Fucked Raw started as a Rampage idea.

Ever since the 2006 recording sessions ended up not being finished, both Aerik and I would occasionally try to come up with a way to either revive or at least keep alive the Rampage name. I tried sending him new masters of the recordings a few times over the years, and occasionally one or the other of us would propose a new or rerecorded release, but nothing would ever happen.

One of those times was late in 2011, right at the time Death Beast was on an upswing, preparing for the live album we would record in November. With Rampage, Aerik and I had had pretty good success with rerecording older songs for him to sing on, and since he had done the best of our 'doom' songs with "Doomsayer", and he was sitting on a full copy of Bellum and a full rerecorded version of our first EP, that left the thrashy fast stuff on This End Up as the last great frontier. In Death Beast we were trying to decide which song from TEU to cover already for the live gig, but then Aerik said that he wanted to do a rerecording of a few of those songs, plus he wanted to have a version of "Here Comes the War" that he could do his own vocals on, since he co-wrote it. Instead of a proper studio rerecording, he suggested we just do a quick-and-dirty rehearsal-style rerecording, he'd do the same with the vocals, and since it would be raw we could call it Fucked Raw.

Well, it was fortunate that our purposes dovetailed nicely, so we tried all of Aerik's suggestions for songs and ended up with master tapes for the four songs here. We just went into the rehearsal room early on a Saturday morning after a Friday night of practice and then post-practice debauchery, so we were pretty hung over. The solos are rough and the vocals are shit (I in particular get really talky when I drink, so my voice was pretty ragged), but we didn't think it mattered much since I was just going to mute the vocal track when I exported the music to burn to CD for Aerik.

I dumped out a rough mix, saved off the master recordings, then sent off the CD and kinda forgot about it. Aerik didn't manage to get time to rerecord it, and my studio PC went through a few changes that made revival of the original master files problematic. Still, when I got the latest version of the recording machine ostensibly up and running I thought it would be better to just work with a mix job rather than try to jump straight into recording. I dug these up and painstakingly re-imported each raw wave file track-by-track, synchronizing them by hand until I had finally recreated the original rehearsal.

It's perhaps not an 'essential' release, but I think it's a good snapshot of a particular time in our existence. Plus, it was too good a title to let languish on a vault shelf.