Crimson frost - songwriting, pt. 1: everything old is new again
posted on 30 Jun 2006 under category Songs
Contrary to most of my ‘writing-of’ posts, I’ll cover all of the songs for this release in one post. As I mentioned before, Crimson Frost at this point was only intended to be four songs - reworked versions of the two songs from New World Blasphemy, a new song (the title track), and a cover of Gomorrah’s “Lucifer, Our Father”. This has ended up being longer than I thought it would, so I’ll cover the two older songs and the cover here and cover the new song, the title track, in the next post. “Black Flames…” was one that I envisioned changing quite a bit - by removing the keyboards. Originally, I came up with what would be the keyboard parts by recording a scratch version of the basic rhythms and using a second guitar line to work out what the keyboard notes would be, then transliterated them to keyboard by programming. Since I wanted a harder-hitting sound that live drums would give me, and since it’s hard as shit to sync programmed keyboards after-the-fact with live drums, I thought I would just return those keyboard parts back to the guitar.
One unexpected change was the ending ‘drone’ section. Even though we rehearsed it well together, when Dante gave me the final drum recordings that ending section was much faster than the original. At first it was problematic, but after I got the hang of playing the riffs faster it gave it a slightly more militaristic, aggressive feel that I think suits the song well. The solos suffer a bit technically from being faster than I intended, but the careening, off-kilter feel makes up for it.
“Ritual Curse”, on the other hand, I didn’t envision changing at all, and it stayed pretty much the same. Since I crafted the drum parts originally by playing on a real kit, I think it was the most improved by giving back the human quality I originally wanted it to have. Also, Dante liked playing with the ritualistic, tribal beat - that slow tempo gives lots of room for groove variation, plus being built on something besides a 2-4 kick-snare pattern keeps it interesting for the skinsman. I was also really happy with the gritty, edgy bass tone I got on this one, which has more bite than the more warm distortion on the bass in the original.
“Lucifer, Our Father” was interesting in that it was almost like writing a new song. The original version, by Gomorrah, is just one guitar and drums, which made it easy to figure out, but the creative (and fun) part came in when trying to craft parts for the second guitar and bass. The main strength of the song is the relentless mid-paced groove, somewhat akin to the slower section of Darkthrone’s “Kathaarian Life Code”, so I figured the best way to handle the verses and ‘choruses’ was to just double everything. This had the advantage of contrasting with the more elaborate arrangement I was planning for the interlude section towards the end.
The single-note guitar line that comes in at the end in the original was easy to figure out - and after I did I realized why. It uses almost exactly the same intervals as I used myself in the song “Displeasures of the Flesh” - against an open D (remember, I’m tuned down 1 whole step), play the D-F diad and then the Db-F diad. Where I crunched it in ‘chords’, Caligula picked it in alternating fashion in single-note lines, with an extra small flourish added at the turnaround every four repeats. Figuring out what to do with that, though, was a bit of a problem - I could double, and let manipulations of the bass line carry the dynamic; I could harmonize it, either parallel or ‘diatonically’ (it’s not strictly in a diatonic mode, so I’d have to wing it, but you know what I mean…); or I could do a completely different counterpoint line. In the end, as you hear, I did all three - thanks to a happy accident.
If you listen to the original, it does the double-time guitar riff over double-time drums, and then the drums cut to the half-time rhythm while the guitar continues the double-time riff for four repeats, before going into the single-note line. I figured when planning the recording that the single-note-line would come in when the drums did and that section would shorten by four repeats - but Dante did the drum lines EXACTLY like the original, leaving me four repeats worth of extra space - so, instead of ‘two’ times through the whole riff cycle, I had three. But, as you hear with the new version, it let me try all three of my ideas in sequence and give each of them a full pass-through.
Then it became time to work on the new song…
(It’s funny now to see me trying to warp my past story to fit with the fictional story of the band I had built. In truth I wrote both Lucifer Our Father and Displeasures of the Flesh, but I didn’t realize that I was reusing the same intervals in both songs - probably, as I note, because one was crunching chords and the other was a single-note melody with alternating turnarounds. I did enjoy fleshing out the one-guitar-and-drums arrangement to a full-band arrangement, and since it worked out so well I’ve toyed on and off with re-doing some of the other Gomorrah songs. Maybe not all of them, but I think songs like Night of the Blackened Pentagram or Holy Ground, or most of the third album, would benefit from a full arrangement.)