Yes dear readers, this is how it should be. At the moment metal bands from different parts of our country clan together, to promote the local scene and to arrange gigs together. And that’s a very good initiative. The point is that, for a starting, but also for a semi professional metal band it is hard to arrange some gigs in this country, and most of the venues only book record company packages. Grun`N Metals Combined is a collaboration from bands out of the three northern regions in Holland. Their main goal is to promote the local scene and one of the means they used is this compilation album. First of all I want to tell you that level of the individual bands very a lot so I will only give some extra information on bands that sound above the average. Proneg opens the album with a death metal song with hardcore influences. Winter of Sin sounds as a professional band and makes a sort of dark / black metal with keyboards. Influences by bands as My Dying Bride. Seizure plays a combination between power thrash and death metal. Awake plays some annoying form of hard rock, heavy metal which we have heard a thousand times before. As it Burns impresses with their melodic death metal with a Swedish sounding sauce and black metal melodies, unfortunately the production ain’t that well and Katafalk tortures us with some fine and original black thrash metal. Cromm Cruac does their thing and plays a strange kind of death thrash which reminded me of Pestilence and Cynic concerning their song writing (very original).

Next two are Mister Monster (old thrash band) and Dionysos (melodic death and a bad guitarist). Eternal Conspiracy is nr.10 and treats us on a well-played piece of black metal with a high Cradle a likeness. Voleg plays technical death thrash with a melodic edge and hardcore vocals and Addendum Demise plays blackened mid tempo death. Noctambulent Grimness does their job by delivering us one melodic black metal song and Northgate does their part with a faceless death thrash song. Monastery does not impress with some old demo material but the blackened death metal sounds promising and Vault’s power metal is very cliche and a song title as “Afraid of the Dark” doesn’t really suit in an age like this. All in all I can conclude that our three northern regions certainly has some talent to offer. But the risk of a release like this is that the bands who have a better production automatically get more response of venues and media than the bands who haven’t got that sparkling production although they do have quality song material. The initiative certainly is very great and I guess all other Dutch regions should make a release like this so our native metal heads can see what is happening in the Dutch metal scene. Keep up the good work guys!!