Local band releases first album

By Liam Higgins

A local progressive metal band has released their first full-length album.

Pomegranate Tiger released their album Entities Jan. 31. The band consists of guitarists Martin Andres and Matt Shaheen, bassist Keith Wilkinson and drummer Phil Gatti. The album had been a two-year project and was written and recorded mostly throughout 2009 to 2011.

Lead guitarist Andres said most of the album was written during 2011.
“I would say 75 per cent of Entities was written in late 2011,” said Andres. “The other 25 per cent were ideas throughout all of 2009 until 2011 when it was recorded.”

In 2010, the band released a demo called Maxims and Arrows. One of the biggest issues with the album was the band found it a bit difficult writing songs when they first started out, but on Entities it came easier. Rhythm guitarist Shaheen said the longest songs on the album were written the fastest.

“Once we started getting it rolling, it was just kind of coming out of us,” said Shaheen. “We were becoming comfortable with our style and we knew what we were at that point.”

The band has been largely influenced by Protest the Hero, Between the Buried and Me and other progressive and alternative bands. They said they feel a lot of the influence for Entities came from wanting to progress as musicians.

“We were always striving to just practice more and want to be better technically and musically and be able to do all the different techniques on our instruments,“ said Andres. “That was an inspiration of it’s own.”

Although the album was finished in early 2012, the band chose not to release it until 2013 because the band wanted to have time to promote the album and get a fan base going. They said they wanted the amount of effort and thought put into the album to pay off in the long run. Andres said he spent close to two years of his life in his room 12-18 hours a day practicing and writing for the album.

“I pretty much was not in existence for two years,” said Andres. “Having to just release it and play one show in Windsor was totally out of the question.”

The band plans to release another album in the future.