By Jase Walker
Finally for another hectic month of gigs, a new venue and city for myself with Nijmegen’s Doornroosje, an infamous venue for its metal shows and Soulcrusher festival and I’m here for a night of blistering metal! Another stacked tour package with Sylosis as main guests along with Darkest Hour and Heriot as openers. This is going to be a heavy one for the annals of big metal shows and I’m here to get my ears around some fat riffs! Another lengthy journey across the Netherlands but a worthwhile one to get here to witness the sheer insanity that’s about to hit Doornroosje tonight.
Heriot takes the stage and the moment that first riff hits, holy jesus they sound massive. Debbie’s unmistakable screams pierce the room and those catastrophic riffs fill the venue with deafening noise. The crowd has already started beating the shit out of each other to the tune of Heriot’s outrageous energy, already putting into motion the kind of movement we’re bound to see this evening. If there’s a band that I could say sounds like a fucking car crash in the best way it’d be these and the response from the crowd for an opener is truly incredible. I look around me and there’s seldom anyone that isn’t headbanging with every fiber of their being.
Circle pits going wild, people smashing into each other meanwhile Heriot continually put out their signature heavy as fuck noise. They barely have to even move a finger to provoke people going wild like their lives depend on it, Heriot are clearly building up a solid fan base that’s here to lose their minds in the pit and Doornroosje really shows that. Unbelievably fierce, completely unrelenting, Heriot are carving out a fantastic name for themselves and seeing them on a stomp around Europe after I’ve departed the UK makes me so proud of how well they’re doing.
Next up tonight is “part of the furniture” OG metalcore heavyweights, Darkest Hour. It’s been a hell of a while since I saw them rip it up at Manchester’s Rebellion and with a much larger stage and eager audience, I’m keen to see them destroy this place. Truly a slice of the original metalcore scene and they still go every bit as hard as ever. The raw sound, the melodic noodling while riffing and lack of clean vocals is a huge part of the reason I got into metalcore so hard in the first place thanks to these and others in the emerging scene years ago. As much as I’m enjoying it, Darkest Hour are running with this trend of putting the bass and snare drums so incredibly loud in the mix to the point where it’s so much louder than the guitars. In-between the flashes of strobes and intense lighting spinning around the room, I can see the center of the crowd going absolutely wild. A mix of people smashing into each other and raised arms from people singing along to every word.
Sylosis starts 15 minutes earlier than expected to the tune of someone fiddling around with an audio jack that crackles away loudly. This seems to have been a big of a misstep as they suddenly stop and the intro seems to be off. Anyway, time to restart and go again, whoops. After a few jeers from the crowd, they’ve kicked off and the bass suddenly seems to have gone from the start and the show sounds quite thin unfortunately. Most of the low end of this show seems to be coming entirely from the bass drum but the bass guitar is almost inaudible which is a bit of a disappointment.
There’s a decent amount of movement in the audience to say that I don’t think it’s impacted the enjoyment of the others but even the circle pit response comes off as lackluster when compared with the earlier two bands. Sadly in this instance I did not enjoy their set, the overall sound mix for this set was poor and damaged my experience of a band that I normally really love. I realize some shows can have bad days at different venues but in this case it was very much a miss for me.
And finally, it’s time for the headliner tonight introduced by ‘What Is Love?’, A stellar choice for a deathcore band. The moment they kick off several people surge past me to the pit, it’s game time! I’m so happy that ‘A Higher Level Of Hate’ is in this set, we get a room split for a wall of death, it’s at a fever peak right now!
These guys barely have to try to get a circle pit going, “spin that shit” and the crowd obliges with a sea of people going mental down the middle, people are here to go nuts and are happily giving FFAA everything they want. Adding to the list of bizarre things I’ve seen bounced around at shows, I can now add inflatable rubber gloves to it. ‘The Sea Of Tragic Beasts’, the title track of the same album and its fierce riff perpetuates the mania of the crowd as everyone around me enthusiastically throws their heads down in obeyance of the riff.
This sort of show for Fit For An Autopsy being on a much larger stage than the last time I saw them suits them so well. The blistering energy they deliver in their performance is matched every bit as much by the insane response from the audience, people gladly smash into each other or headbang so hard it looks like they could end up nutting the person in front of them.
‘Far From Heaven’ amps up the Gojira worship a bit but my god, what a riff and vocal like for it, Jesus. And finally, ‘Two Towers’ to finish, admittedly it felt like a shorter set to wrap things up for a headliner but it’s been a real quality set though with some of their biggest bangers interwoven with a smattering of the new album.
Fit For An Autopsy still remains one of the best bands to see in metal right now with their relentlessly aggressive style that still keeps a keen sense of melody in it. Doornroosje is a spectacular venue to have witnessed this in and I don’t doubt I’ll be back very soon for many more shows to come.
Netherlands is metal as fuck. I won’t have it talked about in any other way.
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