July 21, 2014

Aeron’s Wake from Windsor, Ontario play what they describe as instrumental Celtic metal. Now, I’ll apologize upfront for not being up-to-date on the metal scene and who’s hot or not and for maybe messing some obvious comparisons. Listening to the Aeron’s Wake five track debut EP I hear 80’s metal – the NWOBHM and especially Diamond Head and to a lesser extent Iron Maiden (the orchestration that Maiden do so well) and maybe even early Metallica or a less trashy Skyclad. The fiddle of default front man Quinn Strahl is out front and arguably does the role that the lead guitar would do in a traditional metal band sitting on top of the riffing and trashing of band co-founder and guitarist Spencer Scurr. I’ve spun the EP a whole bunch of time over the last couple of days and I keep thinking the music would be so cool as a sound track. I can just picture the scene in the movie – scared looking Roman solders surveying the distance beyond their defensive walls on some northern frontier of the empire, just out of their sight hordes of blue painted Pictish tribes men and then the attack and slaughter of the intruders. You get my drift.

Aeron’s Wake works well as an EP though a full-length instrumental only album might be trying on the casual listener and in some regard the band may be limiting their potential audience without a vocalist but then again in the conservative world of metal just having a fiddle player is limiting so more power to ’em!