Kelowna’s white-hot metal masters hit the Cranbrook Hotel Pub

By Ferdy Belland

“We’ve been busting our asses in readying our new batch of songs for recording and live performance,” says Robb O’Day, lead guitarist of Kelowna’s remarkable heavy-metal marauders Storm the Empire.

“We’re in the midst of recording our new album at the moment. All the drum takes are done. I’m going in soon to lay down some guitar. Bass and lead vocals after that. And then we let Andy do his masterful work! We’d like to have this album released to the public before the end of the year. And the live shows have been constant lately, which is such a nice thing. We’re super-excited to be playing Cranbrook – we’ve never played the East Kootenay before!”

That all ends when Storm the Empire hit the stage at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub on Saturday, July 8, with opening support from Kelowna’s metal-rocking power trio Oldguard and Cranbrook’s own hard-rocking hooligans Brotherhood of Lost Souls.

“We’ve been playing everywhere so far in 2023,” says O’Day. “After we wrap up our current round of shows in the Okanagan and the Kootenays we’ll be appearing at the Armstrong Metalfest, which is one of the largest metal festivals in Western Canada. After that we’re in Edmonton and High Prairie and then down to Victoria. It’s easy to get cocooned with the Okanagan, as it’s a cinch to rotate between the major towns of Kamloops and Kelowna and Vernon and Penticton, where the majority of the metalheads in the Central Interior live, but it’s been great to branch out and play new places to new audiences.”

The boys in Storm the Empire take their craft very seriously.

“The songwriting for the new album has been going really well so far,” says O’Day. “We’ve had the songs written for a while. The three of us had everything ready to go, instrumentation-wise…and then I came down with COVID-19! It completely screwed up my vocal range. I don’t have the same singing breaths that I used to. I’m asthmatic to begin with, so the sickness hit me harder than I was expecting it to. I’m still slowly working my way back to where I was before with vocal power, and it’s been a year since I got sick. I made the decision after that to step back from lead vocals. I couldn’t sing and then scream back-to-back. And that’s when we found our new singer Kole Cook!

“The songs were already written but we hadn’t yet recorded them. Kole has added such a different and wonderful vocal element to the songs. And now I’m going back over the existing structure of the songs and adding new guitar overlays and little nuances here and there and changing other vocal parts which I believe sound better than what I originally executed.

“We’re actually sitting down now and focusing on how we write the songs. Instead of saying: ‘here’s the guitar part. Put your part on top of it’ – and that’s the end result. The creative energy for the band has turned into this collaborative effort, at least for this EP we’re releasing before the later push for the full album. That’s our current goal. We’re aiming to have three or four songs on this EP, with eight to nine songs on the full album.”

O’Day explains how the band is not content to remain an Okanagan phenomenon.

“It’s basically a goal for world domination, just like every other grassroots Canadian metal band,” laughs O’Day. “Hopefully come Spring 2024 we’re going to hit the city gigs in Saskatchewan, and around June we should be heading out as far east as Ontario. We’re currently researching all the hoops you need to jump through in order to play the United States, at least in Washington and Oregon for starters.

“We have a bunch of friends down in Texas, so it’d be great to play the American Southwest, or even the circuit across the Deep South if it’s possible. We really want to play the UK, since our former guitarist is from there and it’d be so great to share a stage with him and his new band. That would be one of our ultimate goals. But collectively, the band agrees that Australia is the audience we all want to hit.

“Being Canadians, it’s far easier for us to play overseas in the other British Commonwealth countries than it is to migraine your way through all the hassle and expense just to play in the US. These are ambitions we’ll be fleshing out over the next few years.”

O’Day is over the moon with how electric the connection is between him and his bandmates.

“There’s a good gung-ho camaraderie among all of us in Storm the Empire,” he says. “I’ve known our bassist Norm Mathers for 26 years – since our Kindergarten days! Kole was a local vocalist I always admired and looked up to, so when Norm mentioned: ‘hey, we should ask Kole to audition,’ I hadn’t even thought about it! Andy Ashley is a machine. He’s one of the best drummers in the Kelowna scene, and he’s just so musically gifted, both as an instrumentalist and as a producer – he does all of our recording, mixing, and mastering…the guy’s a beast! (laughs) He’s just next-level talent.

“I believe the four of us complement each other perfectly. It’s been a grind to get Storm the Empire to a point where you finally gather the right chemistry of personality and proficiency, where everyone’s contributing to the songwriting arrangements. At first it was just the guitarist bringing in a mixed bag of riffs which ended up stapled together to form songs – that’s how the first two albums were made.

“But with this album, I was urging everybody to participate and push ourselves, and I was pushing myself as a guitarist to not fall into the same old ruts and routines and see what I’m really capable of. When people hear the new recorded versions of these new songs, as opposed to how they’ve been performed live before we hit the studio, they’ll notice some striking differences. I’m pushing the songs as best I can to a higher level of excitement. I’m forcing myself to be better than I was, as an instrumentalist and as a songwriter. And the others are pushing themselves as well.

“It’s what you need to do as a musician. There’s the comfort zone, which is all well and good, and then there’s the punch into the unknown.”

Storm the Empire hit the stage at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub (719 Baker Street) Saturday, July 8, with opening support from Kamloops’ Oldguard and Cranbrook’s own hard-rocking hooligans Brotherhood of Lost Souls (pictured above).

Admission: $10 advance (tickets available at the Pub during regular business hours), $15 at the door; Showtime 9:3 0p.m.

Bring 10 friends with you, a set of earplugs, and a party-hearty attitude. Thank you for supporting live music in our community.

Photos submitted

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