Summer festivals are suffering. With the increased fees for bands, plus all additional costs the many free festivals in our region are falling one by one. Over the years (decades) cycling distance from The Hague lost Parkpop, Schollenpop, Vlietpop and Westerpop to name a few. Werfpop is still running and this year they included two metal bands to the bill. Now Werfpop is not at cycling distance on my city bike, but we have trains going to Leiden. Well that is until our national rail gets involved. So I had to make a mix, cycling 10 km to the nearest station with trains to Leiden and than train and walk. Why telling all this unnecessary travel information? Because it made me decide to go for the shorter version of Werfpop and only attend the evening. This resulted in me missing the second best band of the bill The Curse Made Flesh. I say this without even knowing them, but by seeing bits of Prins S en de Geit and Postmen, I guess it is not hard to know. Actually of the bands I did see before Textures, Arson were pretty nice. These Belgians play a sort of modern punk, post hardcore and dressed up nice they presented this in such a way, that the crowd had to move along. Not unlike Martyr they let a bottle of booze go rond, but kept control by holding the bottle themselves. Well they did get pits and even joined one at the end. plus a wall of death was made upon request by people whose dayjob obviously was not attending a wall of death.
The closing band, reason to head to Leiden and festival headliner for me were Textures. This year Textures came back after an eight year hiatus, with the very strong album Genotype. I followed Textures from the beginning and remember them playing Polars when OLS was still called OLS. Swandive! Later on I would see them several times and before their end they headlined a Saturday at Progpower too. The current line-up of six is very strong and live they always prove why they are Holland's biggest Progmetal band. Vocalist Daniel de Jongh was also playing Werfpop with Crown Compass last time I was at Werfpop, but for Textures it has been ten years to be back. Now I don't take notes and with Textures I cannot place all songs immediately with title and album it came from. So opener was a tape Void from Genotype and I think we did get A Seat for the Like-Minded too. Basically what we got was one hour of progmetal build on grooves and melody. with vocals going from clear to extreme and heads would bang. A very nice way to end a pleasant evening in the park, which justified taking poor train connections.
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