Title: Untitled CDr disc, being a vocal demo for "First Battle"
Format: A plain silver CDr disc with hand-written track details, housed in a generic paper sleeve. This was not a commercial release, but a band demo circa 2004-2005
Edition:Presumed to be a single copy
Track Listing (vocals only):
01. Elfcrusher
02. Winterheart
03. Ode To The Hobbits
04. Orc Dawn
Something plucked from the drawer marked "miscellaneous" today, and a rare visit to the pages of Honour and Darkness for Manwe, side-project of Hugin, here in 'mark 1' version.
I say 'mark 1' as there are two distinct iterations of Manwe: the original band - featuring Hugin alongside Padre Adamo - which gave us the "First Battle" release back in 2005, and then a second iteration with Rich Davenport alongside our Austrian hero that led to the 'Tears In A Burning Eye' track and other material post 2014
Now that you're back up to speed with the history, the CDr featured today falls firmly into the first version of the project! It's a simple thing, being the vocal tracks for the 4 songs on "First Battle" being sung/voiced/spoken by Padre Adamo for subsequent mixing with the instrumental bits.
It's a bit odd listening to vocals out of context to the music: we get quite used to the opposite scenario, where instrumental versions of songs often pop up as bonus tracks on CD singles, for example, but to listen to vocals on their own is relatively uncommon and relatively weird! Given the more narrated style to these 4 tracks, however, it sort of becomes a listenable piece: a little like listening to Lemmy narrative the 'Orgasmatron' lyrics might resemble a performance of poetry.
Not that this CDr was intended to be consumed by the public in this manner, of course, and the lesson learned is that any early and/or partial band demo is always going to be a strange thing to digest out of context.
A previous update to this post gave you the chance to read the lyrics for the songs in question, and with the inclusion of this demo disc it looks rather like we've done to death everything existing on the "First Battle" front, short of an out of the blue event occurring like a long-lost band t-shirt appearing, for example. But I wouldn't hold your breath...
There's not much else to add, with the Manwe Facebook page being devoid of news to share with you. One thing Nazgul spotted there, however, was a promotional image for the "First Ring Part 2" release that references Manwe in its text, so I've popped that below for reference!
