Great evening. Strong performances by all bands, especially Agalloch. Both opening bands were quite enjoyable too, and really not that bad actually. However, both bands are still pretty young and still need to grow and elaborate their sound a bit more.

In Age And Sadness try to expirement a lot with heavy metal parts combined with doom parts. And because of the fact they try to add a lot of different parts and melody changes, the final result doesn't sound "finished". I mean, they could have done a lot better if they really thought things through. Also, the song structure of all songs of In Age And Sadness is pretty similar (something like: intro - doom + vocals - break - chorus - tempo - doom - tempo - outro). It's clear the band has a lot of imagination and creativity, but they need to work on their ideas one at the time instead of stuffing them all together into one song.

As expected (Agalloch suggested Fen as the replacement for Mourning Beloveth), Fen were a small version of Agalloch. They were the perfect opener for Agalloch, and really not that bad either (I repeat, both openers were really far from bad). They really brought the right atmosphere and got the ideal mood going. And the crowd really loved them apparently. If you're a fan of Agalloch, maybe Fen is your next big thing.

Agalloch really showed what mighty and brilliant band they are. Their show was in one word fan-tas-tic. Amazing setlist too.
I think it's very hard to play this kind of music live (the band really has to play flawlessly and also together as a band (more than other bands I think) to get all the right effects. If they don't, the sound is really screwed up. It's really hard to explain, but I hope the Agalloch fans understand what I'm trying to say. Also Agalloch have only two guitar players and no keyboardist (unlike Fen), who have to do a lot of amplifier switches to get all the special and typical sounds), but they really put it together.
Furthermore there was a clear domination of "Ashes Against The Grain" songs, while there was not a single song of their new "The White" EP played.

However, this gig was also a live DVD recording. Of course it's always really cool to have a "I was there!! Plus I stood on the fourth row wearing a MS t-shirt. Buy the DVD and look for me"-feeling. But the recording had also a few negative side effects on the show in my opinion. First of all, the band was really afraid to do and play something wrong. I'm not saying Agalloch were nervous, but the least you could say is they were playing really tense. And, it's psychologically proven that when you're so afraid to do something wrong, you evidently will do something wrong. And so it also happened to Agalloch a few times. On a regular gig it's normal and accepted that you sometimes play a wrong chord, or whatever. But now every single time they missed something, it felt like a disaster because the band was so paying attention to it. Especially "Not Unlike The Waves" was not played as it should... Anyway, the crowd didn't really mind and we all enjoyed the show a lot.

Two final remarks: the show was all in all pretty short (like 75 minutes). Since the typical Agalloch song is at least 6 à 7 minutes, and since they were recording a DVD, I expected the show to be somewhat longer. On top of that, Agalloch didn't return for encores... Again, pretty remarkable. But because of their brilliance, it's easily forgiven of course.