Here it is: the album that we worked on for over a year and never released. We had five of them mastered for our EP that got released as our epitaph in 2010, but the rest of this went into the vault, never to be heard by anyone outside of the band. There are some cuts on this that I myself, before now, have not heard since the last time we played them on stage.

This album's "era," in my mind, represents the most eventful and drama-ridden period of the band's existence. I place it between when Jason joined and when Chris left. It began in late 2007, where we replaced Jon with Jason prior to a string of dates in Alberta and BC. This was a very high moment for us, as Jason's onstage charisma and voice won over crowds where we previously had difficulty. We did a number of shows out of town that went really well, and it at last looked like this whole band thing had legs. We were on fire and unstoppable. A couple of months into 2008, we received a message on Myspace from one Kevin Gales of Torque Records.

At this point in time, we knew of Torque as the label that released albums by our friends in Becoming The Martyr, This Very Day, and The Butchers Hand. I think most people outside of that scene, however, would know them best as the label that released Blind Witness' debut album (a band whose members later went on to form the hardcore band Obey The Brave). Their albums were in chain stores across the country, and they had videos on MuchLoud. We saw being a Torque band as a very desireable thing, and so we responded and stated our intention of working with Mr. Gales. We made the trip out to Regina, met the man, and came back with our contracts in hand as the heroes of the music scene. This deal solidified us as the one band in Grande Prairie that was going to do something big, and we became GP rock royalty.

The high was fleeting. After some issues either getting time to record the album in Govan, SK, or getting Mr. Gales to come to GP, it was decided that we would record the album by ourselves in the basement of the house I was living in at the time. We began recording in the late summer of 2008. It took some long sessions, and then the mixing and editing began. Around this time, Mr. Gales started to become flakey. He got us to fork over some cash for "deposits for advertising in Alternative Press," and gave us some really vague times for when the album would be released. He would give us a date, and then we would begin to reach that date only to have him give us a later date. It became difficult to get any information or emails out of him. He told us that it was because he received 2000 text messages a day, but that seemed suspect. After some time, people started to question our credibility when our big album wasn't getting released.

This made life in the band stressful, and it began to affect our relationships with one another. Our relationship with Chris, in particular, started to deteriorate. He had previously tried to sell everyone on moving to Toronto make the band work, and we consistently declined on this offer. This desire to move away from GP combined with the album issues made him a really unhappy guy. He started taking out his frustrations on the other band members, as he became very combatative and abusive with everyone and began concocting plots to fire Jason and install himself as the lead singer, amongst other things. There was particularly a lot of tension between Chris and Jason during the recording and mixing of the album. That tension between Chris and Jason eventually came to a boiling point in the early spring of 2009, where a situation arose where it came down to either having him or Jason in the band. Jason stayed, and Chris left.

Looking back now, I can definitely understand Chris' situation, as the limitations of living in GP eventually got to me, leading me to move to the eastern end of this country. If you were to place me back in the year of our Lord 2008, I would have joined Chris in the journey to Toronto and tried to get us out of Torque record's clutches. It would have been a lot of fun for us small-town Alberta kids to run wild in the big city, and we might even have gone on to write and record more music than what I've put on the bandcamp. I think that's one of the reasons why this band and period of my life has continued to affect me after all of these years: in the months prior to Chris leaving, the length of time that we spent playing together along with the rigorousness of our jam schedule made us incredibly tight as a band. Between songs at our rehearsals, we would have these improv sessions that were amazing to behold. It really is a shame that we could not harness that and make another album's worth of songs with what was going on in those jams. It is a shame not because we missed our shot at becoming famed heavy metal gods, but because we could have made some really good music together. The other reason is because of what happened with Torque records.

I've tried to piece together the whole Torque records situation in the post-mortem, and I have a theory. I've come to believe that the dissolution of Torque and our negative experience was the result of the death of the CD industry and Kevin Gales' shady dealings in response to that. From my research (ie googling and memory), I believe Torque began life around 2004 and gained prominence by releasing music such as albums by Means and other hardcore and mid-00s scene bands between 2005 and 2007. I think it was in early 2008 they inked their worldwide distribution deal with the famed "tough-guy hardcore" label Victory Records. Unfortunately, this zenith for the label was also happening during a sea change for the entire music industry. It was around this time where a lot of previously existing and reasonably profitable labels, unable to complete with free mp3s, began either greatly downsizing their staff or shutting their doors entirely, according to some of the people I know that worked in the business at this time. Consequently, I don't think any of the albums that Mr. Gales released actually turned a profit. In fact, I recall Kevin saying something to the effect of that he actually had to take out some fairly hefty loans in order to produce, press, and release the albums in the hopes that album sales would pay the loans back; I therefore believe that he was probably losing a lot of money due to the inability to sell his rather ambitious number of releases (ours was supposed to be the 72nd Torque release), thanks to the supression of demand for CDs in the wake of the arrival of the mp3. I believe that it was for this reason that Kevin Gales began hitting his bands up for money.

I don't know for how long he was doing this, but it was something that he was doing with all of the bands he was associated with. On top of the sums of cash he was asking from us, I recall reading a facebook discussion involving a number of former Torque musicians that described a time where Kevin sent everyone on the label an email asking for thousands of dollars in order to get surgery for his kid. I think near the end, he signed something like an additional 10 or so bands from smaller cities across Canada, presumably to just use them for their money. I remember some band from Sudbury, ON messaging us asking what the guy's deal was after he tried getting cash out of them. As to if he was ever planned on releasing our music or just saw us as easy marks, I don't know. He ended up selling the label to a lawyer in NYC, who was kind enough to tell us about the little racket that Mr. Gales was running. Kevin then promptly moved to the United States, never to make a peep in the Canadian hardcore scene again. His LinkedIn profile says that he currently manages Christian Pop singers in Missouri.

As for the Victory distribution deal, Victory actually has a long standing reputation for signing on little labels and running them into the ground. Not long after the Victory deal, Torque began mostly releasing American bands, which were no doubt bands that Victory wanted to work with but didn't consider good enough to be on Victory proper. So, they got shunted off to Torque. I'm sure Mr. Gales was happy to release their albums, as they were quite a bit more polished than the pre-Victory signing albums. Who knows if those albums contributed to the problems outlined in the last paragraph.

In light of this, we might look a little dumb for giving the guy money, but in our defense, Torque did appear to be a reputable label back in 2007 and 2008. They actually released albums, and those albums appeared in chain CD stores. We were also very naive. Being that we were a band from Grande Prairie, none of us really had a lot of experience dealing with "the music industry." Signed bands, booking agencies, management companies, and record labels do not exist in GP, or at least they didn't when I was living there. It's also somewhat of a rarity that touring bands come around, and so we basically didn't know anything. We thought forking over cash to the label was normal. Either way, it was humiliating to get scammed like this. We told everyone, including all of our families, that we had this album coming out in all of the stores. I told my grandma about it. For what it's worth, our talks with Kevin Gales did eventually get us into contact with one Josh Schroeder, who mixed and mastered the EP. At least Mr. Gales ended up being useful for something, I suppose.

The original name for the album was "The Fractal Disorder." This album has three songs that were previously unreleased in any form, plus two previously unheard re-recordings of tracks from the 2007 demo. The rest of the songs appeared on the 2010 EP, though the versions of the songs here differ from them in that the drum and guitar tracks are from different recording sessions than what ended up on the EP. I'm not sure how noticeable the differences are for listeners, but the difference between the songs is there. All of the art was done by our friend Evan, who also lived in the house where we recorded the album. So, sit back and enjoy a once-lost album, now here for your listening pleasure.