It all started when my wife and I attended her company’s Holiday Party where they celebrated the season with a game of Secret Santa. My wife received from one of her colleagues a 16 oz. Teavana Perfect Tea Maker which is a rather handy and simple device for steeping loose leaf tea.

We had always enjoyed a cup of hot tea now and then, but other than when visiting P.F. Chang’s and enjoying the Dragon’s Oolang tea there, we had pretty much only had tea steeped via tea bags – and I must confess I always found the tea bags themselves rather annoying. I had come to really enjoy the Dragon’s Oolang at P.F. Chang’s and so I was immediately interested in trying out Melinda’s new tea maker. Indeed, my enthusiasm for her gift seemed to rival her own! :)

I went online and visited the Teavana website to see what kind of loose leaf teas they offered and then became very eager to try some of them out. I was delighted to find that Teavana had several stores in greater Atlanta – as a matter of fact, the first Teavana store was at Lenox Mall in Buckhead. One quick trip to a Teavana store, and I had some tasty teas to try out with the new tea maker: Earl Grey, Earl Grey White, and My Morning Mate (an awesome combination of yerba mate, roobios, yunnan tea and spices).

I’ve been very pleased with the Perfect Tea Maker and also with my chosen teas. Indeed, I’ve pretty much switched from drinking several cups of coffee during the day to a double cup of coffee in the morning if I’m having breakfast with Melinda and then cups of Earl Grey or My Morning Mate during the rest of the day with an occasional cup of Earl Grey White. I’m looking forward to get some green tea varieties and trying out other white teas.

We’ve looked around and found that there are definitely places where we can find loose leaf tea for better prices, but the Perfect Tea Maker that Teavana sells is wonderful and is fairly inexpensive at $17.99.

During the holidays, we’ve enjoyed many a wonderful cup of hot tea, and I’ve enjoyed reading about the fascinating history and varieties of tea although my poor wife is a little frustrated as I am often repeating facts and stories to her that she has already heard about via a colleague of hers who also recently discovered the world of tea.

And now I think it’s time for me to go make a cup of roobios!

My flight ran a little late so I didn’t actually get to my hotel until around 4:15 by which time I was pretty much guaranteed to arrive too late to see the opening band. This turn of events didn’t really bother me too much as I was only going to the concert to see one band and that band was the headliner. After dropping off my luggage at the hotel, I caught the airport shuttle back to O’Hare airport where I then took a CTA blue bus to Rosemont station. There, I finally caught the CTA blue line train which took me into downtown Chicago where I easily found my way to the House of Blues after a quick detour for some McDonald’s. 

When I entered the building to pick up my tickets from the Box Office, I could hear that the first band was already playing on stage. Apparently, they keep a tight schedule either on this tour or at The House of Blues in general. The concert doors opened at 5:30 and it seems that the first band Toxic Holocaust began playing at 5:45. As one guy waiting in line with me commented, that’s pretty amazing for one of these shows. Usually, you stand around for a long time after the doors open before any music starts and often there are long periods in between bands.

With ticket in hand, I headed into the club and made my way to the back where I purchased for myself an At The Gates “Suicidal Final Tour 2008″ t-shirt. By the time I finished and returned to the main concert room, the first band had packed up and been replaced by the night’s second act: a neo-thrash band called Municipal Waste. They were actually quite entertaining with their tongue-in-cheek lyrics and more-Slayer-than-Slayer sound. The place was already packed to the point of bursting so I had to enjoy the band from way back near the bar, but I still found the view good and the band’s energy and songwriting won me over quite quickly which usually doesn’t happen with opening bands that I’ve never heard before. For the last song in their set, their energetic front man eagerly whipped up the center crowd into a frenzy with calls to form opposing sides that smashed together in a ‘wall of death’. He then followed up with a call for the crowd to form a “circle of pain”. Quite thrilling stuff to watch from a distance although it makes me pine a bit for the time when I may have leaped into the fray myself.

After Municipal Waste wrapped up their show, there was a huge stream of metalheads flowing from the center of the crowd out towards the edges of the room where bars and restrooms stood to receive them. This temporary dispersal gave me the chance to make my way to a nice position just three to four bodies away from the stage where I often find myself as I never seem to arrive early enough to actually make the front row. Having staked my claim to a nice spot near the front, I planted roots and was ready for At The Gates to take the stage.

Unlike most concert venues that I’ve attended, the House of Blues has a big curtain on the stage that they use to hide the stage in between acts. So as the thinned crowded began to fill up again, we could hear the sounds of stage crew testing out various instruments and the mikes but all without actually seeing the, and therefore there were no incidents where some excited fan mistakes a roady on stage for a band member heralding the start of the show.

When the filler music cut off, it wasn’t At The Gates that took the stage.  Apparently four bands were performing on this leg of the tour despite the bill on listing three. The penultimate act was a band called Darkest Hour. They struck me as another generic and uninspired metalcore band with nothing that really hooked me. However, there were several people there who seemed to be really into them, and perhaps, they might have faired better with me if I had been more familiar with their material. Given that I was not, I simply tapped my foot politely and occasionally nodded my head to the beat while waiting for them to leave the stage and make way for At The Gates.

During the next round of filler music between acts, I and apparently several other fans were pleased to hear Slayer’s Angel of Death blasting from the speakers (a MIDI-based sample of this track is my current phone ringtone). A large group of fans standing behind me matched singer Tom Araya for every word and scream during this classic thrash track, and I found myself joining along before the end of the song. After that song finished, I was excited to hear the opening riffs to another Slayer song - God Hates Us All - only to have it cut off abruptly. At first, this was a welcome sign that At The Gates would play soon which summoned forth a lot of excited cheers, but these cheers turned to a few boos and a sigh from myself as the excellent Slayer track gave way to a merely okay Pantera song Walk.

But before this song could quite finish, the speakers went silent, the lights dimmed, and the curtains drew apart. At the Gates were ready to take the stage! This was the moment that many of us had waited twelve years to see – a moment that it seemed might never happen with this group long gone to the dustbin of broken-up bands. After a few heartbeats of atmospheric sound samples, the band members had all made their ways to their assigned positions on stage and without further delay, they burst into a blistering rendition of Slaughter of the Soul.

Instantly, I knew this was going to be a rough but thrilling crowd. Within seconds of the sonic attack, the mass of frantic fans behind me crashed forward like some wave of human bodies, and I found myself being crushed into the people in front of me, struggling mightily with my arms around my torso in an outward straining embrace designed to keep me from getting squeezed like a grape in a wine press.

It’s at moments like these when you’re sweating like crazy, your heart is thumping for all its worth, and your limbs are energized by the primal violence of the music that you truly capture the complete feel of the metal concert experience in all its adrenaline powered joy. While sometimes uncomfortable, the overall experience eclipses any minor nuisances like having an elbow slammed into your kidney or the flailing foot of a crowd surfer slapped against the back of your head.

Next up, the band smoothly moved into Cold followed by the excellent Raped By The Light Of Christ off their second album With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness. This is a “slower” song as At The Gates songs go, and so the crowd settled down a notch giving me the “pause” necessary to attempt recording some video with Melinda’s Flip which she kindly allowed me to take on this trip.

It would have all worked out marvelously, and by rights, I should have been able to post a link to a nice clip on YouTube featuring the band’s awesome performance. All of this would have been so if I had actually managed to press the Flip’s big red record button properly. Unfortunately, I only succeeded in turning on the Flip itself, and my pressing the button didn’t quite take hold so even though I held the Flip up and made every effort to move it around to capture the action of all the band members – I was actually capturing squat. Towards the end of this song, the Flip decided to shut down seeing as unlike me, it was perfectly aware of its idle state and decided to conserve energy. Puzzled (I didn’t figure out what had happened until I got back to my hotel room), I turned the Flip back on, and this time successfully hit the record button so that I managed to capture a measly fifteen seconds of the song’s end.

Oh well. At least, I managed a decent screen capture from that footage:

At The Gates continued ripping through songs from all of their releases including my favorite All Life Ends off their first release the Gardens of Grief EP. Every song they nailed with precision like the versions found on the albums only with that extra energy that gets captured in a concert setting by the best of bands.

For the encore, they performed three more songs kicking things into overdrive with Blinded By Fear during which crowd surfers started getting tossed like crazy and the churning swarms of moshers acted like a giant vortex that threatened to suck me into its hungry maw on a couple of occasions. Next was Suicide Nation, and in keeping with the concerts from their early days, they finished with the awesome Kingdom Gone.

At the end, the band threw a few things into the audience such as guitar picks, drum sticks, and the set list. One lucky person managed to grab both a drum stick and the set list and posted a picture of them on MySpace:

Afterwards, I left an exhausted but very happy man. This was pretty much the best concert that I’ve had the pleasure to attend, and I half-seriously looked online to see about booking a flight to Houston, Texas to see their next show this Thursday, but ultimately I couldn’t justify the costs of the airplane ticket let alone the price of a hotel. 

It seems that like another fan commented bittersweetly, this was my first and last time seeing this amazing band play live.

I can only hope that they follow up the tour by releasing some an awesome DVD with footage from various shows!

As the show draws near, I’ve been thinking about the musical evolution of various forms of extreme metal music and how sometimes you can pick out a clear path from one end of the spectrum to the other. For example, one can easily trace the development from Black Sabbath to At the Gates:

1. Black Sabbath Black Sabbath (1970): proto-metal with traces of its blues origin
2. Black Sabbath Paranoid (1970): early heavy metal
3. Judas Priest Sad Wings of Destiny (1976): beginning of classic heavy metal
4. Judas Priest Stained Class (1978): classic heavy metal with first hints of speed/thrash metal
5. Slayer Show No Mercy (1983): early speed/thrash metal with clear lineage from Judas Priest’s sound
6. Slayer Hell Awaits (1985): thrash metal – much darker with proto-death metal elements
7. Possessed Seven Churches (1985): proto-death metal with traces of thrash origins
8. Death Scream Bloody Gore (1987): early death metal with most thrash elements stripped away
9. Morbid Angel Alters of Madness (1989): seminal early death metal
10. Entombed Left Hand Path (1990): death metal with early hints of the melodic death metal sound
11. At The Gates Gardens of Grief (1991): early At The Gates with only hints of their future sound
12. At The Gates With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness (1993): Early melodic death metal sound
13. At The Gates Slaughter Of The Soul (1995): Classic melodic death metal album

During the process, we ran across a lot of old photos, some from my college days and even one from my senior year in high school.

I thought I’d share a rare shot of the thoughtful mathematical creature with long hair:

I believe that the Bible is divinely inspired by God and that it is suitable for teaching and proofing of doctrine. That is not to say that God directly dictated the words of the Bible to its various authors or that God has not inspired other writings, but that God in His complete power wove the fabrics of history and the people in its threads such that the authors of the Bible wrote the words that He wished to communicate so that all men might know about His love, His goodness, and the marvelous salvation that He has accomplished. I believe that some of the prophets and apostles heard directly from the Lord and did write down direct words of God. Others, however, only acted on instinct. But through it all, God was directing their course as He weaves all events together to accomplish His purposes. Indeed, to those who raise objections about translations and the human nature of the authors, I say that these are inconsequential in the outcome of the finished product when one begins with the hypothesis that an all powerful God directed events to produce a communication from Himself to His creation. One might readily question this hypothesis, but to raise the prior objections requires one to accept the hypothesis and yet said hypothesis destroys these objections.

I believe that the Bible is only properly understood when all of its scriptures are read in context (both textwise and culturally) and with Jesus’s teachings taking precedence over any seemingly difficult passages.

I believe that the teachings of Jesus are just as important as His sacrifice on the cross and that Christians are called to live their lives in accord with His words.

I believe that Christians are called to a life of non-violent resistance against injustices and the system of this world. Through our lives, we bear witness to God’s Kingdom of Heaven within us that will one day be without when Christ is All in All.

I believe that there is no true authority but God alone and that Christians are called to follow only God. When our actions are not in accord with the human authorities that God has allowed to have power over us, we are called to imitate Christ and not return evil for evil, but to instead submit to the unjust suffering at the hands of those who have power over us knowing that God is with us through all things and that He works all things towards our good ultimately – even when others intend our harm.

The above stands in contrast to the historical position of the church as an institution where Christians were taught to obey the powers that God has placed over us and to recognize them as legitimate. This position derives from a failure to recognize that God ordains all things and that his allowing a Hitler or a Bush to have power does not at all imply that He approves of such a ruler or that His children should recognize them as legitimate. The misunderstanding is further compounded by a failure to read Romans 13 in context as a continuation of Romans 12 where Paul describes showing love to one’s enemies and thus uses as an example the emperor Nero and his officials who were surely among the worst enemies of the early Christians. Paul says that we are to love even these persecutors and submit to their persecutions, knowing that we will suffer nothing that God has not allowed. We can take comfort in this knowledge because we know that God loves us and will work all things to our good – even our own suffering or deaths.

I believe that God is a God of justice who repeatedly condemns the powerful and wealthy of the world for their corruption of justice and their mistreatment of the poor and down trodden. I believe that God calls His children to be a voice for the voiceless. God calls us to reach out in Love to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed as our brothers and sisters in need.