War From A Harlots Mouth had the honour to open tonight. I�ve seen these guys before on the Dying Fetus tour earlier this year and I�ve reviewed their album, which is pretty cool. Newsflash of the evening was that vocalist Nico of The Ocean had taken of the vocal duties for WFAHM, doing double duty on half the tour. They claimed he improvised most of what he did, which sounded quite alright. I liked the fact that I knew their songs quite well so I could follow it a lot better. Their mixture of mathcore and other related styles might have been pretty weird to some members of the crowd, I enjoyed it quite well again. Compared to others in their genre they still have a long way to go, especially regarding song-writing aspects, but it�s a fun band to see and a good opening act. Catch them live if you get the chance, it�s worth the effort. (DemonDust)

 

Up next was Intronaut, the actual reason I travelled down here. Their full length album Void has made quite an impression on me, and I expected the band to be even better in a live surrounding. It was unsure whether this show would go on, since bassist Joe suffered from a pneumonia a couple of days earlier, but luckily he recovered. Already in the first ten seconds I noticed that this band was something special. These guys had this mental connection which allowed them to time everything perfectly, especially the drummer was very skilled in timing and precision. It was a real short guy, but as I�ve come to learn is that these shorties usually pack a whole lot of power and skill. This was no exception, he was definitely the musician of the evening for me. Vocals came from both guitarists, but I had rather seen a different division of the quantities each of them sang. One of them had a way more brutal voice, the other had a more hardcore scream, and personally I had liked it if the brutal voice had the upper hand here. Furthermore there was an excellent bassist at play, but his sound was a bit too loud compared to the other instruments. Overall it was a fantastic performance (excluding some minor guitar problems during the second song) of which I was very glad I attended. Their sound lies a bit between that of Mastodon and Cult Of Luna, so people into this type of music should really check out Intronaut asap. (DemonDust)

 

The Ocean; the band that has the tendency to come up with quite remarkable titles. They did their best with their first two records FluXion and Aeolian, but on the just released record Precambrian they managed to use so many geological terms that I only recognised some of them from my high school period. That isn�t the only remarkable about this band, because I should really say collective instead of band; The Ocean consists of almost 30 musicians, with instruments which vary from saxophone to glockenspiel. It comes naturally that The Ocean�s music is pretty hard to describe, but most of all it�s a form of experimental metal with ambient aspects. I saw them once opening the CD presentation of Textures and the stage was pretty packed with musicians, but this time The Ocean looked pretty much like any regular band, except that they had three guitar players of which one of them later handled the mic. By the way, he did this miserably; his clean vocals were full with really false notes! Anyway, the instruments adding a more ambient vibe to the songs, like violins and such, were on tape tonight, which is always a letdown of course. Still, the band regularly managed to build up a great wall of sound without these live instruments. That was pretty cool, but I had never the feeling that I was witnessing a neither unique �band� nor �collective�. The Ocean gave a decent show, but they didn�t live up to the expectations you might have when you know the background of this collective. (Sledgehammer)