I've posted a couple of videos by upcoming bands before, but I have a bit of special interest in this one, because it features a dual-classed geoscientist/guitarist who was a fellow inmate of the reinforced concrete dungeons of Andrew Melville Hall. Since leaving university, I've sort of vaguely been aware of what's been going on with his band through my occasional check of Facebook, but things got really exciting a couple of years ago when I saw they had gone to Sweden to record an album (through his keeping everyone updated by uploading bucketloads of photos of himself with various hordes of blonde-haired girls). They recently signed with a Japanese record company and produced their first music video - he's the one in the sort of time-displaced Indiana Jones outfit who plays the guitar really fast.




Voted the 'worst band in Aberdeen' four years running by people who are unable to process sound, their style is perhaps most similar to (dare I say it) Dragonforce, except taken down just a couple of notches to listenable, and the video uses the tried and tested power metal formula of going to Sheffield and setting up a load of huge fans and some smoke machines in an abandoned cutlery factory. With song titles like "Blackthorne" and "The Avatar" and at least one really good Ben Sotto pronounciation of "unimaginable" at the end of the chorus in the above video, I'm looking forward to hearing the rest of this - besides, you know you're a legitimate power metal band when you have a Japanese bonus track.

Between them and Alestorm, I'm very pleased that the ridiculous power metal quota is being kept up in Scotland, in preparation for in two years' time when it'll have been torn off the rest of the island and paddled over to join Scandinavia.