Massgrav in Sandviken 2010

We’ve played in Sandviken a couple of times before and they have both been pretty average gigs – fun, but nothing unforgettable. This time promised to be better for all kinds of reasons – Drickard organizing it in conjunction with his 20th birthday, lots of people we know going there, beer being sold in the venue and the debut of Kol & Stål. Also, the debut of Massgrav ft. Fenok on Swedish ground. Yay. To sweeten the deal further, we brought our two favorite ex-drummers with us, both Ove and Indy decided to ride with us to the gig, very nice.

Drickard didn’t think we could make it to Sandviken in two hours because of the winter roads, but we sure as hell proved him wrong there. Once we’d said hello to the Kol  & Stål boys (Andyadina, Anton, Gunnarsson, Drickard and the newly recruited Simon) who were rehearsing as we showed up, we went for pizzas at Napoleon. If anyone knows of a good pizza place in Sandviken, do let us know! As always, Sandviken was a ghost town – not one single person on the main street on a Saturday night. Eerie.

 Back to venue, set up merch table, talk to all the nice people we  know that were there; the Tormented guys, Nygge, Jofen, Olle, Jonken, Klara and many many others. Kol & Stål hit the stage and did a great first ever show, playing långsam käng, making good use of “the banana riff” (as someone – we’ll let him be anonymous, but it was one of the drummers in our car – described it): just say “banana” a lot of times in a row and you’ll know what we mean. Cool stuff, and although the audience were standing rather still, they seemed to like it.

Next up, Tormented – which is the same band as Tortyr, but with other songs (and Drette handles the vocals). We’ve played with Tortyr a couple of times in the past, but never with Tormented. Super nice people that played some sort of old schoolish music I won’t even try to describe. Since we knew their bass player was on tour with another band, we were kinda wondering how they’d solve that. Well, Jonken stepped in, who else. The guy who plays drums in Uncurbed, bass in Regurgitate, guitar in Dellamorte and a billion other bands had learned all the songs at home and played them flawlessly, as far as we could judge. Baffling! Despite this, the crowd was once again appreciative but unmoving.

It was now our turn. I won’t say we didn’t want to play, because we did, but after selling exactly zilch from the merch table and after watching the crowd do pretty much nothing apart from polite clapping during the two previous bands… let’s just say there HAVE been time in the past when we’ve been more psyched.

This time, for the first time ever, we’d decided to start with “Falsck Security” (great starter song, as it turned out) and it was soon clear we had nothing to worry about. Seemed like the good people of Sandviken wanted themselves some fast music this night – the boring crowd turned into a great crowd!  Despite the pretty bad on-stage sound and despite local weirdos getting on stage to comb Ola’s hair and kiss his feet, we managed to make very few mistakes and pulled off a great fucking show, if we may say so ourselves. Great fun.

Once we got off stage, Martyrdöd initiated the neverending soundcheck from hell, and it took FOREVER. We talked a bit to people, finally sold a little bit of merch (hey you cheap Sandviken FUCKS, the only time we’ve sold less  merch was in Petrozavodsk, where people are fucking destitute and where the price of a Massgrav shirt is equal to two weeks wages – what’s your fucking excuse?), talked to more nice people and snapped more photos and went home in the middle of the Martyrdöd gig. Good thing we decided to cut things a bit short – the drive home took forever! It started snowing heavily and soon we were driving through a goddamn blizzard with close to zero visibility. A new Massgrav schedule was decided upon – in the summers, we play live and in the winter, we write new songs and record. Let’s hope we can stick to it. Anyway, thanks to everyone involved, see you in Stockholm next time!