The first stirrings of the death beast, pt. 1
posted on 10 Jun 2010 under category History
It was Rampage’s first turn into black metal that ultimately led to Death Beast.
After finishing Bellum Infinitum in 1999 and spending the first half of 2000 doing the Festering Sore album, I needed a bit of a break work-wise, and a newer sound had been working on me during my music listening. ChorazaiM and I decided to do that Hellhammer tribute split, and I had been listening to many bands that Chor had recommended to me and that I had heard about through LARM. Naturally it was all of the more raw, underground black metal variety. It fit nicely with doing the Hellhammer tribute, but I decided I wanted to try to write it on my own, and maybe start affiliating myself with other bands doing the same thing. Though Rampage was of a different style and a bit more humorous than others doing this underground black metal thing, the DIY ethic of it all and general disdain for over-polished production seemed like a natural fit.
Before too long I had become acquainted with Izedis of Enbilulugugal and a friend of his, Sado-Stan Dementor of Song of Melkor. Our workings and eventual collaborations (signing Chernobog to UHR and releasing the three-way New World Blasphemy split with SoM and Cross Sodomy) are merely tangential to this story, though. During the time we were working on that three-way split, I talked to Stan quite a bit by email and online chat, and we both discovered that we had a liking for old-school death and thrash metal. He wanted to work with me and sent me some lyrics, originally planning to do some kind of a one-off EP. The lyrics were “Apocalypse Metal”, “Thunder of Armageddon”, “Death Beast”, and “Blood of Dionysus” at first, then quickly follwed by “Agent of the Reaper” and “Every Church Shall Burn”.
Given our lo-fi black metal collaborations so far, I was expecting this to turn into some kind of Darkthrone/Beherit wanna-be type of thing, but the lyrics really spoke to that 1985 real-thrash heyday, before the whole CNN metal thing trashed the entire scene. At the time I happened to be on an old Slayer kick, and had been spinning Show No Mercy in the car on the way to work. I started kicking a riff or two around, matching them up, and very quickly the songs “Apocalypse Metal” and “Thunder of Armageddon” came together - which should be obvious to listeners who are familiar with the first Slayer LP. The musical DNA are pretty obvious in those two songs.
The aforementioned New World Blasphemy split finally got released by mid-2001, and by that time I was working hard on the six songs that Stan gave me for Death Beast. The ideas from Stan were so good, though, that I didn’t want to just force it into a “Rampage plus (X)” situation, so I asked a friend of mine, Alex, to join me on guitar and some songwriting. We came up with the general aesthetic of the band, our names, and the logo. After a few more weeks of back and forths we finally had four tracks and some covers done, and I sent them to Stan. He used his co-conspirator Skelator from Sadomaniac to do the engineering, and a few weeks later I got a CDR of his vocal waves. I mixed them quick and had an EP - or, as we decided by email, half of the first album. He sent me more lyrics (“Invoking Villainy” and “Enslaved Cadavers”) and even secured an album cover.
And then I managed to get us a label…
(About six months after rebooting that other blog I noticed I was getting nowhere, and so I got the idea to jumpstart me into getting more entries posted I thought I would post a history of Death Beast, the way I did with Rampage before, and then lead into post-by-post examinations of the songs, lyrics, etc., the way I did with my Rampage songs. My interest faded quickly, sadly, but now I can at least get them done properly. Interestingly, though I’d already come clean about some of my kayfabe, I’m writing here like the story is still in place, meaning I must have changed my mind about coming clean between January 2010 and June 2010.)