Opening act was something I had heard the name of a couple of times, but never the music. Sideshift Harry was the name and ska/rock/metal was the game. The guitarist/trumpeter actually was wearing an Electric Wizard shirt so that already gave them a head start for this review. Other than that guy there was a guitarist/singer, a bassist, a drummer and a girl that played saxophone and sang. The whole idea was ska (with not too much variety in it) combined with some smooth rock riffs to some occasional heavy metal riffs. A big part of the crowd seemed to enjoy it a lot, there were a lot of dancing people in front of the stage. The guitarist/trumpeter proved to have a keen sense of humour which also improved the stage performance. I liked the show, but the music becomes boring pretty fast when you’ve seen other Dutch acts like Luie Hond or Beef! doing this.

 

After that it was time for former Nu of Nooit winners Liftid to enter the stage and treat the crowd on some songs of their new album Starting Fire. I had seen this band three times before already but they never managed to actually impress me. This time was slightly different though. The PA was louder than all the previous times I had seen them so the heavy parts actually sounded heavy for once. While in the beginning of the set the sound was quite horrible, after three or four songs it sounded well balanced and nice ‘n loud.

The thing with this band is that I like the music, especially at the volume they were blasting at. But I hate the clean vocals. I mean actually hate. Which is a big dose of the vocal lines so there are a lot of moments where I ignore them and try to hear just the music. His screams are all right though it’s just that his emo vocals sound very whining and predominantly annoying as fuck.

The show was great though. You could see all of them having a great time. I just got a bit irritated that they had to have so many extra’s like an on-stage drinking contest, a mosh battle for a ball to win their new album, a metal cover of ”Tutti Frutti” and a stripper. Well, that wasn’t actually that bad, except for the fact that he was male. It was that guitarist/trumpeter from Sideshift Harry dressed in a dress, some underwear, a big ass sunglasses and a Viking’s helmet. And he was groping and touching all of the members from Liftid pretty severely. The only one that could handle it was the bass player, all the others ran away. Pussy’s! Quite hilarious to see though.

They also performed their song with the vocalist from Concubine. Perhaps that wasn’t such a smart idea, because this is how you really notice the incredible distance between his vocal abilities and the abilities from the one from Liftid. The vocalist from Concubine didn’t look sober to me but still sounded way better. Actually it was a relief to see him singing, and that couldn’t have been the idea when they created this song I’d say.

All in all it was a fun show to attend, the music is still great but the emo vocals still suck. I wish them the best of luck and I’ll probably see them somewhere again soon.