Igorrr and Amen-Ra on the same bill would already be a joyful tour to catch, but the show tonight at 013 is like a mini pre-pandemic Roadburn day, with Hangman’s Chair and Der Weg einer Freiheit joining this monster of a bill. While the start of the show is quite early, and the closed-off balcony and stairs imply not a huge amount of tickets sold, the ambiance is cheerful and the crowd is warming up as we wait for Hangman’s Chair to start as we get in from the icy rain outside.

Hangman’s Chair is an odd duck out on this bill, being stoner doom with a lot of melodic layers and clean vocals that reminds me a little bit of some of Deftones’s slower work, though the band is a lot heavier. Excellent sound mix and vocal performance, and point for gusto for the guitarist who even tries to get a bit of a hum along going. Beautiful light show with a lot of backlighting and streaky leads, though the occasional front light would have been nice, and the strobes into the audience were a bit unneeded. In general a great appetizer to this four-course extravaganza.

Next course we get Der weg Einer freiheit. If any band could ever distill sadness and morosity into sound yet still keep the aggressive edge of blackmetal it’s these guys. The clean and melodic parts are fragile in their sad and melancholic beauty, kicked to smithereens when the very impressive drum work and cathartic Black metal screams kick in. Related somewhat to the depressive suicidal black metal genre but not quite it, the hopelessness and sadness always keeps a tiny tinge of beauty and dare I even say a whiff of hope just to make the pain more futile as you reach for it.

Now for one of our main courses: co-headliners Amenra are masters of suffering. Their music crushes you slowly with despairing screams and the occasional sad, metaphysic clean part or spoken word. Extra beautiful if you know Dutch, which the Belgians use much more poetically than most of us Dutch folk can. Catharsis is a big reason to listen to this intense pain made into sound, a steel brush across to soul, painfully removing all the callouses and scabs holding our broken selves together. This way the cleaned wounds can heal. The fragility of solitary reign‘s opening against the violence of the full post-Hardcore/Doom pummelings gives a tiny breather, the broken dead birds of their imagery beautifully invoked, before the crushing weight of the world is once again lowered on us. Removes, lowered, threads of hope and so much pain. We let ourselves be washed in it. The church of Ra was in session.

And for dessert we have Igorrr. Not suited to everyone’s taste, many so scrubbed after Amenra they leave early, the eclectic French project led by mad genius Gautier Serre is something I personally quite enjoy. I have a pretty varied and out-there taste in music, and have always loved me some Classical-inspired vocals, Baroque and rhythmic, Breakcore and Glitch electronic music. Believe it or not, I once used to go to illegal techno parties and danced the night away to Venetian Snares. Igorrr takes everything I just mentioned, adds a healthy dose of metal and screams, some impressive drumwork, and a load of bits ranging from french accordion to Arabic-styled melodies to the mix for spice, and puts it in a blender. It should not work, but there is the genius of it all. It does. And while it isn’t for everyone, for someone like me it’s bliss. The live show has definitely grown from the days it was just Serre behind a dj booth with a guitar, but I will say losing the two vocalists who the last two albums were written with and for during the pandemic is noticeable. The new vocalists are excellent in their own right, but the music was so tailor-made to the originals it’s very hard to replace. I especially noticed this with the female classical vocals, which she does excellently but misses the special ability to move that to a more gritty screamed part. However, it doesn’t dampen the enjoyment too much. The only thing I will say disappointed me is that Patrick the chicken is so proudly displayed on both the backdrop and the merch, yet we didn’t get treated to Vegetable soup, the song that so famously samples his clucks.

Wide-eyed and sore after dancing and headbanging too much, something I am out of practice in these days, and my soul scrubbed and scoured clean and two pins to add to my jacket, I leave 013 quite happy. Each of these bands would have been worth it for me separately, but together I’m am quite satisfied with the feast I just consumed and let consume me.

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY SUSANNE A. MAATHUIS