Hour Before The Dawn

Next to The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive, April Wine racked up more hits than any other Canadian rock band. They were the first group to have a platinum album in Canada, and the first to launch a tour that grossed over $1 million. 1979 s Harder…Faster and the following year s Nature Of The Beast saw April Wine fully conquer both Canada and the US with Billboard, chart-topping hits.

After several challenging years, marked by the pandemic and a harsh political climate, we fortunately have musical treasures we can unearth. This is precisely what the Norwegian Wind Ensemble has done. This spring, they present two masterful pieces of music that deserve the full attention of an interested listener.

Building on twenty years of creating some of the most epic, emotive and inventive heavy music unleashed on the world, there is no denying that Cult Of Luna's A Dawn To Fear is a monster of a record. An album comprised of eight tracks running seventy-nine minutes, it embodies everything the band's faithful have come to expect from them while covering new ground. "We knew exactly the album we wanted to make, and that was the antithesis of everything we've done before," says vocalist/guitarist and lead songwriter Johannes Persson. "For pretty much every album there's been a very concrete theme. We've known from the start the kind of story we wanted to tell, and I didn't want that to be the case. I've seen a lot of subtle changes and patterns in my own behavior and my own thinking the last couple of years, and I wanted this to be a completely spontaneous process. I just wanted to see what came out of me, and 'A Dawn To Fear' is the result of that."