The San Francisco based power trio Castle specialize in an innovative metal style influenced by bands such as Black Sabbath, Voivod, Celtic Frost, early Judas Priest, and the Obsessed. The group started as a solo project for songwriter, producer and guitarist Mat Davis in 2007. Employing a drum machine and working in his home studio Davis spent the next three years crafting the songs that make up Castle's debut "In Witch Order". In 2010 he recruited live drummer Al McCartney and vocalist Elizabeth Blackwell to complete the recording line-up. No stranger to the metal underground, Davis was a founding member of the Canadian thrash metal band M.A.D. (later The Mad) in 1988. Growing out of the same scene as Sacrifice, M.A.D produced two studio albums, several singles, and were voted best live band of the year by Now Magazine before the band broke up in 1994. During this time Davis met McCartney, then drummer of the influential doom metal band Nosferatu. Over the next decade Davis and McCartney wrote and recorded many projects together, conciously developing the style that laid groundwork for the Castle sound which Davis describes as "complex arrangements made to sound deceptively simple". He further explains, "the songs usually come out of circular guitar riffs—real tranced-out stuff. Mathmatics, numerology and vibrational elements are as real to the process of songwriting for me as anything else." Moving to San Francisco in 2006, Davis met artist and musician Blackwell, a performer since childhood with her family's roving psychedelic rock group, who lived in an isolated mountain commune in Northern California. Blackwell added a melodic dimension to the Castle demo's that Davis felt "was the gothic thread needed to tie the songs together." Lyrically inspired by literate occultists, Davis adapts the stark and compelling vistas of Charles Baudelaire's "Autumn Song" for the song "Total Betrayal" while William Blake's mystic rumination "My Spectre 'Round Me Night and Day" provides the lyrical backdrop for the lead track "Descent of Man." "In Witch Order" was recorded at Lucky Cat Studios in San Francisco by Phil Manley (Trans-Am, Saviours, The Fucking Champs) and will be released in Europe by Van Records in May. A video for the single "Total Betrayal" is out now and a second video for the song "Lost Queen" is in production. Castle will be touring to support "In Witch Order" at dates in San Francisco, New York, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Eastern Europe.

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