First band up was Sengaia, a band quite well known to me by now. I’ve seen them twice already (see live views for Sengaia and The Red Chord), and this was again a great show. Contrary to last time, even the emo vocals were sung decently, must have something to do with monitors or something. Their sound was very good, except for the kick and hi-hat being a bit too soft.

Their deathcore really gets me going I’ll tell you that. But this was also their last show for a while, since there are three members that have another band, namely Blindsight, 37 Stabwoundz and Textures who all have busy plans for the future. Ah well, after this show I happy enough for a while.

 

The next band was only known to me by name. I had seen Malkovich standing on several posters and sites, but I had never been to one of their concerts. Un fortunately I wasn’t able to watch more than three songs, because I couldn’t relate to the music at all. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very good band, but I just couldn’t work with it. It had a rock ‘n roll layer over the entire music, slightly rhythmical with screams and emo vocals. Also something worth mentioning, one guitarist playing a Rickenbacher guitar was hooked up to a Sunn 0))) amplifier that was blasting me away. Very cool, but even that couldn’t prevent me from hanging out in the bar chatting with vocalist Ben from Gorerotted.

 

And due to that conversation I also missed the first few songs of Burst. When I walked in, the sound was still great, 013 did a great job with the PA this evening. I must say that I find Burst’s music quite hard to describe exactly. I think it’s a combination of most metal styles that end with the word core, like hardcore, metalcore, grindcore, postcore, perhaps even sludgecore. That does make some great music, but I felt like there are too many riffs that just barely don’t make it. They seem to make use of tones in riffs that just not send a shiver down your spine.

That doesn’t mean that this is a bad band. On the contrary, technically this is some very good stuff. Their drummer delivers a monstrous effort with his Mastodon-like groove drumming and the guitarists/bassist play everything nice and tight. The vocals consist of a vocalist with a deep hardcore scream, the bassist’s grunts (he also used to be in Nasum) and one of the guitarists emo singing. So lack of variety is not an issue here. Just lack of riffs that make you actually feel something.

The last couple of songs were quite a lot better though, they had a lot of grindcore blasts in them which was great to end the show with. Anyway, I had a great time, and I’m quite sure that I’m not a Burst fan, but I also know that it’s not as bad as when I saw them the first time.