Although it wasn’t announced properly, Australia’s Psycroptic had the honour of getting this evening started. To be honest, both of us thought it was Yyrkoon, until Yyrkoon actually started playing. Pretty stupid. Psycroptic was first brought to my attention at the No Mercy festival, but I only got to see two or three songs then. They played a nice and tight set of technical death metal and grindcore, which was a good start for what was yet to come. I did get the feeling that they played in a rather high tuning, or the guitar was just missing a lot of bass. The drummer occasionally looked like it took all of his strength and concentration to keep the double bass tight, which he did by the way. Nevertheless, this was a nice opening band of which we’ll probably hear a lot more soon.

Written by Demondust

 

Before coming to the show this evening I already listened a few times to Unhealthy Opera, the latest album of Yyrkoon. I was quite blasted away by this work because of its awesome force and good melodies, so I was pretty excited to see them opening for the deathmetal masters Nile. As said, there was some confusement about the first band being Yyrkoon and I kept saying that I found it strange that I didn’t recognize any song! But when Yyrkoon eventually did start to play, I immediately recognized the pounding brutal deathmetal with fantastic solos. The music from this French band can well be compared with Aborted, except that the singer of Yyrkoon is more one-sided; he only uses low grunts, but does this with perfection. He also played the most awesome solos; the other guitar player seemed less experienced and played less tight but it couldn’t prevent Yyrkoon from leaving behind an excellent impression.       

Written by Sledgehammer

 

Then it was time for the mighty Nile to complete this evening of highly technical metal. It took them a long time and a lot of line-up changes to get where they are now, but the result is beyond awesome if you ask me. The new songs sounded killer. The fast stuff just blasts, thrashes and completely destroys everything you knew about fast death metal. The old songs were never compared to the new stuff, simply because most of them are a whole lot slower. Well, if you don’t count ‘Sarcophagus’, which is meant to be deadly slow and therefore one of my favourites.

New recruits Joe Payne on bass and drummer George Kollias delivered a monstrous performance together with veterans Karl Sanders and Dallas Toler-Wade. That bassist is able to play every note the others do, and believe me that requires some extremely high tempo bass-picking action. This guy can probably play everything of Children of Bodom blindfolded. We were even treated on two long songs, one of them being the title track to the new album; ‘Annihilation of the Wicked’. The crowd responded to all the tracks very enthusiastically, and a fan that asked for Karl’s pick received it being stuck right on his sweaty forehead. A very nice evening for the fans, I can’t wait to go and see them at the Graspop Metal Meeting!

Written by Demondust