Skip to main content

My Fantasy Gig: Polish Death Metal

Image
By


It’s no secret that I like death metal. Three of my favorite death metal bands are all from Poland. I’ve been lucky enough to see all of them at least twice individually, but never together. I’ve often wondered why they haven’t all toured together. I’ve never been to Poland either so I’d settle for seeing them all together in their home country.

Decapitated

Opening the show I’d have Decapitated a technical death metal band. Their style, as you would expect, is heavy and progressive. While currently the smaller and less well know of the three bands on this bill, Decapitated are growing in popularity and are poised to step into the shoes of metal titans such as Lamb of God.

After getting into Vader and Behemoth I was really excited to read about another Polish death metal band and I wasn’t disappointed, especially as I also have a soft spot for progressive metal. Often with metal bands who have been around a while, their back catalogue is noisy and unpalatable. Not the case with Decapitated. They’re tight, aggressive and heavy from the first album through to the more recent ones. I’ve seen them play three times now (once even in Norwich) and their live performance demonstrates their skill as musicians.

Behemoth

I’d have Behemoth second on the bill. By far the biggest of the three bands, Behemoth are one of the best metal bands around at the moment. Currently (summer 2017) they are touring the US with Lamb of God and Slayer. I’ve seen them play three times. Once to about 10 people at a club in Bradford and twice to thousands at Bloodstock.

Their singer is often in the press, in Poland and around the world. He famously burned a bible on stage in Poland and was promptly arrested. Later he was diagnosed with and beat cancer.

In the early days Behemoth’s style of ‘blackened death metal’ was heavily influenced by US death metal giants Morbid Angel, but much more palatable. That said they’ve improved on almost every album. Their 2013 album the Satanist is a masterpiece of modern metal. Probably their least heavy album to date, but still crushing.

Vader

Headlining I’d have Vader. I’d describe them as the godfathers of Polish death metal. While not as popular or well selling as Behemoth, they belong at the top. Vader play more traditional death metal, sometimes with trashy tinges. I really struggled to get into their back catalogue. I just wasn’t ready, but every album is superb.

I’ve seen them twice, both times in small clubs. Their sound wasn’t the best, but being a huge fan I put that down to the PA in the clubs. I am sure that atop such a fine bill, they would shine and show what they can really do.

Of course the final encore would comprise of all three bands playing a metal classic together.

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

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
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