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 By the time I finished and returned to the main concert room, the first band had packed up and been replaced by the night’s second act: a neo-thrash band called Municipal Waste.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

I highly recommend this film to anyone who loves being scared and disturbed. I consider it in the same vein as true genre gems like the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, The Shining, and The Descent - all films that know how to deliver the goods when it comes to creepiness, tension, and that illusive tone of pure doomed dread. 

I was extremely pleased with the results of my gamble.

This album is really quite charming, and I found myself listening to Lucky Soul’s smooth neo-50s-meets-indie-pop sound in constant rotation for several days after purchasing it. The musicians keep things interesting and very catchy from one solid song to the next while singer Ali Howards delivers a nice range of vocals that hit everything from sexy and fun to sharp and poignant.

Highly recommended! Especially if you like the Life-era sound of The Cardigans.

From the product description on Amazon:

Dexter is based on the compelling novel “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” by Jeff Lindsay. Orphaned at the age of four and harboring a traumatic secret, Dexter Morgan (Dexter Morgan (Emmy®- and Golden Globe®- nominated actor Michael C. Hall from “Six Feet Under”) is adopted by a police officer who recognizes Dexter’s homicidal tendencies and guides his son to channel his gruesome passion for human vivisection in a constructive way – by killing those heinous perpetrators that are above the law or who have slipped through the cracks of justice. A respected member of the police force, a perfect gentleman and a man with a soft spot for children, it’s hard not to like Dexter. Although his drive to kill is unflinching, he struggles to emulate normal emotions he doesn’t feel, and to keep up his appearance as a caring, socially responsible human being.

I put Dexter on my Netflix list, but got impatient and so last Sunday, my wife and I rented the first disc from Blockbusters. My wife was worried at first because the show doesn’t flinch when it comes to showing the gruesome crime scenes left behind by serial killers; however, by the end of the second episode she too was hooked. Why? Because this show is truly a gem of TV. It is incredibly well-written. All the characters are very realistic and well-fleshed out with their own interesting story-arcs that mesh well together and with the season’s quite compelling overall story arc. The acting is top notch all around with a truly excellent ensemble cast. Special kudos go out to the incredible performances by Michael C. Hall as Dexter and Julie Benz as his girlfriend Rita – a damaged single mother of two kids.

The writers of the series have created a very cerebral and well-pieced together show that keeps you coming back for more. They make clever use of foreshadowing and metaphors to enrich the whole package while using the fascinating concept of the show to explore how people interact with one another and what masks we all wear to hide our true selves.

Speaking of which: it is truly fascinating and hilarious (in a dark and morbid way) to watch Dexter try to pretend to be a person with normal feelings and desires and to hear his inner monologues contrasted with his conversations with those around him.

My wife and I were so hooked by this show that we found that we couldn’t wait for Netflix to deliver each disc and instead wound up renting the last two discs from Blockbuster as well.

Now we’re doing the unthinkable (for people who have avoided premium cable for five years) and ordering Showtime – all so we can watch Dexter Season Two which starts on September 30!

Do yourself a favor and rent or buy Dexter Season One! It’s truly the best TV show I think I’ve had the pleasure of watching.

I am not a hardcore Harry Potter fan. When the original film came out, I had never read any of the books as I don’t tend to read children’s books, although I had heard that they were rather good from some of our friends. However, the 2001 film won me over for its excellence and its since of wonder. When the second movie finally loomed near, my wife and I read the first book, and thereafter, we adopted this pattern for our Potter consumption: read the novel from which the previous movie was adapted to refresh our memories and then see the lastest film entry.

Our pattern was doomed to failure as we continued to enjoy the successive film adaptions. After watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, my wife could wait no more and she plunged ahead devouring books 4-6. Seeing as I didn’t want to risk having the story spoiled for me accidentally and seeing as my wife was eager to discuss the books, I too followed her in this reading endeavor and found myself enjoying every moment of the series.

That is why it pains me to find this latest film adaption flat and disappointing. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m biased by having already read the excellent book from which the material springs (I doubt this since I’ve loved other adaptions where I am familiar with the source material) or if it is the new director for this film or the fact that the principle actors have been playing these roles for six years now and are finding the whole thing tiresome. What I do know is that I found the film a mediocre disappointment that bored me at a few points and that actually managed to draw me out of the magic of story telling and bring to my attention the mechanics of filmmaking to notice the flaws on display.

The first thing that leapt out at me was the editing of the basic story. I realize that the source novel is massive and that it was inevitable that many of the subplots and scenes would need to be cut to fit it into a standard movie-length adaptation, but they cut some things that I thought were vital for the development of some of the characters (and this pieces will be sorely missed in the next film). More immediately damaging was the fact that the way the filmmakers cut things out and pieced scenes together produced a very episodic and jerky film where the pacing just felt off to me. Even if I had not read the book, I think I would have noticed that material is simply missing. The third film also suffered from this problem, but its otherwise excellent production kept the editing from being an albatross draped over its shoulders.

In this case, the rest of the filmmaking only added to the mess. I felt that the acting and the scenes were all very static and lifeless. The main characters seem to do a lot of standing around and talking and often seem bored or wooden. The one chief exception to this is Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge. Her performance is excellent and her character unlike many of the other adult characters is given enough screen time to actually breath and live. The normally excellent Gary Oldman and Alan Rickman seem little more than stage props with the bits that they are given to do in this film – which is a big shame since they are fine actors and the roles as written in the source novel have a lot of depth and material to explore.

This film just felt tired to me. With the staticness and the disjointed pacing, I found myself wondering how much longer the film would last about two-thirds of the way into it – which is almost unheard of for me even while watching a bad or mediocre film.

The special effects were commedable once again. There were some magical moments at Hogwarts such as the magical paper airplane and the Weasley twins OWLs stunt, but there were a few places where even the special effects failed to truly deliver. I’m sorry, but after seeing the wonderous spectacle of absolutely perfect and believable giant transforming robots in Transformers, some of the stuff on display here like the overly cutesy Giant just didn’t cut it for me. We can do much better these days and audiences shouldn’t settle for less.

Finally, the film’s conclusion was a mixed bag – albeit this time it was not entirely the fault of the filmmakers. This book’s conclusion features a battle between the forces of good and evil in which a group of children are pitted against the evil death eaters and no matter what rationalization one wishes to use, I found it extremely implausible in the book that the children could manage to hold their own for even a short amount of time and find it equally so here. Although the effects in this battle are nice to watch and deliver some of the better visuals in the film, there is no real tension in the scene and I never felt fear for the children – which is in sharp contrast to the most excellent finale to the previous film. The death eaters come off here as a bit of a joke instead of real source of menace. Only the excellent Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemorte rescues this scene dramatically by capping it with some true villiany and a real sense of threatening power. However, the film makers decide to ruin things a bit here by introducing some silly trite stuff about friendship and love that weren’t in the book and shouldn’t have been in this film.

It’s a shame that such an excellent story as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was brought to the screen in such a lifeless by-the-numbers manner. I really hope the filmmakers recapture their game with the next film.

At least there’s still Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the bookshelf. I’m pouncing on that book as soon as my wife finishes devouring it! :)

Lovers of awesome action packed spectacle rejoice!

Michael Bay has delivered us one hell of a cinematic roller coaster ride. This Transfan just had the pleasure of seeing a sneak preview of the new film that starts everywhere on July 3 (although there are some early showings on July 2 at 8PM and midnight) and I walked out of the movie theater with a great big smile on my face. Even the fact that it was pouring down rain and my car was a football field away from the entrance to the movie theater couldn’t dampen my parade after this movie.

This film delivers the goods on all accounts and delivers them in a big way! The action is fantastic, the special effects are perfect, and surprisingly enough (in such an action special effects driven feature) the actors all turn in great performances that add that extra special touch to the film. Also, the humor works very well and is satisfying and natural instead of silly and forced.

Transformer fans will be pleased and yet people who don’t have a clue who Optimus Prime or Megatron are will enjoy this ride, too judging by the enthusiastic reaction of my friend who knew nothing going into the film other than that it was a movie that featured giant transforming robots.

About the only small complaint that I can offer is that they did such a great job with setting up the story and bringing the Transformers into the picture that they wind up having too little time in the epic finale to develop any of the Decepticon characters to the degree that lovers of the comic and show will remember. However, I’m sure that this will be rectified in the sequel that is hinted at by the movie’s final minutes.

Go see this movie as soon as you can! You’ll have a blast. So far this has been the best time at the movies all year for yours truly. What a great movie! Thank you, Michael Bay.