Written by:	s7mon
Published:	February 03, 2012
Event:	Covan Wake The Fuck Up Tour 2012
Location:	Madness, Wroclaw, Poland

As you all probably remember, in 2007 a tragic accident caused the death of Decapitated's drummer Vitek, and the singer, Covan, went into a coma. Covan Wake The Fuck Up Tour is organized by Decapitated and their friendly bands in order to collect money for Covan's treatment. I guess everybody thought it would be indeed a Decapitated+ friends tour, but sadly, the band decided to play only two out of ten dates. It turned out that Virgin Snatch and Thy Disease are the only ones that will play the full tour. It's basically the same situation as two years ago, when these two bands also played together and even in the same venues. But that didn't worry me much, as I missed that tour and Virgin Snatch are one of my favorite Polish bands.


The first band to take the stage was Quo Vadis (POL). I'm not really familiar with their catalogue, all I know is that they released an album in 2010 Infernal Chaos and it contained some decent thrash. They are still promoting the aforementioned record, so no wonder they focused on it during the gig. "Blood for Oil" and "Cross of Gold" were definitely the strongest point of the record and they didn't disappoint live. Of course the band played some older stuff, such as "NKWD" from their self-titled debut album or "Trzy Szósteczki" with a "Black Magic" snippet. Sadly, it was the cover of "Symphony of Destruction" that met with the warmest crowd response. They ended their short, 30-minute performance with another cover, which was "Pretty Woman". It's a shame they didn't play more of their own stuff. After all, they have released nine LPs already, so they had a pretty wide choice. But this was a pleasant opener of the metal evening.

It was quite a surprise that the second band that played was Anal Stench. It was quite a comeback, as the gig in Wrocław was their first in almost six years. The band is composed of members of two other bands that performed that evening - Thy Disease and Virgin Snatch. They play groovy death metal, which is always good to hear live. The thing that struck me the most was that they had two vocalists, one wore a balaclava and was growling, the other used rather traditional metal scream. They are obviously fascinated with communist Russia, as they had hammer & sickle signs on their uniforms and spoke usually in Russian between songs. You could see that the gig gave them a lot of joy, as they were smiling and joking all the time. Anal Stench put up a really enjoyable show, but again the crowd didn't really care much about the band's efforts.



Thy Disease are an industrial death metal band. Not really my cup of tea, but live it worked just fine. Third band in a row that wore uniforms. Is it really that popular now? The first obvious difference between Thy Disease and the two supports was less chaos on stage: they clearly put much more thought into their performance. The musicians moved around a lot and did it in an organized way. Unfortunately, once again, the audience plainly didn't give a shit about the people onstage. Out of around 200 hundred people that showed up, 15-20 were close to the stage headbanging. I didn't mention any moshpit, simply because there wasn't one. The singer tried to encourage the crowd, but they didn't listen. Of course, we should be happy that these people wanted to help Covan by purchasing the tickets, but come on! This is a metal show. Anyway, Thy Disease played some of their best songs, such as "Mean, Holy Species", "Fog of War" or "Rat Age". They also did a cover of "Intoxication" by Atrophia Red Sun, which is a band in which Covan used to sing. The thing that was sometimes annoying was the synthesizers, sometimes the songs would've sounded a lot better without them.

At last! Virgin Snatch was the band I'd been looking forward to seeing for a long time. I love their last two records, In The Name Of Blood and Act of Grace . Luckily for me, they focused on these two, so we heard some solid modern thrash metal in form of "Bred to Kill", "Walk the Line", "Purge My Stain!", "State of Fear" and "Through Fight We Grow". They met the warmest reception, and repaid in a performance that was easily the best that evening. They were super tight and Zielony proved that he's one hell of a frontman. His voice was in a pretty good shape as well. But the thing that impressed me the most is that he jumped off the stage and joined the moshpit. Twice. It may not sound that spectacular, but this is how you gain fans' respect. The worst thing was that they played only for around 40 minutes, including encore that was the title song from their second LP Art of Lying. They could've easily performed a lot longer, as the crowd was hungry for their music. The other thing that sucked was the sound. It wasn't one bit clear and sometimes it just turned into cacophony. But it's a rather regular situation in that venue so I shouldn't have been surprised.






After all, the gig turned out really well. The first three bands maybe weren't marvelous, but they weren't a let-down either. But it was Virgin Snatch that stole the night. I hope that the money collected during that tour will be enough to pay for Covan's treatment.