In a familiar turn of events, one band’s demise leads to the beginnings of another.
When their Scorpions tribute band Jermun ended, Eric Hoodikoff and Chris Archibald decided to continue working together.
With a shared love of early 80s power metal, the two began recording almost every instrument, track by track, less vocals, on what would become the debut album by Savage Blade.
After completing their first album, the two decided to recruit members to perform the album live; Chris Killeen on drums, Marc Andre Hamelin as second guitarist, and Nikko Forsberg on lead vocals.
They performed their first live show and debuted We Are The Hammer at the Spiritbar in 2010, and haven’t looked back.
A European distribution deal, rave reviews across the globe, and international tour dates on the horizon have followed.
Yet, like any independent band, they have had their share of struggles.
Hoodikoff explained over the phone, “metal and the kind of metal we play, isn’t universally popular...we’ve had both great shows with crazy fans, usually here in our hometown, and lame ones, in smaller towns and cities, that were poorly promoted with no people there.”
Undaunted by a few misfires, the entire group hunkered down last winter to begin writing the follow up, vowing to make it louder and more cohesive than its predecessor.
Named Angel Museum, and once again self recorded and produced, Hoodikoff explains, “This album just sounds way better than Hammer, sonically I mean. We learned so much about recording, doing the first one, and I can hear it. We also recorded a lot of songs this time around, and then pared it down to the absolute best eight or nine for the album.”
A measured blend of fast rippers, slow ballads, and small elements of progressive metal surfacing, a different bunch of writing partners and an unrushed pace have yielded their best songs yet.
With one metal opus clocking in at over nine minutes, Savage Blade seems disinterested in courting commercial radio with the content mostly satisfying themselves and their fan base with what Hoodikoff jokingly calls “niche music”.
Whatever the label, these locals — voted best Metal Band at the Kootenay Music Awards this past March — play complex, beautiful, and yes, very very loud original music.