I saw Scale the Summit play in Seattle in April 2009. They were either the first or second band of the night. I hadn’t even heard the album they had released shortly before that tour started, Carving Desert Canyons. They were relative unknowns then, and they had no vocalist. I was prepared to be uninterested.  It took about five minutes before I changed my mind.

I remember being wide-eyed and gap-jawed in wonder, completely sucked into what they were doing on stage. If I’d heard a studio album that contained the music I was hearing, I would have been completely enthralled. To see them doing it live on stage, with no studio gimmickry or room for error, was astounding.

Now here we are more than two years later. Scale the Summit has another album out, The Collective, which was released in March of this year. They’re definitely better known now. In fact, one of the band’s two phenomenal guitarists, Chris Letchford, made MetalSucks’ list of the Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists in June (and my only complaint about that was why he didn’t appear higher in the list).

Seeing Letchford and his co-guitarist Travis LeVrier doing their thing live remains a thoroughly entertaining experience, and yesterday’s release of the two of them doing a play-through of the song “Whales” from the new album captures some of the wonder I felt for the first time more than two years ago. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »