Dec. 01, 2010 - Issue #789 : Beckett Shorts

Prevue

Holy Grail

Sat, Dec 4, Starlite Room

Holy Grail plays metal the way it's meant to be played—fast, loud and just in control enough to put it over the top—but for the band's debut album, Crisis in Utopia, the members did something a little rare for a metal band: they sat back and took their time. Their slow process does make some sense, though: they had more than 187 riffs to whittle down courtesy of shred wizard Eli Santana, and also a touring schedule far more hectic than the average group working on its first full-length.

"It was definitely a drawn-out process: if we would have just stayed home and nailed it down it could have been knocked out in two months," explains vocalist James Paul Luna, he of the soaring, operatic vocals that give Holy Grail much of its old-school charm. "But the good thing was that we got to step away from it for a bit and come back at it with fresh ears. It was nice to be able to reanalyze it from that point."

The analysis has definitely contributed to Crisis in Utopia's bigger, more complex sound, one that harkens back to the legends of metal while still carving out a modern niche. It's a sound that, curiously, seems to be getting even bigger responses outside the States than in it, including from the Canadian metal scene, something that Luna attributes to music fans around here being a bit more open-minded than in the genre-cliques that sometimes develop Stateside.

"If you were in Europe, I don't think many people could tell the difference between someone from Canada and someone from the States, so it's a similar culture, but it's kind of more of an open-minded view of music in Canada," he explains. "It's closer to a European mind set—whereas in the States the mass media kind of takes over, up there people kind of dig deeper into and are hungrier for it, a little more willing to explore on their own."

Sat, Dec 4 (7 pm)
With Blind Guardian
Starlite Room, $36.50 (all ages)
  vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus