Music, Reading, Writing, Photograohy
In between all the Bad Omens shows, we decided to have a little break with some symphonic metal. Six concerts in 9 days is a bit of a heavy schedule, but with ILLUMISHADE as a kind of a cooldown in between, you couldn’t do much wrong.
I pre-ordered three albums so far for 2024- and all of them were (or still are) highly awaited. ILLUMISHADE’s second album „Another Side Of You“ was one of them. As an expression of how much awaited this album was, let me tell you that I ordered it twice. Yes. Exactly. We got two copies of this album – first we ordered the CD (in a bundle with a t-shirt) and then about a week before the album came out, ILLUMISHADE mentioned in a video that the vinyl has bonus tracks. I am a simple person, so me and my girlfriend decided that yes, bonus tracks (that we knew before because they had been published on Spotify in 2021 already) are enough of a reason to pre-order the vinyl as well. Our vinyl arrived last Thursday, the CD on Friday and here’s my opinion. Little spoiler: Any other releases in 2024
Continue readingAlbum review: ILLUMISHADE – Another Side Of You
Thomas Herzsprung is an author I came across on TikTok. I started following him without having read any of his books mostly because of his personality, but I kept looking for his books in the bookstores. I knew he wrote psycho thrillers and since I’m a huge fan of Sebastian Fitzek and the like, I wanted to give him a chance. Yet, I never found a single book of his in the bookstore and since I usually found something else to take home with me instead, I never thought of ordering a book. Now I recently discovered that as an Amazon Prime member I have access to a selection of free e-books and luckily, his book „Der Behandler“ was available for free, so I decided to give it a try.
First things first: For this post I decided to write a combined review of both Bad Omens shows in Cologne. Altogether I’ve been to four concerts of this tour and since there wasn’t that much of a difference between the Cologne shows (while there was still a significant difference) I decided to review those two together. I’ll also write a combined review for the other two shows because I’d probably repeat some points again and again, so instead of cluttering my blog with Bad Omens concert reviews I decided to group them. At some point I the past I was very worried about the four concerts we had tickets for. Somehow I had feared that I might regret it after the first show. I didn’t. In fact, I am more than happy to have bought tickets for four shows because not all of them were equally good, but read more.
Sometimes you just buy concert tickets for the sake of going to a concert I guess. And this one wasn’t even a tactically clever choice. When we read that Architects would play their only show in Germany in Münster, which is not far from where we live, we decided to go there although none of us is that much of an Architects fan. I occasionally have them in my Spotify mixtapes and I honestly don’t know many of their songs, but we’d also seen Spiritbox at Full Force before and thought they were cool, so why not? So we bought the tickets and went for a surprise.
Let the concert year 2024 begin – with a bang! This show was long anticipated, since ILLUMISHADE are currently in my top 10 favourite bands and this was the first time I would see them live. Yes, we’re back at the „let’s go abroad to see the support act“ game – and it was worth it. Here’s my little concert recap of my first concert in 2024. (Note: This review was written the day after the show, but published significantly later)
My first book choice in 2024 was taken following an entirely practical approach: the first part of the Brynmor University trilogy by Dominic Gaida had been waiting and smiling at me from my shelf for several weeks and I always postponed it. Until I read that part 2 will come out in February 2024 and so I decided to give it a read to see if it would be worth to wait for the second part – or to even pre-order it. Spoiler: For me personally, it is.
Happy new year I guess. It’s been a while and I wanted to publish this review much earlier, especially given that the CD was in my post box a week before the album was actually published. But first there were Christmas holidays, then were exams to mark and now I’m back to work. I didn’t even manage to finish my 2023 recaps, but who cares – let’s start 2024 with this review.
2023 was somehow a special year because I finally found back to reading books. I also started buying more books (and of course I haven’t read that many of them, that’s the law. Maybe I’m more of a book dragon than a book worm). Actually I bought so many new books that we had to get a third bookshelf (and then I had to buy even more books so that the shelf wouldn’t look super empty). Yet, my reading list of 2023 isn’t super impressive. Under the cut you’ll find out a bit more, but be prepared: My impressive count of books read in 2023 is 17 (actually 19, but I couldn’t add the two volumes of Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne to Storygraph, but that’s fine, because 3 out of those 17 are the Concrete Jungle comics which literally have 20-25 pages each…).
Last year, when I was asked how many concerts we go to on average within a year, I excused the 14 concerts and 2 festivals as an exception because there were so many shows that had been postponed because of the pandemic. Little did I know. I didn’t anticipate what would happen this year, after I quit 2 time-consuming hobbies, out of which one was fairly expensive as well. Things escalated. I went to concerts. I enjoyed it. Join my concert recap of 2023 🙂