»Notes: As The Omens Forecast

This song went through a variety of revisions, more than is usual for my songs anyway. I recorded an initial version that had a middle section envisaged as some sort of interesting middle section interspersed with solos. Instead I found this longer structure (over six minutes) pretty unrelenting and difficult to play so I trimmed out the middle section. This middle section bore more than a passing resemblance to one of the riffs from 'Damage, Inc.' and so the song was known as 'Damage Inc-ish' before I put the lyrics on. Seeing as I'm such a cool dude, I've decided to upload the demo for you to listen to and conclude 'what an idiot, the longer version is clearly better.' You can see how far my songwriting has advanced in that I'm still naming demos after the Metallica song they sound most similar to.

The lyrics attempt to recount the final collapse of the old motherboard in my old computer, referred variously as 'The Recording Computer' or 'LT3'. Basically, during the mixing of Breaking Point, whilst I was out of the room the motherboard broke irrevocably at which point I was concerned that I'd lost the two recordings as well as the source recordings from some other recent recordings. The source files for Limbo had already been lost in an earlier bout of PC drama from the old PC and so I really should have taken greater steps to back up data.
Fortunately however, the hard-drive was mostly unaffected by the disaster, though it would no longer boot, the data appeared to be safe. After further IDE cable acrobatics I had rescued the data and put it onto the new (or rather 'newest' seeing as a three-year-old computer is hardly new) computer, LT5 and could set about finishing the two songs. After looking at the hardware situation on LT3, and bearing in mind that the last second-hand motherboard I bought was expensive and broke in under a year, I concluded that I'd have to spend an ass-load of money I could scarcely afford to get the PC working again.
After a couple of trips to CCL (the second due to confusion over RAM in the initial order) I assembled all the parts into LT3 and upon discovering the motherboard drivers didn't fucking support Windows 2000 had to install Fedora 10 on it (something I'm sure I'll live to regret.)

Musically, this is another example of my current fascination with mid-tempo sections in the middle of songs. This particular mid-section was an attempt to get something bearing a resemblance to Slayer when they're in angular mid-tempo mode, a la 'Behind the Crooked Cross'. Despite the pretensions of grandeur in the mid-tempo section, the fast section of the song was an attempt at some straightforward thrashing. The end section was an attempt to create a bigger sounding ending, with the mid-tempo riff being modified successive times during a fade out. The end was somewhat inspired by the end to Machine Head's 'Clenching the Fists of Dissent'.

'No solos?'

No indeed. I was going to put one over the top of the verse/chorus part after the mid-tempo section but on closer inspection this would have been a particularly long time over which to thinly spread my rather limited soloing abilities. Also, I had lyrics that needed to go in that section for the 'story' to make sense. I considered cheating and using Cooledit to knock together some shorter solo section out of the existing guitar parts, but this felt like a lot of fuss for the sake of a solo. So I'm tentatively rolling this song out under the 'Fuck Solos' banner seeing as it suits my purposes. If you're really missing the solo, I don't know, you could listen to like any other song I've done that has guitars on it. Stop crying anyway, there's plenty of lead on there.

You're lucky I didn't tack some spacey slow section on the end of this as I am wont to do. Then again, not every song has to be eight minutes long. Fortunately, I think due to the 'narative quality' (I can't believe I just said that) of the lyrics, I think the song still has some epic stylings. That's what I like to think anyway.

I'm sorry if you think the drum machine intro is lame but I couldn't think of anything better to do and I like to imagine what my songs would sound like if I actually had real drums.

I was originally going to have all the vocals in the lower register (as in Chief Rebel Angel) but it sounded boring when I did this so I sang parts of the backing track in a higher register. The long 'Die!' at the end was originally going to have an Angel of Death-style scream on top of it, but this sounded ridiculous so I just went with a shout. It still sounds quite silly but I'm no death/black metal vocalist.

Lidl have an aisle where they sell weekly specials. Each week there is generally a theme to the aisle, often quite a bizarre one considering that most of the people who shop at Lidl are mainly there for the cheap (but surprisingly high quality) fresh veg, and tinned food. Either that or the Energy Drink and Butter Keks anyway. Previous themes at the Heckmondwike branch have included DIY, computer equipment, Fishing, and Horse Riding. Seriously. Anyway, this week it was music themed and they were selling a variety of musical instruments such as guitars and tambourines as well as sheet music and other paraphernalia such as guitar tuners. Amongst other things, I bought a Yamaha microphone from this aisle which turned out to be surprisingly good. The compression and reverb on the vocals come courtesy of my guitar pedal which made recording the vocals easier. Prior to getting the new mic I'd have to record vocals on a shitty old £4.99 desktop microphone (the sort you'd use for voice com over the internet) and then add reverb, compression and any other effects in Cooledit afterwards, which was far from ideal as it's nice to be able to hear the reverb as you're singing. You probably can't, but I'd hope you can hear the difference.

I'm a thief and stole the image for the thumbnail from a picture called 'Necropolis - The Old Ones' by Aboshi found here.

These are mostly here for my convenience.