Avocado Booking presented Utrecht with a unique day of metal: the tour that we already reviewed of Dying Fetus, Skinless, Cattle Decapitation and War from a Harlots Mouth fused with the tour of Dead to Fall, Ion Dissonance and Through the Eyes of the Dead. It was the first event of Avocado Booking with the name of the last record of Black Sabbath with Ozzy. A bit of a weird mix of people was the result of the fusion and it wasn’t ideal that the bands played from roughly 2 p.m. till 9 p.m. but what the hell! It became an awesome brutal day.  

War from a Harlots Mouth is a band that I only knew from name before today’s gig, and I kind of remembered them to play standard metalcore, but I was completely wrong! I don’t know if I ever saw anything messy like this before. Extreme mathcore including all the ingredients such as filthy screams and music from jazz to grind, sometimes to be broken up by heavy breakdowns. All brought to you with loads of energy, and you know what that means: swinging guitars and musicians that jump around like idiots! Now I don’t have much with this scene, but I surely had a good time. The Germans really made it a party despite the small amount of kids that were present in the venue this early. This of course meant that there was a lot of space to mosh around, which apparently happened by a few. Seriously crazy stuff. (Mindsaver)

Through the Eyes of the Dead was more known to me, playing music I dig more as well: brutal metalcore with good song structures and also breakdowns that I could appreciate much better. But despite that fact, they were a bit disappointing compared with War from a Harlots Mouth. The sound was good and that band itself played very decent, but they were just too serious. The mood to party was gone and so it became a little boring. (Mindsaver)

With Ion Dissonance we returned to the mathematics, although less complicated than the opening act of today. As said, I’m not a fan of hardcore or mathcore, but I prepared myself for this one by checking out Ion Dissonance’s latest effort Minus The Herd (which will officially be released on June 5th), and I must admit that it didn’t even become annoying. My thoughts about the show were the same; I witnessed a pretty intriguing gig which left me a bit more positive about the whole chaotic hardcore scene. (Mindsaver)

Dead to Fall brought us some more (melodic) death metal sounds in again more metalcore. I was getting a bit bored by the many metalcore played today, so a little more death sure was welcome variation. Unfortunately the passion that they had in their presentation was the best entertainment of their set, that was way more entertaining than their music. The band played tight and all but after hearing several metalcore bands I couldn’t really get excited about this anymore. (Sledgehammer Messiah)

Aaaaah, now it was time for some refreshing deathmetal. From the first notes of Skinless I totally woke up again and I wasn’t the only one. Singer Jason Keyser has this great raw, unpolished voice which had a lot more variation than the some other bands today which sounded too forced. Just as in the Baroeg a few weeks ago they did a wall of death which was later followed by the zombie wall of death on ‘Deviation will not be Tolerated’, which was a hilarious sight! These guys put up a brutal and very enjoyable show! (Sledgehammer Messiah)

With the great album War of Attrition just released, Dying Fetus was more than welcome a second time in the Netherlands. Mainman and only remaining original member John Gallagher had some line-up troubles and it was especially hard to find a good drummer, but it was very much worth the effort because Dying Fetus was in excellent form today while it was the last show of their European tour. You could tell by their static appearance that they were a bit exhausted but still they got a lot of people moshing it up because of their tremendous force, extremely tight grooving and technical riffs. A good variation of John Gallagher’s deep grunts with bassist Sean Beasley’s higher screams took care that this 85 minutes lasting set didn’t get boring a second, a magnificent headliner of a brutal day! (Sledgehammer Messiah)

As you might have noticed we unfortunately couldn’t review Cattle Decapitation, because we had an interview with Dying Fetus mainman John Gallagher, not a bad substitution eh? Expect the interview on the site soon, you can check out the review of Cattle Decapitation at the Baroeg here. At about 9 p.m. we stumbled out the Tivoli, broken by all these great bands today, but of course never broken enough to drink another few beers, cheers!