Overtorture from Stockholm was the second and last band to support Hypocrisy on their release-party in Fryshuset. The first one had been The Curse, but to be honest with you, I really had never heard of any of them, and only guessed that Overtorture was probably bigger due to their position in the playing order…

Anyway, a presentation is in order here as well I suppose, so here goes – Overtorture is a death metal act which was founded in late 2011, and this was close to being a release party for their debut full-length as well which was released only three days later, an album called At The End The Dead Await.
The members of Overtorture are all more or less known from other constellations, past and present, and they consist of Joel Fornbrant on vocals, Magnus Martinsson and Andreas Hemmander on guitars, Joakim Antman on bass and finally Fredrik Widigs on drums.

As you can hear, the band was one man larger than The Curse, and as they had the same space issue on stage to fight with (with Hypocrisy’s stuff taking up most of the place), Overtorture were even more squeezed together, something that once again was clearly affecting their possibility to perform. Whether or not it actually affected the way they usually do perform I of course cannot comment on as they were an unwritten side in my book. To make things just a little bit more complicated, Overtorture had also brought along their own stagedrops to the show; these may have been the smallest ones of the like that I have ever laid my eyes on, A2 or possibly A1, but the fact that they were back-lit helped their visibility, and I must confess I found their motif quite fitting – a (probably) dead guy staring up from a half-opened casket. Incidentally, it was the same guy as the one on their album cover, but I didn’t know that at the time…
Another visual trait in the band that stuck out, for me at least, was the somewhat look-alike quality Fornbrant had with Tomas ‘Tompa’ Lindberg from At The Gates. Even though Fornbrant did what he could with his performance, it didn’t get quite wild enough to resemble the latter, and even though his vocals were wild and fitting to the music, neither these reached the same level of insanity of that of Lindberg, but on the other hand this is a hard man to compete with, and there really isn’t any reason to do so either…

Fornbrant did move about quite a lot though, as much as the limited space could take, and he headbanged away when the music was for it as well, making him the most active man on the stage.
The others tried as well of course, but as they were nearly pressed up shoulder to shoulder as the drumkit had to take up space all the way to the front of the stage, there really wasn’t much to do but a little bit of headbanging when it didn’t get in the way of the nearest standing band mate...
If things were a bit too tight on the stage though, there was clearly more room on the floor in the hall. There had arrived more people since the last band played, but it was still quite a lot of open space around the place; still, Overtorture had the luck of having supporting friends in the crowd this night, and thus there were both chants and sheers raised for the band in between every song, and the nodding took on a more deliberate shape when the music was playing. Heck, there were even a few who dared headbang along with the band, something that helped lift the spirit of the show!

The only problem was, the music wasn’t at all interesting.
Whereas The Curse had given us a highly varied set with some great Swedish nostalgia at the heart of it, Overtorture gave us death metal inspired by the early American bands like Morbid Angel and the like, but completely missing out on the groove that the originals have, and in addition to this there was absolutely no dynamics in their songs or their set – it was just speed from start to finish, with riffs that were forgotten as soon as they had left the instruments.
Don’t get me wrong though, there was an energy to it that helped the band along, and Fornbrant took his role as frontman more seriously than Karl Envall (The Curse) had done by actually speaking to the crowd, but the show should have been cut in half at the very least to have left me with any form of interest in this band. As it was, it dragged on for too long, and my attention was in a galaxy far, far away when Overtorture finally reached the end...

Setlist:

Black Shrouds Of Dementia
Murder For The Masses
Slaves To The Atom
The Outer Limits
Targets
Suffer As One
At The End The Dead Await