Quandary

Geoff Irish, Gareth Hogan and Sam Vallen first met in a practice room in late 2006. Bought together by their common influences in progressive rock and metal, the quartet (including a bass player at the time) started writing what would become their debut album at that first jam session... though they didn't know it at the time. The only ambition at that stage was to have a recorded work ready before performing live for the first time.

So the unnamed group went on quietly craft over 70 minutes of instrumental music over the course of the next few years. They went through several bass players and explored several options for vocalists in this time, and at one stage resigned to being a 3-piece instrumental group without a bass player. Exhausted and lacking the confidence and direction to pull it off, the group was contacted by Etelantulet's Dave Couper, who answered an old advert for a bass player. As well as learning all the bass parts in record time, Dave took up a lot of the vocal responsibilities - and gave the rest of the band the confidence to sing together, to use harmonies and to share lead parts across the group.
On new years day 2009, the newly christened "Quandary" put a halt to writing, and spent the next year and a half committing their material to the recorded medium. In June 2010, "Ready to Fail", the album four years in the making was made available online for free/pay what you want download. Quandary will also be giving away free physical albums, and there are plans to appropriately validate the recordings with live shows in the coming months. Together, this lineup has been solidly rehearsing for years, forming not just music and friendship, but ideals and beliefs about ambition and music. Quandary has no desire to become a stylistic repetition of themselves, and as such, values the literal definition of "progressive", as well as songwriting over technical achievement and spectacle. The music itself featured on "Ready to Fail" is a varied, colourful collection of songs that are all at once heavy, progressive, musical, uplifting and dramatic.