Hello readers!

On Tuesday February 17th, I headed over to the Marquee for maybe the most ridiculous concert of the month. A tour headlining Swedish death metal bands, At The Gates and Decapitated made its stop at the Marquee that evening. There was no line outside the venue before the event.

At the Gates is a Swedish death metal band from Gothenburg, and a major progenitor of the Gothenburg Sound. Initially active from 1990 to 1996, the band reformed in 2007 for a reunion tour before breaking up once again in 2008. However, they reformed for a second time in December 2010, and have since continued to perform live. The band released At War with Reality, their first album in 19 years, in late 2014.

Decapitated is a Polish death metal band formed in Krosno in 1996. The group comprises guitarist, founder and composer Wacław "Vogg" Kiełtyka, vocalist Rafał Piotrowski, bassist Paweł Pasek, and drummer Michał Łysejko. Decapitated have gained recognition as one of the genre's most widely respected bands and one of the finest exponents of technical death metal. The band earned an international fan base in the underground music community, and became an innovating act in the modern death metal genre.

Vogg and his younger brother, drummer Witold "Vitek" Kiełtyka, founded Decapitated along with vocalist Wojciech "Sauron" Wąsowicz in their mid-teens, joined by bassist Marcin "Martin" Rygiel a year later. The band's ambitious fourth album, Organic Hallucinosis, was released in 2006 with a new vocalist, Adrian "Covan" Kowanek.

In late 2007, the band was involved in an automobile accident. Vitek died at the age of 23 on November 2, 2007 of the injuries he suffered from the accident and Covan survived, but he slipped into a coma as a result. After a period of disbandment, Vogg reformed Decapitated and in 2011 released the fifth album, Carnival Is Forever. The latest album, Blood Mantra, was released in 2014.

Only 400 tickets had been sold to this show by the time doors opened at 6:00 p.m.. The majority of the audience at this point was composed of people in their early 20’s wearing dark eye makeup and dark clothes. Despite this, there was also a decent number of older men that looked in their 40s, likely a result of the band’s popularity in the early 1990s.

The venue had hung up curtains halfway across the general admission floor, which was something I had never seen them do before. I inquired about the change to a security guard who was standing by. After congratulating me for asking such a thoughtful question (I could tell he liked the attention), the officer told me that the venue often brings out the curtain when less than 500 tickets are sold to a show. This is in order to herd the majority of attendees into one area so that they are easier to handle for security officers, as less security will work an event with less attendees.

No one was surprised (except maybe my exclusively Bruce Springsteen/David Bowie loving friend who I dragged along to the concert) when a mosh pit formed two songs into the first band’s set. It was a gaping hole in the crowd with no more than fifteen people participating, but nonetheless it was a mosh pit. It only got more intense as the night went on. All night, officers stood on multiple ends of the circle, waiting for a need to intervene. There were some minor injuries, but overall I felt like the security was doing a phenomenal job of keeping guests safe.

My concerting is quickly coming to an end, and I feel this concert was an instrumental experience in the diversity of my research.

Until Next Time,
Sabrina

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