Gorefest

T

hey made their debut in the underground demo scene with two tapes titled Tangled In Gore and Horrors In A Retarded Mind. With the line-up Jan-Chris De Koeijer (vocals/guitar), Frank Harthoorn (guitar), Boudewijn Bonebakker (guitar) and Ed Warby (drums) featuring featuring one of the most low-pitched and cavernous voices ever heard in Death metal. Their 1991 debut Mindloss saw them hit the market with the 'Relapse' label. It would be with 'Nuclear Blast', however, that they would release the follow-up, False, in 1992.

Hoogendoorn, soon after, quit because of incidents during the Mindloss-tour with drummer Ed Warby (ex-Elegy) took his place just two weeks before recording sessions of False. The album sold relatively well in the Netherlands and Germany for a band of the genre. They then completed a European tour with Deicide and Atrocity, playing in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Czech Republic, Slovakia and England.

Gorefest featured an abrasive sound with intensive riffs and melody, and in 1993 they released a live recording featuring this style at the Dynamo Open Air Festival performance, dubbed and recorded as The Eindhoven Insanity, which many argue was the first live Death metal album. Also in 1993, they toured North America as a supporting act for metal band Death. Erase (1994), however, proved to be their most lasting performance to date. Gorefest were never your run-of-the-mill grinding Death band, but proved to be more cerebral then much of the lot. Their next works, Soul Survivor (1996), and Chapter 13 (1998) a total departure from their roots even showing traces of pop, even going so far as to abandon their heavy image and graphics. Inexorably, fans turned their backs on them and the sales of the album plummeted, causing them to split up in 1998.