Outside of SoulFood

Devin Townsend played a coffee house last night. If you’re not familiar with HevyDevy then this might not mean much to you. Devin started his professional career as the lead singer on two Steve Vai albums, and soon after formed his own band Strapping Young Lad. SYL has been a major influence on me over the past nine years. So a free show in a coffee house in Redmond as he takes a break from an international tour in support of his latest album. As it turned out, I wish Dena and I had gotten there sooner. The above image should give some indication, but the shop was at maximum capacity and there were maybe a hundred people standing outside.

At one point a manager at SoulFood got on stage and asked for people to ’share the experience’ and let others have a turn because ‘what comes around goes around [sic]‘, which became a great lesson in the effectiveness of feel-good hippie rhetoric. No one budged.

I used the opportunity to try out the voice recorder on the iPhone. If we’d been in there it might not have turned out so well. You’ll have to ignore some various douchebags in the background – two young dorks in front of us kept talking during the entire show. Yes, we know it’s from Ziltoid. Yes, that’s a great reverb system. No, we don’t care what you think about Addicted.

Here’s a snippet from the track ‘Coast’ off the album ‘Ki‘:

And a good chunk of ‘Solar Winds’ off of ‘Devin Townsend Presents: Ziltoid the Omniscient‘:

Finally, an unreleased track he called ‘Radial Highway’ that was as he described it ‘a lot like Trainfire [also from Ki] but creepier’:

That last one annoyed me most. There was a woman who showed up right before this song who started bugging everyone there about who this was and why her favorite store was clogged with people. She just wouldn’t shut up. She hung around after it was clear she wasn’t interested in the music and kept initiating conversations with random people. Very frustrating. I don’t go to live shows to socialize with people, I go to watch musicians perform.

Anyway, here’s about the only shot I could manage of the stage. I’m not even going to try to point it out. This is really all I could manage:

Can't quite make out the stage...

• Chores. Yes, I did chores.
• Played with Oscar. So much playing. It was great. I need to add pictures to his site.
• Finished Pratchett’s latest Discworld book, Making Money. It was great. I like the Moist Von Lipwig character, it’s adding dimension to Lord Vetinari, and since so many of the books have followed Commander Sam Vimes’ adventures it’s nice to see him from a different perspective. Side Note: Pratchett’s storybook “Where’s my Cow?” featuring the City Watch cast is one of Oscar’s favorite books. (Side Note 2: looks like there’s another Discworld book out, with another soon to be released. Even diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Pratchett continues to crank them out.)
• Developed a multi-site single sign-on system in Rails. It allows a site using an API_CODE to register a user, which returns a token that can be used by another site to verify that the visitor is logged in and spawn a new session. The API allows a chunk of anonymous data to be registered along with the user to be passed along to the second site. Really, it’s a simple application with two RESTful web services. I’m pretty proud of it.
• Discovered that the infused vodka we made last Fall mixes a little too well with cranberry juice.
• Started playing back through God of War again, which is great fun and I wish I’d finished it back on the PS2 when I first got it years ago.
• Purchased and currently enjoying the new Fear Factory album. I’ll write a review once I have it fully consumed. So far? Happiness.

Things I didn’t do that I wanted to:

• While I moved the File Server out of the office into the living room and made a place for it, I didn’t plug it in and get it up and running again. This is annoying, I want access to my music library again.
• I wanted to clean Oscar’s room today. Oh well.
• I wanted to get a new DVD started for the Grandparents in PA.
• I wanted to get started on the two short story ideas I’ve had going through my head the past week. I also wanted to get some edits into Down the Path while they were still fresh in my head from last Thursday’s North Sea Writers meeting.

We also went shopping last night (Oscar played with a Nerf battle axe and talked me into buying a SpongeBob SquarePants DVD set), and we also went to Matt’s for dinner today and Oscar went silly playing with Callie, Matt’s Welsh Pembroke Corgi. Tomorrow Dena is bringing the kids downtown since they all have the day off and we’ll be meeting for coffee.

Exhausting.

Lightning Swords of Death was up first. Their lead singer took himself too seriously, and their drummer couldn’t manage to hold a beat. Which is lame for black metal when you’re expecting precision double bass work and you get a stuttering mess of duples and triples. I thought at first it might have just been an issue with how they had set the mics up for the kicks, but it turned out to be what it was, sloppy and undisciplined. His fills were boring and uninspired, too.

Which is when I realized that I really like this type of music for the percussion. So no, I didn’t like LSoD.

And that was reinforced when Septicflesh hit the stage. These guys rocked. Tight, fast, great stage presence, and the drummer killed it. These guys have been around for a while and I’m surprised I’ve never heard of them. Then again it was only a few years ago that I started listening to the headliners. Anyway, if you dig the death metal, I highly recommend seeing Septicflesh live.

Took forever for the stage setup and the sound test, although we were treated to Inferno beating the hell out of his drums as they set levels. This guy is ridiculous. Check out their latest album Evangelion; the title track is Daimonos, and is a good display of his blastbeat prowess. Anyway, Behemoth hit the stage and they were better even than I remember them at the same venue over two years ago. Just really tight and you could tell they enjoyed playing to the crowd.

While they didn’t play Daimonos, they did bust out a ridiculous version of Demigod, which was really my first proper introduction to the band. Incredible show. Worth the $20, and I love seeing metal acts play at El Corazon.