Callous Intent & Dance with Dragons - Musicon The Hague, 17 March 2023

A tiny footnote in the book of Heavy Metal, but Callous Intent played their last show ever with Maus on drums in Musicon. As that book is my bible, I decided to attend. The second band Dance with Dragons was a blanco for me, so open for new music. Musicon friday nights are as unpredictable as Dutch elections audience wise. Usually it depends on who the bands bring along and what the competition is over the weekend. This weekend many people choose Baroeg either the Saturday, the Sunday or both. As I can't make both it was close to home Musicon for me. Tonight it was not all that busy as people tend to get picky. Next to the Friday evenings with Dutch Metal, there are also a lot of big international names announced recently. So with shows of Rhapsody of Fire, Raven, Vicious Rumors, Exciter, Artillery and Evilded being recently announced some might snub your national underground. well not me.

Dance with Dragons was completely uknown to me, even if coming from nearby Delft. Six band members including a female vocalist. Now female voices come in different categories for me. First there are the top voices (Oceans of Slumber, Madder Mortem) than there are the heavy metal voices (Leather Leone) the extreme ones sounding like one of the boys and finally the operatic ones, whom I tend to avoid. Upon first notes it became clear that Dance with Dragons go for the operatic voice. So for me they started losing like Tome Egbers entering a Jinek studio filled with female guests only. Luckily matters were not all that bad as the band obviously holds some experienced players and the songs were built up pretty fine as well. Further teh girl can sing operatic or not. I did not get why their friends and fans decided to stay at the back, as getting an empty Musicon going needs some help. An OK show they gave us, while I thought the song Betrayal could have been dedicated to many famous Dutch men being judged by national press nowadays.

Callous Intent were to close the evening. I saw them several times before (first as Priapsis) and quite like their Death/Thrash metal. Remember how in the eighties you would check out LP's by the bandshirts members would be wearing on the bandpicture? Well if tonight that was anything to go by it meant two Callous Intent shirts, plus Revocation, Anihilated and Gojira. Not meaning all it gave a direction, as did the Sepultura cover Slaves of Pain. What we mainly could see is that it is a pity that Maus is leaving the band as he is one hell of a drummer. Callous Intent gave us a proper metal set, where I believe their anthem on the killer Uhu went missing this time. Still a nice set and curious how and if they will recover from their loss of drummer.