In the hype-driven web press world, where bloggers are racing to predict the next big thing, Nightosaur give you that old-fashioned belly-fire enthusiasm. They're a band built out of a shared love of dual guitar solos and songs that clock in at seven minutes, they love Ronnie James Dio and early Judas Priest, and they write songs with titles like "Valkyries Son," and "Sabre Fangg." They do this because they love it, and that's refreshing—downright exciting. The first line of Nightosaur's bio reads, "Out of the frozen wasteland of Minnesota, Nightosaur soars like a Pteranodon on the leathery wings of dual lead guitars," and they aren't really trying to be funny. At concerts, they have an onstage rule of "shirts or beards, never both," and they follow it. .

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After recruiting Henry on bass, Max Clark and Andrew Webber, who both play guitar, picked up Travis Franklin on drums and the band started writing songs. Their debut album, Black Blood of the Earth, is filled to the brim with ghost women, heroes and monsters, and sweeping, meticulous instrumentalism. It's the stuff of legend, with echoing choral chants and soaring guitar solos, every member singing lead at least once. The songs run the gauntlet from Beowulf-esque hero epics to "Thunder Wizard," a song, as Webber describes it, about "when people use up all the fossil fuels, the ghosts of dead dinosaur wizards come back and take over the world again." He finished writing the song's lyrics right before the Deep Water Horizon Gulf oil spill, which let Webber boast that the song was ripped straight from the headlines. But then, in Webber's words, "It became this weird dinosaur protest song, which wasn't really the intent, but I kinda like that about it. It's written from the point of view of the dinosaur wizard." So there you have it: a song written from the point of view of a dinosaur wizard. It just doesn't get much more rock 'n' roll than that. [City Pages, October 2011]