Demo Dungeon

Demo Dungeon: Ageless Wisdom – Demo 90 Review

1990 was a pretty strange time for epic heavy metal, especially for Greece. The early 80s saw the beginning of epic metal, with releases from the grandfathers, Manilla Road and Manowar, as well as some lesser known acts, such as Legend and Dark Quarterer. The mid-to-late 80s saw a small wave of derivative acts, such as Baron Steele, Valkyrie, and Martiria, spring up in various locations (mostly from the U.S. and Italy). The movement would start to pick up again in the early-to-mid 90s, with acts like Longings Past, Wotan, and Crush, but ’89-’92 was a pretty barren time for Mediterranean epic metal; the founding fathers were mostly broken up, and the second wave hadn’t taken off yet for the most part. Enter Greece’s Ageless Wisdom.

Demo Dungeon

Demo Dungeon: Valkyrie – Deeds of Prowess Review

Epic metal has grown to be marginally popular in recent years, at least in countries like Italy and Greece, who have adopted a movement that barely even existed in the United States, playing in the style of Manilla Road and Manowar, who, aside from a couple of incredibly obscure acts (Longings Past, Stormbringer) were the only ones playing it for a long time. However, other examples of epic heavy metal, though few and far between, did pop up occasionally during the late ’80s and early ’90s. Ageless Wisdom put out a demo in 1990, Wotan had one in ’93 – but Valkyrie, from the Netherlands of all places, were one of the first to try and capitalize on the sound that the epic metal grandfathers – in this case, Manowar, not Manilla Road – first brought to the world.