The first stirrings of the death beast, pt. 3
posted on 13 Mar 2015 under category History
So, given that my current mission is to finish Death Beast’s second album The Onslaught this year, I have been reconnecting with my history. I’ve dug up old articles and interviews and the scant handful of reviews of our earlier releases, I’ve been listening to the old recordings, and I’ve been compiling the working music files for what I have written so far for the new album, trying to find my way forward from what I’ve got so far.
And then I realized that I left the old task of telling the history by the wayside.
I thought it wasn’t that long ago, but it turns out that Parts 1 and 2 of the story were told back in 2010(!!!). A brief recap: in early 2001 I started collaborating with Dementor of Song of Melkor, and what I thought would end up being a raw black-metal collaboration quickly turned into old-school thrash worship. We traded lyrics and song ideas, and thanks to the wonders of technology we managed to get a five-song demo and some covers completed, with more on the way. Then, by mid-2002 Opyros of Barbarian Wrath heard the demo, signed us, and we started working on finishing all that we had for the album. At the end of that post I cryptically foreshadowed, saying “it would be three more years before the album finally got released… but those are tales for another time.”
Well, it was a perfect storm of other-activity busy-ness, technology fuckups, and a lack of sleep thanks to a newborn kid.
I had been doing pretty brisk business for UHR before we got BWV off the ground, but once that happened in 2002 it redefined the word ‘busy’. I spent most every day emailing, spamming message boards, working out trades, inventing a new inventory system that integrated with building a webstore (BY HAND - no CGI-scripted carts or anything like that), and my daily trips to the post office to pick up payments and mail out orders… It’s a wonder I got anything else done.
And that was July. In August I became a dad, so pile sleepless nights on top of all of that.
I went back and reviewed the data files of the original vocals that I received, and it seemed that I was ALSO still working on Death Beast at exactly the same time - I got vocals for half of the first demo in July, which is why I tied BWV and starting Death Beast in my mind, but the other half of the demo didn’t get done until September 2002. What I think happened now was that I didn’t ask Opyros about Death Beast until a couple of months after BWV started, and then I eventually broached the subject. I remember having only two songs done at one point, because it was me emailing him those two MP3s (Apocalypse Metal and Thunder of Armageddon) that got him to sign us - which is why I must have started working on the demo in earnest. I also remember Opyros calling me on one of his US visits a few months later, and I was downstairs late at night, either trying to get my son to sleep or feeding him while talking on the phone precariously balanced on my shoulder, hands-free, and Opyros telling me to just burn him whatever I’ve done so far - that would have been in later 2002 or early 2003.
But, little did I know, we were already doomed.
I was tweaking sounds and drum files/drum rendering methods all the way through, so while it doesn’t sound like it, there’s a continuous line from the demo to what would end up being the album - I tried rendering the same original songs with new drums a couple of times, but by the time I’d burned the half-album-worth demo I was working on newer stuff. When Dementor heard that Opyros wanted to release us he wrote lyrics for a couple of newer songs and I came up with music for another. I’ve dug for them but I can’t find the demos that I sent him for those in early 2003. He told me he was having trouble figuring out how I intended the lyrics to go for “Every Church Shall Burn” and we still needed lyrics for the song that would become “Here Comes the War”. But, he was working on it - at least until the computer blew up.
That ended up being the last straw, basically. Dementor was working with Skeletor, his compatriot in Sadomaniac. Skeletor was the computer guru who did all of Dementor’s recordings, and they had most of the vocals already done, it sounded like from his emails at the time. However, one day, the computer blew up, and they lost everything. Dementor was kinda burning out on music, but I’d hoped that this album would encourage him to keep it up. Losing a whole album’s worth of work, though, just killed it. After a couple of months of me trying to talk him through shareware and fixes and such he finally said he’d just have to drop out, but that I should go on and try to find another vocalist.
And that’s where Juggernaut comes in - but that’s another section of the story…