August, 26th – Esslingen, Komma – Morne, Born/Dead

A pretty weired package came up for this date with MORNE, a doomy and noisy post-crust five piece from the US / Massachusetts, and BORN/DEAD, an old school punk outfit – also from the US but California.

I decided to team up with some friends for a beer or two and for some live music. We met up at the Komma in Esslingen where I have not been before but which I knew from a lot of other event announcements. It turned out to be a pretty alternative kind of venue where a lot of punk events take place, located aside a river with a small hydropower plant based on an old water mill. The event itself did not start before 10 PM so we had a nice time talking about doom and some upcoming events.

BORN/DEAD started with their set and I really did not expect anything neither any special genre. They played pretty violent old school punk with little crust influences. If you listen to early Exploited records you will get an impression of their sound. But it is played quite well and has a lot of power. Unfortunately the small size of the venue made it necessary to turn up the volume of the guitars to compete with the drums. To get an imagination of the size of this room you may imagine that the 40 paying visitors almost filled the room in front of the stage. So it was very loud and so after some songs, the primitive sound of BORN/DEAD and the heat in this small room made me leave. But they did a good job anyway!

The band which was more for me – MORNE – started shortly afterwards. And hell first this sounded like a drone band. With the first vocals it became clear why this band was playing with a punk band. They surely have some little influences of punk in their sound, but more doom, maybe post hardcore / metal and drone. Like their support, MORNE played a quite short set of about 45 minutes. But they came back for an additional song which means ~7 minutes. It is really hard to describe the intensity of their sound, I guess you have to experience it – check out their myspace page!

After all this was a really nice evening with some new sounds and sounds which I have not been listening to for a very long time. Nice side effect: I have met some guys I have not met for a very, very long time (years). Plus I will go to this venue again, the really relaxing atmosphere is attracting me.

MOURNE on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/mornecrust

BORN/DEAD on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/borndeadpunx

Tomorrow I will be back with the next report – IKARISCHES ENSEMBLE – a great youngster band mixing metal elements with a solid jazz basis. They prefer jazz venues mostly. I am really excited about their sound and looking forward to it…

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