Echoes of Eternity

History

Echoes of Eternity got its start in 2005, the brainchild of two friends from South Carolina, Kirk Carrison and Brandon Patton. Carrison had met vocalist Francine Boucher while they were both students at Full Sail recording school in Florida. They started dating and, after graduating in 2001, moved to Los Angeles hoping to find work in recording studios. A few musical projects didn't pan out, so Carrison convinced his old friend Patton to relocate to LA and start a band. They brought in Boucher, a Canadian who had been making her own music with an eye toward film scoring. Bassist Duane Cowan, who had just moved to Los Angeles from Japan, rounded out the lineup.

The group cut a three-song demo and sent it around to producers and labels. It eventually landed with Roy Z, a well-known producer and guitarist. He was interested but too busy to produce them himself, so he passed the demo to Nuclear Blast Records, which signed the band in 2006. That June, they went into Raven's Work studio to record their first album. Patton's friend James Urias, a guitarist from Lubbock, Texas, was brought in to help write and record. Carrison worked as an assistant engineer at Raven's Work, which let the band use the studio at night and on weekends—even though the place mostly handled audio post-production for TV commercials. Engineer Eric Ryan produced the record, which mixed American thrash metal with the European style of female-fronted gothic metal.

On February 20, 2007, Echoes of Eternity put out their debut album, The Forgotten Goddess, on Nuclear Blast. Critics had mixed feelings. Martin Popoff of Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles said he was "not thrilled with the high-strung, ProTooled, synthetic, stiff nature of the riffs and the drumming." Jeff Maki of Live-Metal.net, on the other hand, praised the album for its "beautiful melodies galore, backed by a start-stop machine gun double bass attack and a classic metal guitar sound." In 2007, the band added second guitarist Sam Young and shot a video for the song "Voices in a Dream" with director Ole Carlson. That June, they hit the road in the US opening for Symphony X and Sanctity. In the fall, they toured with Edguy, Into Eternity, and Light This City, and later joined tours with Trail of Tears and Unexpect.