This end down
posted on 14 Jun 2022 under category News
Though it’s been out for about a month, this is the official (belated) notice for the release of Rampage’s newest album, This End Down, a release that breaks my personal delay record with an interval of SIXTEEN years between first conception and actual release. Despite that, the final release ended up much closer to the original conception than I could have imagined - some live/rehearsal-styled quick-and-dirty renditions of some of our strongest back-catalog songs.
As discussed previously, the very first thing we did when we reunited earlier this year was the lead-off track “Rainbow Skies” for the rerecorded Bellum Aeternum, but as we lined things up for what is coming next I reminded Aerik that I was still sitting on these tracks. They were done about the same time as the BA tracks, late 2005 to early 2006, and in fact we had even tried to revive with them a couple of times in the intervening years - I even found an old email from about 2012 where I talk about sending these tracks to him again. Since ‘sending’ things now only involves upload and download time, not a trip to the post office and a week’s delay in the mail, he heard these and instantly said “We need to do this!” And, working a song a day, he was done in just over a week.
The original conception was a set of rehearsal-style quick recordings - no overdubs, no punch-ins, just first/second-take live-styled recordings, warts and all, focusing on a few of the older songs that we felt were the strongest and that Aerik really wanted to take a crack at. He had picked a few of the fast ones off of This End Up, along with him mentioning that he wanted to try his hand at singing a version of “Here Comes the War” since he had also written the lyrics on that one (and, after all, War Never Changes…). I did this set first, just straight up in my regular D tuning just like the older stuff.
Then, he wanted to try a few more of our doomier tracks, and since I had made the decision to tune down to C# for another release we were working on at the time, so in parallel to the BA recordings I also knocked out some of the older songs from Monolith, plus a sick C# version of “Displeasures…”, and even a Sabbath cover.
I gave the tracks a quick mix, not even bothering to take out the scrap noise before/after the songs, and committed them to master stereo exports which, a couple of mailed discs aside, proceeded to sit on my hard drive for 16 years. That is, of course, until Aerik and I resurrected them, and now you can buy them on Bandcamp or stream them on Spotify until your eardrums bleed.
Anyway, despite the aforementioned warts and blemishes, we’re both very happy with what came out. My playing back then was nearly the best it’s ever been (topped probably only by my performance on the BA recordings and, later, on The Onslaught), and Aerik’s vocals have grown even more over the decade-and-a-half than I could have imagined. He doesn’t just sing these songs, he LIVES them - the anger on “Here Comes the War”, the fury on “Bloody Leg” and “Six Bells”, his Dickinson-on-steroids epic take on “Wanderlust”, and his absolutely SICK version of “Displeasures…” - this is the full fruition of what the 2004-2006 version of Rampage only hinted at.
And we still have an album and EP in the hopper, along with the new stuff we’re working on. Stay tuned.