Thanks to the asshole crackho’s at the Dutch Railways I missed Charlie*Adler, which I was looking forward to as well, since I hadn’t seen them in a while. I guess that feeling has to stay that way for the time being.

 

The second band on the bill are a weird two-some from this little country. Now I deal with a lot of strange awkward music that make your bowels dance up and down in your body, but The Julie Mittens were too weird, even for me. The band consists of a drummer and a bassist/guitarist, who started out with a weird little machine (of which I forgot the name) on his guitar strings that emits magnetic fields or something. The guitar was lying on stage, while he was playing bass with a bow (for a cello or violin), pretty weird. Both instruments were attached to quite some effect pedals and other electronics, and with this huge soundscapes were created. The drummer added some beats and some mumbo jumbo rattling to it, that was about it. I lost interest quite fast because the songs basically didn’t go anywhere, it was just making certain chords echo and flange and phase for as long as possible, accompanied by drums. If it were to be extremely low like Sunn 0))), I might have liked it. Too bad.

 

The lads from Ephel Duath gave me a warm welcome, and of course after they played a miraculous set I smoked my ass off with them again. Every time I’ve seen them they gave a marvellous performance, there were never any better or worse shows, so their consistency is pretty good I might say. This time the drummer seemed to be more in it though, because the previous time he was here with the band he had only joined two days prior the tour, while still playing with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull he told me. You could see that he was more involved in the music this time. He made my jaw drop again, just like the guitarist and bassist did, but I’m already getting used to this fact. Vocalist Lucio seemed more agitated like the first time I saw them, demanding a moshpit (which is quite an endeavour with their music) which they got on several occasions. The sound was good, and because I wore my earplugs this time I could actually hear the clicktrack they were playing to from time to time, so I could stay in their groove. Again these crazy Italians proved that avant-garde fusion jazz and metal can easily be combined, in a much more relaxing way than The Dillinger Escape Plan sometimes does. They plan on returning here around May/June, so I guess I’ll see them then again!