It's not fake, it's memorex
posted on 08 Jul 2022 under category History
I know that I always say it was 13 years between The Wakening and The Onslaught, and that is a fact, but it’s not like there was absolutely nothing between those two. In fact, one of my favorite side-roads, creatively speaking, was taken in an attempt to bridge that gap - the infamous ‘fake’ live album by Death Beast, Live Apocalypse. And, true to many of my ideas for songs or albums over the years, it popped up in one of the most unlikely places.
The first thread of the idea for the album came from the demos I had already been doing. In the couple of years after the release of The Wakening I had rough demos of three songs - “Devastator”, which was the first of the new songs I’d written for the album, “Drink ‘Til You Die”, and “You’re Fucking Doomed”. I wanted to try some new arrangement things on Devastator and YFD, and instead of just rerecording over the same demo tracks I wanted to redo them a bit differently, thinking that full-on new recordings might light a fire under me and get me writing more new music.
Next, I was still several years from being done even on my intended work trajectory of the time, and while Hartmuth didn’t like shorter releases I thought I needed some kind of intermediate release to keep the name alive. I considered some short release on UHR, or maybe approaching Gravewurm or another band who might be down for it to release a two-song split - I wasn’t sure and honstly didn’t care much what, but I wanted SOMETHING out in between.
Finally, in some of the packages I received for the BWV store in between I saw some of the Barbarian Wrath titles had some unlisted live tracks. Hart always liked packing CDs with unlisted extras, and I remember listening to Heilig Vuur again around that time and I liked how he put live cuts from that unreleased Countess live album on the end of it. I had the full album, so I knew the source, but separated from the full live album it was neat to have these unconnected tracks that just seemed out of nowhere.
So, one day during the summer I took my kids to swimming lessons, and I was sitting in a covered picnic area beside the pool with the other parents. I had a small notepad and pencil and would occasionally scribble down lyric or song ideas or attempt to tab any musical ideas I had. My mind wandered and all of the threads above came together at once - why not record these new tracks as ‘live’ tracks, along with one or two from the first album, so that they could be as bonus tracks for the new album? It gives me an excuse to rerecord the new-album demo tracks, faking them as live would force me to record them differently, and the momentum of recording anything would hopefully convert into forward momentum on more new music to finally finish the album.
Just as I had this thought, another thought from back in my creative writing classes came up - it’s okay to leave ‘holes’ in the plot or character or other aspect of the story with regards to what you tell the reader, but there should NOT be holes in the story as the author perceives it. So, if I’m giving 2-3 live bonus tracks from a gig, what would be the full tracklist for the gig? So, I started coming up with a dream ‘wish list’ of a setlist for what a Death Beast show would contain, and I started toying with the idea of leaving in stage banter references to the last song or next song on the tracks, or maybe even putting in a few seconds of the end of the prior song… and then pretty quickly it just ballooned up into “Fuck it, we’ll just record a whole fucking live album.”
Even though I also had “Drink ‘til You Die” written at that time I didn’t think I could pull off the middle section ‘Teacher’s Pet’ break easily, so I only put “You’re Fucking Doomed” and “Devastator” into the mix, along with my favorite tracks from the first album. The Exodus cover came from one of those old late-night IRC chats way back in the early 2000s. Cesc from ReDimoni said he always liked that song and he thought Death Beast could do a good cover of it, so I threw it on. The Rampage song was, yet again, me trying to get a perfect version of “Gates of the Abyss” - I still missed it, but got a lot closer. Some of the solos were shitty but I much prefer the rewritten first verse. The medley of Slayer and Nasty Savage was a nod to the way so many 70s bands would have extended jam/solo sections in their gigs and they would sometimes cut into sections of songs - bleeding off of the ringing guitars into the open-e-chug at the start of “Black Magic” just felt right, and I always messed up in my head the bit after the solo - in Slayer, it’s in 16ths but whenever I play it I always go to triplets, which led to me thinking of “No Sympathy” by Nasty Savage, and the tempo and 12/8 drumbeat was right to cut over into the song “Death Beast”. And, to end where it begins, opening the gig with Priest’s “Rapid Fire” was directly inspired by how strong an opening it was at their 30th Anniversary British Steel gigs, and one thing I’d always wanted to do if I actually got into live performance again would be to always open a gig with a cover of something that other bands open with, a kind of heavy metal combination of tribute and Where’s Waldo.
Hand in hand with the tracklist was the stage banter, as that is the main thing separating good bands from good live bands. I thought about my favorite bits from either my favorite live albums or gigs I’ve been to and scripted them in along with the track order. Then I had to figure out how to record it.
I started first by just worrying about the instrumental tracks. I got my drum programs set up song-by-song and then set about getting guitar and bass tones. The trick was going to be getting a rock-solid consistent sound track-to-track, so I used my Spider Amp and took photos of each knob setting, saving one preset for ‘Axe’ and one for ‘Vic’. I did try to not mess with volume settings, but I also double-checked this on the back end by using wave analysis on my recorded tracks to match the RMS volumes - probably more trouble than I needed to go through, but I wanted it consistent. When it came to recording, I practiced each track a few times and gave it a one-pass recording. I would rerecord a track from scratch if I really shit the bed on a take, but I didn’t mess with punchins or overdubs - just as if it were live.
Matching vocal tracks was going to be a lot harder going track-by-track, and especially so if I wanted crowd noise to fit. I somehow got the idea to just take my exported instrumental tracks back into a new audio file in Sonar and overdub my vocals there, so that I could also layer in crowd and sound effects. Then I also got the bright idea to give it even a bit more of the ‘recorded on the fly’ method by thinking about how some soundboard-live recordings are at the wrong speed and sound a bit sharp or flat because of it. Adding a touch of speed would help thrash metal sound more careening and out of control, I thought, so I sped up every instrumental track a 1/4 step, then imported that into my master mix file. I left the crowd noise at natural speed and recorded my vocals at natural speed, and only having to sing a 1/4 step sharp didn’t mess up my vocals too much. I layered in the first song, then appended the second song right at the end of that (after a few explosions, like the way Priest did at their British Steel Anniversary gigs). Piece by piece I ended up building a full, 56-minute single audio track that had all of the effects, all of the vocals, and all songs. Then, I exported the whole monster as if it were just a straight soundboard dump and clipped it just the way I’d done for dozens of bootlegs I grabbed off Dimeadozen.
I make it sound like it happened fast, but the process overall took about two years between conception and final mixdown, and of course during that time was when Ramrod passed on. I wasn’t yet at the vocal stage yet, but when he did it was a no-brainer to add in some kind of tribute to him, and then in the kayfabe of the gig we could say it was organized on the one-year anniversary of his passing. I can’t remember now if I had already decided to do the trading-off vocals on “Here Comes the War” before then or not, but mentioning it in the stage banter was a given, as I felt like I had to pay some kind of tribute.
A lot of times when I listen back to my own music I focus on the flubs and wish I’d done better on playing or recording them, but this is the one release I have where I’m happy about them. It really does give it the kind of ‘oh, this really IS live’ feeling. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing more ‘live gigs’ like this, if I can find a way to cut down on how much work it is. We’ll see what the future holds, I guess.