A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

The song “Death Beast” was another in the long line of songs named after the band playing it, and so with awareness of this fact in my mind I tried to wrap up as much about the band as I could into a single song so that it would serve as a fitting signature for us. Seeing the different structures of the stanzas I was given, the first thought I had was that this meant I’d need this to be not-quite an epic song, but definitely one that has more than its fair share of tempo changes, key/tonality changes, and drumbeat/feel changes.

Unholy disease ususrps the land
The evil beast destroys all men
Damnation rose from the depths of Hell
Pestilence upon this world befell
Disease, a plague of incredible agony
Man shall suffer, writhe in pain, eternally

Destroyed by the Death Beast!
With black wings of doom
And horns for impalement...
Destroyed by the Death Beast!
How he soars and maims,
The beast of the plague...

Killed by the Death Beast, Slaughtered for fun
Damned by the Plague Beast, Evil has won
Murdered by the Death Beast, Violence is king
Tortured by the Plague Beast, Eternally

Destroyed by the Death Beast!
How he soars and maims,
The beast of the plague...
Destroyed by the Death Beast!
With black wings of doom
And horns for impalement...

The Death Beast usurps the land
The pestilence destroys all men
Evil rose from the crypts of Hell
Damnation upon this world befell
The last of the plagues, the final Black Death
Now mankind shall feel, Ahriman's wrath...

The Death Beast
The Hell Beast
The Death Beast
The Plague Beast...

One of my standard bag of tricks when trying to do one of those more involved song structures is to find a riff that I can use in different feels or time signatures - typically, something like a midpaced 6/8 ‘triplet’ feel to start, then mutate into some form of 4/4 either as marching eighth notes or blazing-fast 16th notes. The first riff to the song was one I came up with pretty easily, using a pretty standard I to flat-V/tritone progression (D to Ab) with different turnarounds alternating on each repeat. For more variation in the structure, though, I didn’t return to that same riff until later in the song, after a radically different verse and chorus part.

This song is also another classic case of the vocalist going in a totally different direction from where I thought they would go when I was writing. I initially wanted just a four-bar lead guitar fill to go straight into a verse - if you’ve heard the demo of the song and the final version, you notice the ‘missing’ solo after the first very short lead part, and it’s six repeats instead of four or eight - that’s where the first six-line verse here was supposed to go! I can’t remember now exactly what I envisioned, but I think what is now the Chorus (“Destroyed, by the Death Beast!”) was supposed to go where the verse is now, and somehow what are now the second verse and the pre-solo bridge part were supposed to be the choruses. Again, Stan/Ironfist’s changes were for the better. I don’t naturally think along the lines of a vocalist, so I plot my vocal rhythms pretty mathematically, like another instrument. What Stan did with changing feels, dropping lines, fitting six lines into four or stretching four into six or six into eight gave a much greater variation in vocal delivery than I would have come up with on my own. Nowhere is this more apparent in what I write than in this song, I think - too bad I never demoed a version with my original vocal conception to show the different. Also, it’s a testament to his ability in this area that I can’t even imagine or remember now what I was originally planning - what he came up with just feels so right.

But, back to the riffs, to keep up with the theme of varying my approaches to riffs and feels throughout the song, after the triplet-based D-Ab riff, I took it down three half-steps to B, where the verse stays with a steady, superfast line that’s pretty straight. The harmonized guitar riff at the end of the first 3 verse repeats was my attempt to rewrite Slayer’s “Face the Slayer”, but in a different key and faster hopefully nobody noticed too much. Descending power chords on the last repeat kept me from just repeating the same thing over and over, and it also let me lead to the chorus - Back to D, but fast like the verse while opening up with ringing power chords instead of frantic picking.

After the second chorus I thought it was far enough from the intro to return to the riff, but this was when I mutated the riff into a slower, crunchy 4/4 feel and added the octave-sliding bit into the mix. I somehow got that bit from Moonblood by way of Nargaroth, as I had just figured out their cover of “The Gates of Eternity” which uses an octave riff in a different key. It ended up fitting well, either layering the parts on top of each other or adding in the octave riff on each fourth repeat of the original main riff. I intended for the solo section overall to feel a bit like that middle solo section of Judas Priest’s “Sinner”, where the feel goes really slow and the lead guitar turns into a noise machine of anger, then slowly builds back up to the song again. Another part I was happy with was how the end of the solo goes like the beginning with long, ringing chords, but the second buildup goes back to the original triplets instead of the changed eighth-note section, bringing the song full circle.

As with most of the writing for these demo songs, after reading the lyrics repeatedly the cadence of the lyrics suggested the rhythms of the riffs, and so they all fell together pretty quickly. I don’t remember agonizing over any of the arrangement ideas or ‘now where do I go?’ questions - quite a contrast with the songs for The Onslaught, though I wouldn’t find that out for another 12 years at that point…