Albion-Tharotia - Out in the Wilds

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DavidXNewton

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Published on July 30, 2016 8:25:29 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn_aj2XC040

Duration: 7:10

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12

Listen/download the Poison Skies: http://albion.bandcamp.com
The Afflicted: http://bit.ly/theafflicted

David says...
The timeline for this album was… long. I had been playing around with ideas for it while I was writing Signal from the Sky in 2010-2012, and most of the first half of the album was written by the time Hatoful happened to us and led me to concentrate on my video-making for a while - Hatoful also spawned a mini storyline concept album which was in many ways a practice run for this one.

So, several of the songs were mostly written in Modplug first, were put to bed for a while and were then transplanted over to Reaper. This is one of them, and I’m so glad that the transition happened because I love how it came out - once again, the Shreddage guitar library gives so much more realistic a tone, and I love the sound of the introduction to the mid-section. It’s one of the longer tracks at just over seven minutes, combining a character’s introduction with an advancement of the story in much the same way that the source novel does.

Even though it was a challenge to communicate ideas for the rest of the song across the Internet and mostly not working together in person, I love how this one came out in the end - the moment I realized Kjorteo and I were so in tune with each other was when I passed her the idea for a chorus I had and even without being given any lyrics at all, she could recognize the repeated shout of “Out in the Wilds” throughout the chorus. That chorus and the mid-section are mine - Kjorteo wrote the entire first half of the song.

When singing Girard’s lines I tried to give a bit of a snarl to my voice, spitting the words more - I rely a lot on studio magic to put any sort of power behind my voice but I think the difference is just about audible, and I surprised myself on the “the savior has gone…” line. Contrasting me, Kjorteo also provides Girard’s growling voice throughout the album to emphasize lines where he’s at the height of madness (because I can’t do that).

Kjorteo says...
Long before this album actually existed, I had come up with a personal list of which metal singers' voices I felt would be most appropriate for each of the main characters in the novel. At the time, this was purely a for-fun thought exercise, because power metal is a genre wherein assembling singers to act out a massive epic is something that actually happens with some regularity (Avantasia, Ayreon, Avalon, and now Albion. See if you can spot a pattern.)

In my head, I had always cast Blind Guardian's Hansi Kursch as Girard--again, well before David took my silly little headcanons literally and based each song's "sound" off of them--because Kursch has an amazingly aggressive voice and a known tendency to write sympathetic pity-me songs from the perspective of madness-consumed villains. In what would eventually become a song about Girard raging against the cruelty of his own fate, the fit was perfect.

When this did become a real project, David took that connection and ran with it, using a Blind Guardian-inspired sound to make a perfectly fitting chorus. I loved it and wanted to help, so I worked on the verse and pre-chorus to match it. The contrasting long held first line note and more aggressive followup line in "Alone/I find myself in this land" took significant inspiration from the song "Beneath These Waves" by Demons & Wizards (another Kursch project.) The line "A walk through the shadows" in that song contains the exact holding effect I was trying for with my "Alone", and their "The ocean's beauty" line was even the exact note/key my verse started with in my original Modplug rendition, before David changed the pitch on everything to accommodate his Reaper instruments and singing voice.