Fortress

It was recorded in the summer of 2007 at Silo Studios in Hamilton, Ontario. The ten songs are broken into three movements separated by piano interludes and run about forty-one minutes. The band said the sound was close to Kezia but "less poppy and more technical metal". Unlike its predecessor it does not turn on a single concept. The bassist and lyricist Arif Mirabdolbaghi describes it as closer to "goddess worship in the tradition of Robert Graves": "It has to do with goddess worship, and how there has been this degendering of the Lord and Savior, and the suppressed feminine. A lot of it is based in Genghis Khan and old Irish Mythology, about the rise and fall of the Goddess of the forest. If I had to reduce it to its simplest form, the concept is about the re-emerging of goddess worship and the erosion of faith in scientific process." The singer Rody Walker was blunter: "This album is nothing to be intellectualized. All talk of wonder, pathos and optimism aside. I feel it's a very natural progression for us. A natural progression into further obscurity. I am of the belief a lot of the people who work for us were hoping for a stab at a more commercially viable album, however we wrote what we wanted without linear boundaries and created something less commercial than ever. Some fans of the band will hate it. And some people who hate the band will love it. All others can rot." The running order here is the original's as printed.