We started the evening with the Helsinki locals of Keretik, advertised as a “gloomy metalpunk” band on their Facebook page, and the trio more than delivered on that promise. Both the music and the performance were straight in your face metal riffing with a punk attitude and feel, all smothered in a gloomy/doomy sauce. Plain and simple with no extra frills, they came on stage, got behind their instruments and started pummeling us with their heavy riffs. While it wasn’t necessarily your typical stoner/sludge kind of metal, I’m pretty sure their music would be appealing to a whole lot of fans of that type of music. They neatly filled their time slot with as many songs as they could, only broken up with a sip of their beer in between. And while there wasn’t a crazy energy to be found in their show, you could see and feel that they were playing their music with passion and the music was solid enough to keep us all entertained and heads bobbing along.

And then it was time for HIDE! Last time I saw them, they enhanced the uncomfortable and intense atmosphere of their music with some lights they put on the floor that were flashing at irregular intervals, at times almost functioning as strobe lights. This time they completed the experience by closing all the possible curtains they could, so when they started the show, and the lights in the room were turned off, it was literally pitch black in there. Which had an immediate influence on the senses. And then they started… with vocalist Heather Gabel on the floor with her back turned to us, Seth Sher started to build up the harsh electronics, with some flashes of light every now and then. Heather slowly rose, and started to proclaim, moan and shout the lyrics to the songs, at first dressed in some sort of an overcoat, that got dropped along the way to reveal the torn up tights and duct tape wrapped around her chest. She paced around the stage with penned up rage and frustration, shouting, moving unpredictably where the one moment she was more in the back of the stage, to the next stand right in front of our noses, at some points even jumping off the stage to come and shout right up in our faces walking through the crowd, while Seth kept on looming over the table from where he was creating the harshest noise-ridden electronic music you can think of. HIDE live is more than just another concert. It’s a whole experience, like a performance art piece, and the most oppressive, yet mesmerizing thing I’ve gotten to witness in recent memories.