Hypocrisy and Kataklysm was once again paired together, as Nuclear Blast resurrected the Death...Is Just The Beginning concept they had going way way back in the day. Now they were touring Europe on a co-headlining tour, and lo and behold - they stopped by to play in Denmark along the way!
Sure, Kataklysm’s been here quite a few times over the years, but for Hypocrisy, it’s nearly unheard of, and we were going to soak in every second of it, be sure of that!

“Copenhagen, Pumpehuset, English eller svenska? We haven’t played here since -93, and it was my birthday!”
- Peter Tägtgren (vocals/guitar)

For this evening, Hypocrisy was first up, and while it was a bit sad not to be able to let the excitement grow and have them as a final climax of the evening, it was also pretty sweet to let them have all the pent up energy up front. And there was a lot of pent up energy in the sold out Pumpehuset, which actually seemed to have been waiting for Hypocrisy as much as for Kataklysm - a positive surprise there, considering that we put all the love we have for the band, it was really hard to guess at how interested the common Danish audience would be in them. After all they haven’t been frequent visitors, now have they?

But in the end, as in the beginning for that matter, the hall was filled, and the crowd ready to rock, as Hypocrisy took the stage. It seemed the band could sense this, as they brought out their A-game for the show.
They kicked off with Fractured Millennium, and then served up a sweet, albeit safe, best of setlist with focus on older to mid-old material, and while this was all fine and good, it was the delivery of the songs that really set this apart. Hypocrisy was on fire, as already mentioned. Peter Tägtgren had the audience in the palm of his hand, while Michael Hedlund and Tomas Elofsson livened the stage up further by being on the move a lot of the time, and also posing and messing around with each other. Reidar ‘Horgh’ Horghagen sat in his usual Nordic God stance behind the drums and delivered a solid and tight wall of percussion for the show, but visually added the least bit of traction.

Due to the size of the stage, Hypocrisy also had to play with a fairly limited amount of dressing for the stage - they didn’t have their stylish drum podium front, and a few other artifacts had to be left in the truck (or wherever they transport it) as well.
At least the quality of the light show had gone quite a way up from The Spirit’s gig earlier, thankfully, and this combined with a good sound, and that spectacular performance from the band, made up for it in spades.
Every drop of sweat spilled by the band, was in equal measure spilled by the audience. Well, ok, that was an odd way to put it, but what it means is that the filled hall proved every bit as active and into the show, as the band was. From the start, cheers and screams filled the room, and it didn’t take long for it to take a physical aspect as well. Moshing, a bit of crowd surfing, headbanging, and the like raised the temperature considerably this mid-November evening.

“I think we played these songs 2000 years ago.”
- Tägtgren (vocals/guitar)

We had known going in that this would be the highlight of our evening, but we didn’t realize to just how high a degree Hypocrisy would own the show, to put it in modern parlance. Neither did we realize, nor would have ever guessed, that this would be the highlight of the evening not just for us, but in general as well! Hypocrisy had both the largest and the wildest crowd at this show, and we can only cross our fingers that will mean they wont be strangers again for so long. Might we be so bold as to suggest an appearance at Copenhell next summer..?

Setlist:

Fractured Millennium
Valley Of The Damned
End Of Disclosure
Adjusting The Sun
Eraser
Pleasure Of Molestation / Osculum Obscenum / Penetralia
Fire In The Sky
Killing Art
Buried
War-path
The Final Chapter
Roswell 47