New world blasphemy
posted on 03 Mar 2006 under category History
In 1998 I completed the transition of Rampage from the boombox hell to a proper studio project, playing all of the songs written in the vein/mindset of the classics I grew up with - some thrash, some death metal, some epic metal, some traditional stuff, a few humorous/joke songs, and the like. At the same time, though, as I detailed before, I was falling into love with a style of music newer to my ears (the ‘modern’ black metal movement) and realized that I wanted to do this kind of music as well.
If you’ve read the history of the band before, you know this already. However, I don’t think I’ve ever really stressed what this sudden surge of interest in modern black metal did to Rampage and how it ended up almost ending the band after the release of Monolith… back in 2001. But the seeds go back to just after This End Up. In 1998 I had almost enough material for four albums: a bunch of satanic death/thrash stuff that ended up being This End Up, some humorous joke-type ‘hate a bitch’ songs that ended up being Misogyny, Thy Name is Woman, the Bellum Infinitum concept album, and then the handful of doomy tracks that would have been Doom Metal. I had the songs divvied up onto the albums they would go to, I had the order I wanted them in, and I had a few ideas for some new songs to do while recording each album.
So, when my interest in Black Metal surged, I had to add a new album to the mix - and doing it would mess with my schedule one way or another.
Some of these older songs had been around since 1993 (or earlier), and I didn’t want to make them wait. Also, I didn’t want to make the black metal material wait, even though I still needed time to write it. Plus, by the end of 98 I already had two of these albums out - I figured one more year would let me push out one or both of the older albums and thus the plate would be clear for me to do black metal exclusively. Bellum was fully-formed, and closer to the epic type of black metal as on Bathory’s “Blood on Ice”, so doing that one next was really a no-brainer, except that I wanted to do that one last, AFTER the doom one, so I started halfheartedly working on doom material, and even started recording. This is how that one song got done for the “Doom Metal” single.
And while it is true that the vast improvement in sound on that one over TEU made me realize I didn’t have to wait to do Bellum, it was also impatience, wanting to get past the old shit and get to the new shit. So, with a vengeance and fury borne of wanting to get to the NEXT thing, I tore through recording Bellum (after the live album fiasco, but that’s another entry), then hit a brick wall.
Yes, most of the next year (2000) was eaten up with the time requirements thanks to the upswing in activity at UHR and for producing other bands, but I was also having trouble doing anything musically. I kept waffling on whether to knock out the doom album quickly or just do a black metal album first - and what made it worse is that every time I started working on one, it would go nowhere and I’d switch. It’s easy to see now it’s because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do (even though I thought I did), but at the time I was shocked, and scared that the well had run dry. And ended up frittering away a whole year on doing next to nothing.
That impatience built at the beginning of 2001, but by then I had made contact with more black metal bands via UHR (Chernobog, Cross Sodomy, Song of Melkor, etc.), and I thought lighting a fire under my own ass would force me to get stuff done.
And, to a degree, it did.
By agreeing to contribute to a split with as many of these other bands as I could, I figured I could slake my ‘black metal thirst’ by just knocking out a quick two or three songs, thus making some progress so that I could give myself room to either finish the doom album or write more black metal. And that’s how I got the idea to do New World Blasphemy.
But the songs still needed writing. Still, as I’ve found out, having a focus is over half the battle - and the tales of those battles will be left to the songs themselves.
(Well, I didn’t really ‘do nothing’ in the bulk of 2000, because as I referenced earlier I wrote pretty much an entire 73-minute deathcore thrash epic. Even posts like this which ‘fill in the holes’ have holes that need filling.)