When I enter the venue there is a big American flag on stage and a mean looking guy singing and guitar playing his darkest songs together with musicians helping him. With his monumental presence King Dude is convincing the crowd with a broad scale of his work. The only downside is he plays for over an hour and his songs have mostly the same structure and in his style is not much variation. Highlight is ‘Pagan Eyes Over German Skies’ taken from the split with Urfaust.

After an ambient intro the two guys of Urfaust where supposed to begin but there is only silence. What an anti-climax. It turns out guitar player Willem is not yet ready. He is tuning his guitar and drummer Jim decides to start with pounding on his toms. After a minute or two a guitar riff is set in and the minimalist journey starts. At first the guitar is not loud enough and you’ll see the duo isn’t in the best shape to continue. On one moment I wanted to leave the room out of disappointment.

 

On the other hand this is Urfaust, you never know what to expect. So I decided to stay and it was the best decision. Singer/guitarist Willem picked up his self esteem and found his typical struggling way through the songs. Minutes before the show he met two old friends from his village where he rehearsed with back in the days. You’ll saw he was pretty nervous, later during the show he sends gratitude to these friends for showing up and he told them they were the reason he is staying here.

 

The band is still one of its own. The band is the soundtrack for the struggling life of a farmer one hundred years ago somewhere in the Peel in the south of the Netherlands. Imagine a muddy field in the fog where a guy is sitting alone on a plough behind a horse. The razor-sharp guitar buzz, the struggling pounding on the drums and the hysterical way of singing is as pure as you can imagine. If you take the time to enter Urfaust’s world you’ll receive hair raising moments. After an hour it’s over, they try a sort of an encore but they quit it abruptly. It doesn’t matter, this is a band doing its own thing, and they don’t care about their crowd or performing a “show”. This is pure drunkenness shaped into horrific and at the same beautiful songs.