After seeing a very intimate Sepultura show in this venue a month ago, I now went back to see another big band: The Haunted. Obviously not as populair as Sepultura, because the Brazilians played in a sold out Burgerweeshuis and this time there was only a fourth part of that amount of metalheads attending.

Opening act of tonight was Wolf, a Swedish heavy metal band that releases their music on the respectable labels Century Media and Prosthetic Records (USA). Heavy metal is not the style I dig the most, but of course I gave Wolf a fair chance of showing what they got and I must admit that they had a pretty neat sound. Very decent metal with high vocals which I could accept quite well although their gig took a little bit too long in the end. Too bad that their stage performance wasn’t interesting at all and because of the minimal response from the crowd I concluded that Wolf was just a mediocre opener.

After Wolf it was now time for partyband Municipal Waste to do some serious goods to the visitors. A lot of people seemed to be here for these USA hardcore thrashers, cause when Municipal started playing a pit was formed that kept going on during the show. Confessing that Municipal Waste isn’t my music at all, I must say that I had a good laugh about the whole performance. Thrashing music, two idiots who were shouting to each other all the time and songs about beer and evil sharks, yeah awesome! Their idea of creating a circlepit around the sounddesk was a good one, it sure made some more people bashing and crashing. Also really cool was witnessing their drummer Dave Witte who did some extreme fast drumming including a few blasts. Excellent entertainment!

After a long lasting setchange it was up to headliner The Haunted to overrule the praised Municipal Waste. Seeing them for the third time in only half a year, they once again played almost the same setlist, which gave me the same feeling as the times before. Really, these dudes play absolutely formidable (live-)metal, but it just doesn’t gets me exciting. It’s hard to explain, but the sound is maybe too perfect to just lose myself. Also the sluggish parts who occur in quite a lot of songs slow down things too much. It truly is a bummer cause these men are just excellent musicians. I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t jumping around, and frontman Peter Dolving had some comments on that. Although with a smile on his face he seemed to be a little frustrated that an active reaction on The Haunted’s music stayed out. “This is supposed to be a rock show. Go break something!” I’m sorry Peter, but I think that Municipal Waste won more souls here tonight.