Two nights ago, one of my NCS collaborators (Alexis) and I hit Studio Seven in Seattle for Dark Tranquillity‘s headlining We Are the Void Tour. Along with Threat Signal and Mutiny Within, the night also featured an opening performance by a Seattle band called Blood and Thunder. We’ll be posting our review of the entire show tomorrow, but we decided it was time to focus on Blood and Thunder in a way that the typical format of our concert reviews doesn’t really allow.

The two main draws for us at this show were, of course, Dark Tranquillity (who were cosmically awesome) — and the band we’re writing about today. We’d seen them for the first time a month ago when they opened for The Finnish Metal Tour on its Seattle stop (reviewed by us here), and we were super-impressed. Now that we’ve had the chance to see and hear them a second time, we’re even more blown away.

The local Seattle metal scene has a growing number of talented bands that we predict you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future, but Blood and Thunder may just be the best un-signed extreme metal band in Seattle.

We spent time talking with some of the guys after their set at Studio Seven. In addition to being superb songwriters and musicians, they’re as nice a bunch of metalheads as you could want to meet, and they were patient enough to pose for some photos outside the venue (like the one above and a few more after the jump). But they’re also dead serious and very intelligent in the way they’re going about trying to make a name for themselves in this overcrowded niche of music. It was an eye-opening conversation for us.

(Continue reading after the jump for our report on that conversation, our review of Blood and Thunder’s set, and a big batch of our barely tolerable concert photos of this band in action . . .) Continue reading »