I was a little late so I missed the first part of opening act My Own Grave. They released their second full-length album Necrology last year and came over to show us some of these tracks. I had never heard this band before so even though I thought, according to the name, we were dealing with some sort of metalcore/deathcore act, we got treated with some straight forward death metal. Even though they played in front of only 10 people or so at this point, they played a decent set. The most amusing part was a very angry looking singer who introduced the tracks with simple one-liners such as ‘This song is also about death’. The sound was pretty well for an opening act as well and even though the band doesn’t play the most original death metal I’ve witnessed over the past few years, it sure was a nice opening act. (Brent_)

 

The Finnish deathgrind outfit Deathbound was mashed up between the two Swedish death metal bands here, perhaps that’s why their show had the least spectators and also the worst crowd response. The band features Rotten Sound drummer Sami Latva who performed a very tight show with these guys, yet I have to say he’s underachieving here. He can do much better and go way faster than this. Overall the songs this band plays sound like a cut and paste mixture of riffs, it never really felt like a complete song. Also the band has a lot of riffs that take the pass out of the songs, something that doesn’t work too well in this genre I feel. So after a few songs I was starting to get really bored, looking behind me it seemed that most members of the audience felt the same. Too bad, I had hoped they would appeal to me more in a live environment than on record, but it seems this is just not a band for me. (DemonDust)

 

I was a bit sceptic about Demonical’s performance before the show. Their new album Hellsworn that got released last year is yet another nice Swedish death metal album but on the other hand, their performance at last years Neurotic Deathfest wasn’t too good. But as soon as guitarist Johan Jansson played the first tones, I knew this was going to be just fine. Demonical play the most unoriginal Swedish death metal in the veins of Entombed and Vomitory but succeed at this due to their very well written songs. Kicking off with the opening track of the new album ‘Baptized in Fire’ (where the name of the tour, Ascension to the Throne is taken from as well), they continued with some pure goods from Sweden such as ‘Children of Sin’, ‘World Serpent’, ‘Leipzig 1945’, ‘Infernal Void’ and finishing their set with the catchy ‘Death Metal Darkness’. The songs were blended nicely into each other by some cd interludes as well as lead singer Svenker with some stupid but enjoyable jokes about their setlist (“if you want to see what song we’re gonna play, come take a look at our setlist”) and the unreadable backdrop, as there wasn’t any space besides putting this behind the backline. This band surely isn’t original at any point but they definitely know how to put on a good performance. After 50 minutes or so the band finished their set and definitely made up their performance at the Neurotic Deathfest! (Brent_)