INTRODUCING: The Wise Man’s Fear
Music encompasses a lot of things, feelings and emotions, tales of the past, and even our own stories to be shared around. This is usually done on Broadway or as part of a musical, but the concept album is used a lot within the rock and metal genres. For Indiana’s THE WISE MAN’S FEAR, taking on a story and telling it through music is the whole basis of their band. Pioneers of fantasy-core, the quintet have written about the world of Pneuma over two albums, and into their third, Valley Of Kings, as it completes the trilogy of the tale they unfold.
“Castle In The Clouds was essentially started as a pilgrim progress style allegory that was sort of chronicling quintessential human existence,” says drummer Paul Lierman. “You have your standard triumphs tribulations, love, loss and ultimately it was a search for meaning and there’s, you know, documenting a man’s search for meaning. The Lost City was a prequel to that sort of traces the character arc of the villain from Castle In The Clouds and shows sort of his backstory, and then the Valley Of Kings which we’ve just released that one occurs 1000 years in the future, relative to the events of the prior two. It’s focused on internal conflict, whereas the first was man versus environment and the second was man versus man, this final one is man versus self so it tries to wrap up the trilogy, and by the end of it, it creates this sort of time loop where the main character is sent back to the beginning and he appears as a tertiary character from the first record. That’s a little bit like Lord of the Rings meets Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.”
For example, about their song, The Relics of Nihlux, Lierman says that it establishes the story for Valley Of Kings. “You’ve got these five warriors who are like the greatest warriors in the land and they are setting up to destroy these relics, which are remnant from our second record which happened, 1000 years past, and they’re trying to take these relics and destroy them. But the only way to do that is to find this legendary Valley of Kings which is very deep below the earth. So, it’s establishing sort of their motives and then it’s also, there’s a lot of like foreshadowing happening in that track but yeah the title itself is the Latin Nihil for nothing, and Lux for light so it’s anti-light or lightless was sort of the spin that we did there.”
Hailing from the state of Indianapolis, the band set themselves apart from the rest of the bands from the area, especially within the city of Indiana. Lierman explains, “it’s pretty pop-punk heavy and hardcore heavy, so I think maybe we’re a little bit of an outlier. It was a little bit difficult to integrate with Indianapolis scene just due to distance and such, but it’s a decent scene, it tends to favour more punk and hardcore I would say.”
With groups like MAKE THEM SUFFER, BRING ME THE HORIZON and SAOSIN influencing the band’s sound and style, it’s no surprise how much the members enthral themselves in their love for music, as Lierman discloses. “From a consumer standpoint as a listener, I love music because it has helped me in the past and currently sort through life in the things that life throws at me. It’s helped me to process and understand the world around me in a useful way, even when stuff doesn’t make sense all the time but at least it helps to have somebody who’s able to commiserate, even if you’ve never met them, and I think that’s really powerful. From a writing standpoint, it’s a little bit similar in that it is expression, but it’s a creative expression which is really fun, and especially the way that we approach writing. It has like an open world feel to it where we’re writing the stories, as we’re writing songs. That’s sort of allowed me to scratch the creative itch in terms of story writing. Then also work with the guys and collaborate with some of my best friends and that’s one of the greatest things in the world.”
“It’s been really an awesome exploration for us as creatives we’ve just been having a blast with it.” the drummer continues. “But I think there’s so much potential in music for this kind of thematic story building. It’s underutilised for the most part, I think we see a lot of records by bands that are great records, but a lot of times they sort of dwell on the same you know five subjects, you know. You’ve usually got like a love song, a breakup song. And, you know, maybe like a couple of other terrific things but there’s so much more out there so anybody who’s interested in this I would absolutely encourage them to do something like this that’s a little more out there.”
Even with the current situation of the world, the future is optimistic for THE WISE MAN’S FEAR. “It’s a sort of pipe dream of ours we just want to play some overseas show so I know we’ve got a decent group of people a listener base in the UK that has been asking for a while for us to get over there, we’d love to do that. We would love to play Germany or Italy, that metal scene in Germany is pretty legendary so we just love to go experience that and be a part of it.”
Valley of Kings is out now via SharpTone Records.
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