PureVolume

"the beginning of things" [posted 5.4.2008][nick]:
Hello all. Evan and I formed our two-man project at the beginning of our sophomore year of a college in central PA. We arrived at the name Northumbra one evening right before a full lunar eclipse. We are both into astronomy, so when I thought of the dorm we lived in at the time, which was known as "North", and the umbra, or the shadow on the moon that is present during an eclipse...I randomly said "northumbra" - cramming those two names together. After thinking about our band's name for a few weeks, I soon thought up the name of our first album...Light in a Dark Place. This title stands for rising above shadows - the darkness in the world. It represents optimism, and it stands for blocking out the evil that lurks in this corrupt world, which at times can be hard to do for all of us. After getting the album name down, I began writing lyrics. So, we hope you enjoy these songs. It is our first musical effort as a small band, and we have each grown a ton since we put it together. The album has 8 full songs on it, so not all of them are always showing in the playlist - just click on our album to listen to all of them. The streaming quality isn't that good on here, so we made all 8 songs downloadable, so you can hear how they really sound and put them on your iPod or whatever you want (fyi - A Night in Her Arms lost some of the low-end sound of the kick drum during conversion to mp3 for some unknown, annoying reason - our apologies). We have a WAV. copy of that song that is perfect - on our actual CD, but we can't get it on here...only mp3's can get on here. But you get the idea. We'll maybe re-convert it sometime and put it on here so you can hear how it really sounds, but hey, fans seem to think its still one of the best songs on the album from what we've been hearing. Good stuff. I also posted the lyrics to each song on the album. Enjoy.

"the changing of things" [posted 7.24.09][nick]:
It has definitely been a while now since Evan and I released Light in a Dark Place...Over a year now. We never really expected it to garner much recognition outside of our small campus...But it did. Evan spread the word of our band and our first album across Northern Virginia - his hometown, and we quickly became somewhat of a hit with many of the people there. On my end of things...I stumbled across a music message board on one of my fav. band's websites where I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to music lovers about our band and the album we had up on this site. People from Great Britain, Canada, California, Spain, Hawaii, the Netherlands, London, the Czech Repub., Switzerland, Ireland, and Australia - surprisingly ended up listening to the songs on here and liking our sound. A number of them actually downloaded some songs. Overall, this really boosted our image of ourselves as an upcoming alternative band, and inspired us to give listeners more music...Sadly though, since that initial urge to produce another album, Evan has relocated back home to attend a different college over the past year, and we quickly realized about three months ago how difficult it would be to put another album together living so far apart - as I currently live in Pennsylvania. We agreed to not go forward with making songs for a second Northumbra album because of this. We both feel that this is unfortunate, but everything changes in time, and we realize that change is healthy. We may put something together in the future, but for right now, Northumbra has officially pressed pause... As for me...I have decided to take a different route. I began to write a great deal of material for the second Northumbra album about half a year ago, and I feel that I cannot let it go stagnant. I have officially decided to go the route of doing a solo album. It will be my first solo effort, but at this stage in my life I really want the challenge of doing this. Since the time that I contributed the guitar, lyrics/vocals, and melodies to the first Northumbra album, I have taught myself how to be a drummer. I have pushed myself to become fairly advanced in drumming over the past eight months and feel I am more than ready to take on this solo album. I will be writing all the lyrics, singing, recording multi-layered acoustic and electric guitars, and laying down all the drums on this thing. The title I am doing this under will be Ocean Bound. Several songs are almost done at this point. This effort feels so promising to me. If you like Northumbra's first album, and you want to hear different voice inflections, enhanced guitars, solid drumming, and a whole new take on things...Check out the Ocean Bound purevolume page over the next year or so - which will eventually display my finished solo work. I will also be contributing lead vocals and guitar to two other projects during the writing and producing of my solo album - one of which will be named Crafting Will.