The first band of the evening was Every Time I Die, which is a band that plays some kind of emo/screamocore. My first impression of the band was quite mediocre, none of them was seeking any contact with the audience or something like that. To me it seemed like they were very nervous on stage but after a couple of songs they got loosen up and lifted the performance a bit higher. At this time the singer and the guitar players were making contact with the audience and during the last songs there even was a small moshpit.

 

After Every Time I Die it was up to Unearth to heat up the audience. I knew a couple of songs from Unearth but I’ve never seen them live so during the first song I was completely overwhelmed by them. There is so much power, speed and technique combined in one band, it was amazing.

The audience loved to see Unearth on stage. When you looked around, you just saw nodding heads everywhere except in front of  the stage. The crowd there got completely nuts, they started moshing on the first song and didn’t stop until Unearth ended the last song. It's a shame that after half an hour “Endless” was already the last song of Unearth. But they can look back on great performance.

 

Caliban was the third band to hit the stage tonight and they had the difficult task to exceed Unearth. Caliban was aware of that and played liked their lives depend on it, constantly seeking the interaction with the audience. They even pulled the wall of death trick form their label mates Chimaira. But on some kind of reason the audience didn’t really respond to them and or it’s because Caliban was trying too hard, the songs are pretty much the same or the live presentation of the singer wasn’t good enough? I don’t know.

What I do know is that after a while actions like going to the toilet and getting some beer were more interesting then seeing Caliban on stage.

 

The last band for tonight was Lamb of God who were in Holland for the first time. On the first two songs the band suffered some sound problems but after a while they were gone and Lamb of god sounded just like the CD. The band started with “Laid to rest”, “Hourglass” and “As the palaces burn” and the audience loved it. The setlist continued with  “Now you’ve got something to die for”, “11^th hour” and “Omerta”.  During the spoken word intro of “Omerta” the audience literally goes wild and at that time Lamb of God is at its best of the evening. After this, the performance of Lamb of God and especially singer Randy Blythe is getting worse. The main reason for this is that Randy is smoking cannabis and getting completely stoned on stage and telling us how great our cannabis climate is “trust me, we already know that”. After the show Lamb of God returns for two more songs and after that they called it a day leaving the audience behind with mixed up feelings.