Before you ask, yes, this is just like every Meshuggah release. If you like Meshuggah, you'll like it. Most parts sound like if Nothing really had it's shit together. The ones that don't most sound melty. Not face-melting; they sound like melting. When you watch a time lapse video of a glacier or a wax figure or something melting, and sometimes it's flowing and sometimes it loses big chunks, that's that's Violent Sleep of Reason. Monstrosity is my favorite song. By The Ton is also great. Give it a listen. I'm super pumped to see them in November.
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Besides listening to music, I like to try to stay busy, musically speaking - playing, recording, mixing, now blogging I guess. Right now, either because of allergies or an ear infection, I'm hard of hearing in one ear, and it's putting a damper on things. Mostly, I'm working on mixing the latest Servant Girl Annihilator release, Enemies of God, which is very difficult to do listening in mono.
So the other thing I need get done is writing lyrics. ALOT of lyrics:
Goat Thrower needs five songs worth of lyrics,
Servant Girl Annihilator has 6, only a couple of which are even started,
Bituminous Pit has all the material set for out next release - Straight and Godless Line, which has 5 songs that need lyrics and another grouping, which I think will be called Cauldron, almost all of which needs lyrics. All in all, I've got like 20 songs that need lyrics that I have to write.
Here's the rub, I'm not really a lyricist - or at least I don't think so.
In Doomsday, writing both music and lyrics was a chore. Lyrics, especially, were always sort of gauntlet. Brian was the singer, so really our standard should have been that it sound cool, and that Brian is willing to say it out loud, right? Instead, and with precious few exceptions, we took it way too seriously, which made it a pain in the ass. Each song had to be the coolest sounding, most ideologically dense, narratively exciting manifesto of philosophical downfall and existential terror ever, each grimmer and more incisive than the last.
As if that wasn't a high enough bar, most of the songs were written as part of this never-to-be-finished concept album, at times titled Regimes, at times Technology Will Ruin Us, so the songs had to be sort of narrative and plausibly be part of that universe. It wasn't until right before we stopped playing that we relaxed a little, and just enjoyed the creative exercise.
At least we were writing as a group, and I think that's where I shine - as a contributor.
Since Doosmday, though, I've been involved primarily in small projects, me and one or two other people, and usually I'm doing vocals and by default, writing lyrics. I've never thought of myself as a lyrics. I never write for fun. I don't read other band's lyrics, I don't like poetry. Writing lyrics is a pain the ass for me, most of the time
So what's a guy to do? I don't really have an great end to this post. I just sat down to write lyrics the other day, because mixing was not going well, and was immediately stumped. It seemed like something to work on,
So I guess I'll to crystallize my creative process, and see if I can't crank out some lyrics.
- A Starting Point:
I think I like to start with a cool title (Cauldron, Metamorphose to the Grim, Court of Castrates) or a concept that strike me - usually that's either really weird or that I can be angry about (conspiracy theory that Michael Jackson bought the bones of Joseph Merrick, the elephant man, the media are shitty liars, good old nihilism) - Some Seed words:
I think lyrics I really like come from a combination of the above and some cool words or turns of phrase that I have think of or encounter. I need something cool to get me started.
Metamorphose to the Grim was just a dumb phrase on a scrap of paper, and I had I was playing around with the phrase/idea of transubstantiation (religious context, the communion wafer is literally Christ's body). In the context of horror movies, I wound up with a sweet Goat Thrower song about werewolves - "Like a lupine bolt from out the darkness split my soul in twine, down a transubstantial concourse I embark." I ended up being really proud of those lyrics. - Phrasing is apparently really important in my process:
I've tried just writing lyrics and fitting them to the song. Brian was really good at that. I'm not. I think my best work comes from wanting to accomplish a particular thing - a GO! just at the right time, a certain phrase doubled up or syncopated or alternated or distorted or yelled over a pause. That's a little like lightning for me - I never know when it's going to strike. I could probably benefit from starting with a song and finding some dynamic lyrical thing as a jumping off point. Metamorphose had that too. I actually re-wrote the intro riff to the song to accommodate that one idea. - Commentary on a thing isn't always good:
I used to like to try to write songs that commented on stuff, but that only works for me when I give a shit to begin with. Like I tried for a long time to write a song about Margaret Sanger, who before she founded Planned Parenthood, was a proponent of eugenics. She published a paper, called Harvest of Imbecility that I read in college. If memory serves, it's about sterilizing mentally and physically handicapped people. I couldn't get invested in it and floundered on it for months. Eventually I re-wrote the song about how mass produced white bread was the answer to pre-industrial-revolution local bakers stretching flour supplies with talc and sawdust which is gross and deadly but also kept them from cooking thorough, allowing bread to carry cholera and typhus. - I can't go personal:
Turns out I'm not the type to emote in my music. Everyone once in awhile I try to write something about life events - someone's sick, someone died, something happened to someone, someone got born, whatever, it never works for me. I don't really connect to other people's emotional lyrics either. It follows a pattern: - I write personal lyrics
- I hate them
- I rewrite them, trying to speak only in metaphors - for some reason I default to space metaphors - astral bodies, dark matter, black holes, entropy and the inevitability of universal heat death.
- I commit that now almost meaningless nonsense.
- Whatever I was feeling passes or I get over it or whatever
- I have to rewrite this song that is now a pile of cosmic word-salad that I have literally no level of connection to.
- Structure is important to me, but I get hung up on it:
I don't like poetry. Maybe I just don't get it, but I don't I like it. It's hard to articulate why, but I think that the structural aspect of prose is sort of subverted so that the content can be effective. In poetry, i think I see it as the opposite happening, or maybe it's more 50/50. Like expression within the confines of a restrictive form is the art? I can get behind that without really buy into it. Free verse poetry is completely over my head. I don't enjoy it or understand it. Filthly beatniks can keep it.
I like rap the same way. I don't really like like mumbley rappers or rappers who rap around the beat, or pile words on and get these epic complicated rhymes, but aren't tight. At the same time, I need the production to be stay lively, preferably sample heavy, but I like the songs to be about the vocals. Grayskul is a great example of both. big rap collective consisting of guys who are real tight rappers, and guys who fly a little looser, and also alot of sample heavy down-beat parts right up against some kooky P-funk experimental synth shit. I love/hate Grayskul.
Anyway, thank said, I see lyrics the same way, except I only rarely get the desired effect out of my own lyrics with just the words, so the form is important too - i like it to rhyme and complete ideas in time and hit all the accents right, but alot of times I get caught in a corner with trying to make the form serve the function. I have a lot of respect for some guys I've worked with who can just write free verse lyrics. Brian was awesome at that, as was John, my Bit Pit co-conspirator and Kyle my SGA drummer. Great job, guys. - Pacing:
I have a tendency to really put lyrics off. I can write some shit down and yell it at the drop of a hat, but I don't like those lyrics, usually. Servant Girl Annihilator is mostly written on the spot, but those are just gore metal lyrics. As long as it's not misogynist, I don't really care. But bands where I'm going to play live, going to promote, going to be the face of the band and yell those things in peoples faces - I need to care about those lyrics and sit with them and make them good the first time - the need to sound bad ass and feel good. - Underlying nihilist anti-establishment outlook:
I developed a good sense for this in Doomsday. I don't know if it will work for everyone, but I like my lyrics to have a little bit of devil-may-care and a little bit of fuck-the-system mentality. Without it, they don't feel appropriately heavy metal.
Taking these eight, only very recently formalized, bullet points, I'm to try to write some lyrics this weekend. And to thank you for your patience, below is that Goat Thrower song I kept referencing.
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