Skip to main content

Infected Rain at The Underworld

Image
By

Infected Rain are one of those bands I thought I really ought to be into. A modern, European metalcore band with female vocals, what’s not to like? But I just couldn’t get on with the Ecdysis album. I persevered and when the band released a few tracks from the Time album in advance of its release, I listened, but they didn’t really work for me and I almost gave up. Then a few weeks later Time came out, I tried again and was just blown away. Not just daily listens, but multiple dailey listens.

Then it was announced they would be playing at the Underworld at the end of August and a quick check revealed almost everything they’re currently playing live is from Time with a couple of older songs thrown in. It should be perfect, but, as I’ve blogged before, the sound at the Underworld can be hit and miss. Then my wife said she wanted to go and that was that!

We went and it was amazing! The band hit the stage, and while the sound wasn’t perfect, still not enough guitar in the mix, it sounded great. The songs were easily recognisable. Lena’s vocals were clear and so strong. She gave a solid performance throughout. She engaged with the crowd throughout and after the second song, acknowledged to the crowd that someone had fainted just before they came on, wished them well and told us to look after ourselves. I haven’t seen a band with this much energy for quite some time. Lena seemed to be everywhere all at once and Alice (bass) seemed to be constantly moving and swapping places with the guitarist. A couple of songs before the end, my wife told me she loved it too. All too soon it was over, but Lena told us a few of them would be at the merch stand after the gig, so we hung around.

My wife (42) had only been able to stand for the first few songs and while she sat for the rest I was a few metres away, standing watching the band, when a young man in his early twenties clearly thought she was fair game and started chatting her up. I watched with amusement as she smiled and pointed me out to him and the look on his face as he passed by me was a picture!

When Lena and Alice came out to take pictures with the crowd, I’m sorry to say I went all fanboy. I got a photo with them both and proceeded to tell Alice I thought she was amazing and that she was the main reason I’d come! We bought t-shirts and I was still bouncing as we left the Underworld, and all the way back to the hotel if I’m honest.


My wife wants to see them again in January.



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