For those who don't know, Israel is a very small country, besides it's size, there are many other reasons for international musicians and performers avoiding to come. In the Metal genre, while this fragile issue continues, there's one individual who doesn't give up on bringing more and more good, high quality bands to the holy land, and this person stands behind, ProgStage Productions.

Some bands are cancelling some are not, but for ProgStage it's not a reason to give up. This time, in December 13, 2014 we had an awesome old school, Death Metal band ENTOMBED A.D. From Sweden, performing at the Gagarin club TLV. For about 27 years they've been providing the world with pure Swedish Death Metal; it is a little bit different from what most people used to think about Death Metal genre, it's different on it's tunes.

I have to confess that I haven't heard about this band before. referring to the recorded materials, I can not sympathize with the buzzing, dirty sound. ENTOMBED A.D have a rich history on the scene and it is highly recommended to get to know their earlier materials.

The show opened later than scheduled, and there was some lineup changes with the warm up crew. Officially THE FADING and DEFACE, two well known and popular Israeli bands were supposed to perform the opening show, but unfortunately a week before the show THE FADING had to cancel and were quickly replaced by SEPARATION ANXIETY. This turns of events wasn't  a benefit for SEPARATION ANXIETY, for a past few months this band got the reputation of 'saving the day' band, by happily giving a hand with replacing the original events lineup in a last minute.
 

This event came up in the worst timing for these guys, probably because of the lack of time for rehearsal practice and some internal band issues, the band performance wasn't the best, few songs preformed very sloppy by the lead singer Slava Fedorov and the lead guitar Andrey Kuznetsov. Some solos and vocal parts wasn't in place and were off key, but still it happened in a few songs, if I rate their performance by scale of perfection, I would say that they were in their 70%-80% which is not likely for SEPARATION ANXIETY, for that I am sure it was a one time mess up and they will resolve their issues very quickly. In that matter I would add, those guys give their all in a tight schedule and gave the crowd outstandingly energetic show.
 

DEFACE is a band I had a chance to interview a couple months ago, and I looked forward to see them live on stage. In their earlier materials and shows I wasn't impressed and even a little bit confused by the style and genre they play, during the interview my expectations grew high. They did stand up behind every word and promising they'd made in this interview and my expectations were exceeded. Every band member have its own different character to put in the tune and together they look very interesting on the stage and the performance was very energetic and bone crashing. For the last song, they had a special guest, their manager and good friend Michael Wasserman.
 

After a good appetizer, the crowd wanted the main course immediately, but it didn't happen in a minute. As I said before, the show started off schedule, it started an hour late, no one's fault on that, the flight was delayed and the band didn't have the chance to make a proper sound check. ENTOMBED A.D. insisted to clear the club and get everybody outside, didn't work out so well, rainy night makes people angry, understandable situation, in one hand no body wants to get wet, in the other hand ENTOMBED A.D. wanted their sound professional and good.The leader of ProgStage Productions, Patrick Losinski stood on the stage in front of angry crowd and made a promise that every second of waiting will pay off, and he was right.
 

The sound technician in the ENTOMBED A.D. Crew did astonishing work, and this point emphasizes the issue with sound in local shows and clubs. It is hard for me to say that local sound technicians are not professional, because they do hard and good work. But the big contrast in sound between the opening bands, though it was still very good, and ENTOMBED A.D popped up the matter of maybe we got used to average sound quality.
 

As soon as ENTOMBED A.D got up on the stage, the crowd went crazy, a frenzy kind of crazy, I had not experienced such insane crowd in a long time, most of the time I had to concern about my camera not been crashed. Although Gagarin is not a big, fancy club, but there's some small detail which make the whole experience different and makes you believe that every penny you've spent on a ticket is worth it. The lead singer L-G Petrov or by his full name Lars Göran Petrov, looked a little bit too drunk but it didn't bother him at all to perform on a very high level, it is a huge benefit to be able to get your work done perfectly and still be a rockstar!
 

Victor Brandt on bass rocked the stage like a mighty beast, by meaning his professional performance though he's pretty tall, which also made my photo shooting very challenging. To get to the starting point, the diversity between my point of view on the recorded materials and the live performance is very big. Despite the recorded album which characterized by buzzing and dirty sound, on stage ENTOMBED A.D. sound completely different. Maybe it's the excellent sound technician work, maybe it's something else. The sharp and acute guitar sound, deep and blasting drums, full and heavy bass and beastly crashing vocal performance. Although I can not judge the recording process the band choose to make, for me it was much more pleasant to hear them on stage, to get fascinated by a professional sound and performance. indeed a work of a veteran, high quality band that can crash your skull and bones.