out with them for a little while until I either lost them or saw some other friends and that’s basically what I did throughout the day. I hung out with different friends from time to time and that was definitely fun.

It was a great day and the weather couldn’t have been better, a nice ~20C and it being rather sunny. Not too hot, not too cold. Among others I saw Solstafir, Meshuggah, Machine Head, The Devin Townsend Project, Lamb of God, Steel Panther and Slayer. All-in-all it was a terrific day and afterwards I hugged some new friends goodbye and walked home for another 30 minutes. Afterwards I was so tired from the lack of sleep and standing/rocking out all day for the last couple of days that I wanted to take off my shoes, but fell asleep before I even could.

tl;dr

I had a great weekend filled with concerts, laughs and drinks.