Skip to main content

Devin Townsend & Fear Factory

By
The Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton is one of those venues, like the Glasgow Barrowlands where I see loads of bands advertise that they’re playing, but under normal circumstances I’d have no reason to go and see them there. On this particular tour it turns out Wolverhampton was the most convenient place for us to get to to see Devin Townsend and Fear Factory. What a great venue! It had one of the clearest sound systems with more definition of sound than you get in a lot of venues, but it was stupidly loud. Ear plugs were even on sale behind the bar. And being the midlands, everyone was really friendly.

Looking back, Fear Factory are one of those bands that I thought I really liked when I was at school, but it turns out it was just a couple of songs from the Demanufacture album. When they made a comeback with Mechanize in 2010 I got into them again and bought up their back catalogue. I still only like a few songs from Demanufacture, but the rest of their albums are great especially the debut Soul of a New Machine and the most recent, The Industrialist. I’ve seen them live before at Donington in 1994 and seeing them again now reminded me just how simple and infectious their take on industrial metal really is. I really enjoyed their set, especially opener The Industrialist and closer Replica. Definitely a band I want to see more.

Charlotte and I have had great difficulty in getting to see Devin Townsend. I missed him at Bloodstock on 2010 as we were having our first baby. Then Charlotte and I both missed him in 2011 as Charlotte was very pregnant and felt too ill to go on the day.  This time we didn’t have much luck either as Charlotte was unable to stand for long. However, we did get to see the hilarious videos that Devin plays before his set and the first four or five songs of the set including the amazing Supercrush and ZTO. He’s an all round performer and just plays so well. Long may he continue and could we have Strapping Young Lad back please?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th
22 comments
Read more

Bloodstock 2009

By
This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin
1 comment
Read more