Apart from KRK’s foreign and domestic offerings at Dante’s Highlight, the annual Curium festival was also taking place at Gloria the same rainy March weekend, presenting a good variety of smaller demo bands and bigger already experienced acts.  Sadly, the schedules were bound to overlap each other, and therefore attending both events wasn’t very practical, as one would’ve ended up missing bands that one paid for in any case.  However, on Saturday we got our schedules worked out well enough to come check out some of the first bands of the night.

First were local youngsters Brymir with their attempt at performing “epic heathen metal”, but this feeling was hardly achieved in the live setting, apart from a few keyboard parts and some cleanly sung Finnish lines in one of the songs, and some of the blame can surely be put on the quite messy sound.  The vocalist Viktor’s harsh voice was decent and aggressive, but in no way original or outstanding, and neither was the material in general.  While the band seemingly enjoyed performing, in the future they might want to think how to better portray their paganistic themes in their live performances, and lend some credibility to their genrefication.  Some of Viktor’s hand moves were like from a rapper’s repertoire, and the keyboard player just looked plain fucking retarded with his orange beanie and gleaming wide smile.  The audience was few, but at least those 20 friends of the band in the front seemed to be enjoying the show enthusiastically.  All in all, lots of room for improvement, but somewhat promising, and certainly not hopeless.

Witnessing the Pori death worshippers Stench of Decay was my reason for coming, and although these dudes don’t have many more years behind their belts, I’ve been very much impressed by their dark death metal, performed in the perfect obscure tradition of the old Finnish gods like Convulse and Demigod.  The set started with a new composition, and the rest consisted of the songs from the second demo – excluding the Abhorrence cover – and the older track “Souls of Possession”, which was perhaps the highlight for me.  While the vocalist and the bassist had hair and energy to use it, the guitar players had neither, and were entirely concentrating on playing their instruments, making sure not to even look at the nearly nonexistent crowd.  Hopefully this aspect of the band will improve as they get more stage experience, so that the songs can be performed with the intensity they deserve.

Witheria, who had celebrated their 10-year anniversary just a week before, were the first more experienced act to go on stage, and this certainly showed not only in their energetic and self-confident way of performing, but also in the solid, deathly thrashing song material.  Notable was also Tuberculosis’ neat ability to turn the ends of his shrieks into high painful screams, although this trick was perhaps utilized live a little too often.  As enjoyably as Witheria were thrashing it out, after a couple of songs it was time to head towards the next gig of the evening, so sadly we couldn’t see Dauntless introduce their new singer, or Survivors Zero, who we always seem to manage to miss.

Despite Asphyx, Bal-Sagoth and co. playing the same weekend, I have a hard time comprehending the lack of people at Curium, as I heard that it was quite empty on Friday as well, and I don’t really believe that Asphyx and Amoral share a lot of fans...  You’d also think that many local underaged metalheads, who couldn’t make it to Dante’s, would have been delighted about the opportunity to see two days worth of quality bands for only 12 euros, but apparently not, or then they hadn’t even heard about the whole festival.  Tragic, tragic. ~ Ossi Turpeinen