Hawklords, Porkswords and Merch

After an extremely successful, not to mention fun, trip to Belgium, Holland and Germany with the mighty Hawklords (aka, Porkswords), we’re back and settled into the build up to Damnation Festival on November 5th.  The guys from the Hawklords were an absolute bunch of Gentleman and it was a pleasure playing with some of the most talented musicians we’d ever met.  The tour wound up in Bierhof, Berlin at an outdoor stage in the middle of the park playing the “Silver Machine Festival”.  It was a fitting end to a great tour and thanks to all who supported us on tour and came to the shows.  Check Facebook for photos!

We’ve also upgraded our merch and added two new designs to our store.  The Eagle shirt was particularly popular on tour!  It was designed by Nottingham’s Michael Cowell and features an intricate, hand drawn design.  We’ve also bought back the first shirts we ever made, black shirts with our logo on the front.  Since we ran out of the first batch, people have been asking us to print these ever since.  We’ve even got girly shirts this time too.

Review on No Clean Singing

This is an interesting one: a website that focuses on extreme metal, a reviewer that prefers extreme metal, and some tough rules that normally only allow the reviewer to listen and write about a single track from an artist.  Despite that, they’ve given us a great review and a personal message from the reviewer himself.

Read more here: http://www.nocleansinging.com/2011/08/21/miscellany-no-33-illuminatus-arkona-and-satevis/

And don’t stop there, keep reading.  There are some excellent reviews on nocleansinging.com.

8/10 from Dead Press

Another great review here from deadpress.co.uk.  The reviewer picked up on one of the important parts of the album for us: the flow between the tracks.

“The entire album is perfectly organised, and sounds as if it’s one everlasting song. The changeovers between tracks are brilliant, and combining that with the fantastic sound these guys produce you have an album perfect to sit back and listen to.”

It’s always been important to us to create albums that work as complete pieces of music and it’s great to get recognition for that.

Read the full review here: http://www.deadpress.co.uk/6667/album-illuminatus-glasnost/

9/10 from Germany’s Power Metal Zine

Another belting review here from the German web-press.  The introductory paragraph shows something we’re really proud of – listeners n0t knowing what to suspect and being and being extremely happy with what they’re listening to.  To quote Google translate’s version of the article:

“It’s always nice when you discover totally unprepared and without any expectation of bands for themselves. ILLUMINATUS is one such band that has recorded with “Glasnost” is a wonderful album.”

You can read the full review here: http://powermetal.de/review/review-Illuminatus/Glasnost,18753.html

Amazing Radio Airplay… again!

Following on from our interview with the guys over at Amazing Radio, they’ve told us that they’ll be playing one of our tracks on their next show.

The show’s being aired on this Saturday, the 23rd of July at 6pm GMT.  In case you miss it, don’t worry, the show it repeated again the following Tuesday (26th July) at 10pm GMT.

Happy listening!