Last but not least among the bands supporting Orphaned Land on their European All Is One tour, in the spirit of the message of brotherhood across borders, politics and religions, was Bilocate from Jordan.

Even though Bilocate rated highest among the support bands this evening, they were also the joker in the pack, without the humoristic implications this entails. Whereas The Mars Chronicles and Klone had delivered diverse musical styles to each other and the main act, they were all still slightly bound together in the melodic and progressive corner, whereas Bilocate went straight for the throat with their 90ies reeking (used in the most positive way) death/doom mix-up, a style clearly much more in line with what Orphaned Land delivered on Sahara and El Norra Alila than their current direction.

“Alright guys, we’re just warming up and I guess you are too, but we want to see some headbanging!”
- Ramzi Essayed (vocals)

As had been the case for the first two bands, the crowd had once again become a bit larger, and I was impressed to see the amount of people which had shown up for the event.
Even so, Bilocate were given a somewhat more lukewarm response from the audience than what I had seen earlier on. There were of course applause between songs and a limited amount of headbangers in the front were really getting into it, but mostly people hung back a bit and quietly listened. This could of course be because Bilocate is as of yet a rather unknown size around these parts, but my guess goes more to the aforementioned fact that they fell a bit outside of the common style of the evening – the crowd was likely more after the progressive music, and Bilocate’s 90ies throwback which in itself sounded great, didn’t quite deliver on that exact point...

One thing I can say for certain is that it wasn’t for lack of trying from the bands side that the party wasn’t at full speed during their time on the stage.
Bassist Hani Al Abadi was an absolute animal on stage, slaying the performance and because of the stage-size, sometimes also almost his friendly sideman guitarist (whose name I sadly have been unable to find, feel free to help me out here).
Ramzi Essayed delivered some earthshaking growls, but took it a bit easier on the whole performance thing, as did his brother Waseem Essayed (keyboards) who was hidden away in a dark corner of the stage next to guitarist Rami Haikal, a huge imposing man with a Palestinian shawl around his waist, who for that matter was also punishing his instrument severely.
Being the main support, Bilocate had a longer stage-time than the other bands, but somehow it struck me as though they didn’t get to deliver all that many songs; later, I found out that their opening track, A Desire To Leave, is almost 20 minutes long (credited to being the longest Arab metal song to date), so that could definitely have a part in this...
Still, they played five songs for us, and even though as I have mentioned they were a far more brutal band than the rest on the tour, it shouldn’t without saying that their music also contained several calm and clean passages, again adding to that lovely 90ies vibe I’ve been going on about. Adding further to this, the band had a surprising cover in their set from said decade, namely Dead Emotion by Paradise Lost! This song got some more heads banging, and it was great to hear that they had put a personal touch on it as well, just as Klone had done with Army Of Me.

I for one was headbanging happily to Bilocate. They were not the band I fell for the most this evening, but that doesn’t make them any worse, it just meant that they had tough competition.
I especially liked the nostalgia of the past century that they gave me – Bilocate may be from the 21st century, but there was nothing in their music that gave this away, and in a way that was really refreshing!

Setlist:

A Desire To Leave
The Dead Sea
The Tragedy Within
Dead Emotion (Paradise Lost cover)
2nd War In Heaven