It came as a surprise, American Head Charge on tour as headliner and coming to one of the upcoming venues in Belgium. This package consists of 4 bands, which is quite a lot for an evening, even for handling a whole tour. American Head Charge should have been on tour with Coal Chamber last year but unfortunately they weren’t a part of the package anymore when Coal Chamber started their European tour. So this was a nice rematch for them. We had also a nice little chat with these dudes and also with the beautiful Liv Sin, something to keep an eye on.

First up was the German band Reptil (**). Young dudes which sounded as and looked like an industrial zombie jungle band. A singer with quite an attitude, a small skinny woman who dressed differently each song. Sometimes she was a queen, then completely transformed into a man-eating witch. The attributes were quite nice although it was sometimes a bit amateuristic in such a small setting. This band would stand more out in a very small dark club where they can express their satanic rituals even better. Music wasn’t that bad, although they have to build more maturity, sometimes it sounded a bit too simple.

Next up were the Australian death metallers of In Death (***). Fine death metal with nothing new in it, nice grooving tunes mixed with technical stuff. Death metal fans should check out this band, they will love them for sure. The technical presence of these Australian dudes is quite good and it’s fun to see them playing. And not to forget a very beautiful female bass player, but her looks weren’t the most important part, she handled the bass exceptionally well.

From Sweden, Liv Sin (***), a real metal babe that delivers heavy metal like Doro but with a voice that has more power. You could see that a lot of the audience came for Liv Sin, especially the older guys whose hormones were doing overtime, aren’t we getting enough at home gentlemen? Okay, she’s a nice looking singer, but sometimes the reactions were a bit over the top. The music sounded good and the stereotyped heavy metal fan who loves Doro will get wild when hearing Liv Sin. Sing-alongs with the very energetic voice of Liv. I would prefer to see her sing with something more daring, it sounded for me a bit too much playing safe.

American Head Charge (****), one of the bigger names when nu metal was up and coming, started off with some really groovy shit. This music deserves to be heard more. It has such nice melodies, power, groove, it’s a pity that this band hasn’t the big status it deserves. Cameron, the singer, has an outstanding voice, while looking a bit uninterested on stage, he delivers quite a presence, also the other members are delivering it very hard, a groovy guitar tandem, a hard hitting drummer. The focus was more on songs from The Feeding and The War Of Art. The audience liked it very much, I am sure when AHC hits the big stages of the European festivals much more people would love them, but hey, that’s people nowadays, you have to feed them, they are too lazy discovering good music. It was quite nice to see that some members of In Death came to stage on the last song Never Get Caught.

It was good to see them back and let us hope they continue as they don’t have it easy, support them if you can. It was an evening with a lot of different styles and it was a pity that not more people showed up. I don’t understand why people want to pay for a band who are just copying their dead heroes and want to be like them instead of supporting really good composed original music, just my two cents.

Oh yeah, CHEERS !!!