In just under ten years Caligula's Horse from Brisbane, Australia have played their way into the prog metal upper league. While the debut "Moments From Ephemeral City" (2011) remained largely unnoticed, the quintet's career gradually took off with the 2013 concept album "The Tide, The Thief & River's End" (at the time our "Album of the Month"). After the change to the InsideOut label, two albums with a broader impact followed with "Bloom" (2015) and "In Contact" (2017). The current work "Rise Radiant" is to be understood as a perseverance slogan - also in view of the Australian bush fires that have just been survived and the still ongoing corona epidemic. We talked to guitarist and band founder Sam Vallen (32), who works full-time as a lecturer for musicology at the University of Brisbane
Already the title of the new album makes you sit up and take notice, because "Rise Radiant" does not only mean "rising radiantly", but can also be translated as "Meteorstrom" (accumulation of shooting stars). Sam Vallen is aware of this ambiguity and explains: "This is the first release in a while that we haven't designed as a concept album. When we started songwriting, we realized that we were drawn to themes that were a bit more universal. The most important of these was the idea of getting back up and trying again." But in a way the title also refers to the band itself, "because we've had many line-up changes, most recently with the arrival of our new bassist Dale Prinsse. So our goal was to deliver the best possible result - because we too had to 'rise up brightly again'
In terms of content, "Rise Radiant" is about universally valid human experiences. "When we started writing the song, I told our singer Jim Grey that this time the focus should be on personal things, not mythical characters like in Bloom and The Tide, The Thief & River's End. The last two songs - 'Autumn' and 'The Ascent' - for example, are about fatherhood, which is a new theme for Jim and me. On the one hand, the birth of a child is an event that changes your life and that you are very happy about, but on the other hand you have to fight a lot. Because you wonder: ...how do I reconcile all this? And what is my own value as a father, now that my child is more important than me?"
