The first band on the bill was Dead By Dawn, (not to be confused with Death By Dawn with the former Pestilence vocalist) a metal band from Rotterdam. This proved to be quite an entertaining band, playing nice and groovy metal, with the occasional faster and slower parts. They use metal/death metal/hardcore in their description, but in average it was just a straight forward metal band, with good heavy vocals, tight play and some good grooves in it. A great warm-up for the rest of the evening.

 

I wish I could say the same for Mindscan, but this band didn’t please me that much at all. I listened to both of these opening acts and Mindscan already rose the hair in the back of my neck then. Live this feeling wasn’t that strong, but I still wasn’t very happy with their music. The band makes metal/metalcore, and has two women in the band, one playing bass and another playing guitar and singing/screaming. This vocal effort is also done by both the drummer and the other guitarist, so you have a three vocal attack, all managing clean vocals and screams. This was executed reasonably, if it wasn’t for those standard emo vocals the Dutch are usually so good at. I also noticed some mistakes by the drummer, even when he wasn’t singing, and the emo riffing was quite stale as well. The only thing I enjoyed were the heavy riffs because they had quite some impact, but this couldn’t save the show for me. Too bad.

 

Then it was time for the mighty Textures to steam over everything we had witnessed before and they goddamn did so. As soon as ‘Drive’ kicked in the tone was set for a great set, but when by the third song of the show ‘Swandive’ (I think) still no moshpit was started, I decided to do so myself. I can’t really remember when I moshed and headbanged for this long at a show, and as I’m typing this the after-effects are still very noticeable in my body, my neck and back in particular. The band was experiencing the same problem, having played their first show in a month the day before at Eurosonic, but they were coping fine with this, judging from their performance. There were some hardcore kids dancing around, but by the end of Textures’ set I had scared them all away, which I find quite funny.

Somewhere halfway through the set disaster struck. Vocalist Eric leaned on some drunk metalheads in the front, somehow (while making semi-wrestling moves) flew over one guy, landed on the floor, on his head, with one big motherfucker on top of him. This all happened only inches away from me, I only heard a loud bang that could literally be heard in the back of the venue according to witnesses, and when I picked up the dude on top I noticed that it was Eric who was lying there, and he didn’t look fine at all. He was cramped in pain, looking severely injured. I tried to communicate with him, but there was no response. Seconds later the rest of the band was like, ‘hey this dude’s not getting up’, so they quit their song and checked out what was going on. I was quite startled by this stunt, and so was the band I think, for a minute there I thought the show would be over and an ambulance would have to be called. I passed the microphone to guitarist Bart and he announced that there would be a short break and we should all go grab a beer. About five minutes later Eric was back on his feet painfully smiling, stating that there’s probably something bruised, but continuing with the set.

They managed to continue their show without any other real problems, and I entertained myself as I do at any other Textures show. Rock on dudes!!!