A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

“Devastator” was the first song that I wrote for the new Death Beast album The Onslaught. The song actually came together pretty quickly at first but the long cooking time led me to make a few changes that ultimately made it much stronger than the first draft. The original ‘demo’ mix of this song I had is dated to some time in 2007, so I’m pretty sure that I had other songs in various stages of work at the same time, but “Devastator” crystallized almost immediately as it came from a very direct, simple concept: “What if I turned Priest’s ‘Sinner’ into a thrash song?”

I didn’t want to copy the song a-to-z, but three things about it struck me as things that would adapt easily to thrash - that steady, driving 8th-note rhythmic feel of the verses, the simplicity of the subtonic-tonic movement of the main riff, and the general lyrical story of a menacing, mysterious figure who’s come to bring not just harm but apocalyptic doom. The word ‘devastator’ had been in my head for a while, and so renaming the ‘sinner’ to the ‘devastator’ gave me a lyrical starting point. As for the music, the song’s main riff was just me taking ‘Sinner’ to 16th notes instead of 8th notes and adding in the flat 2 and the flat 5 (Eb and Ab, against D tonic) for the normal thrash musical accents. Moving the whole pattern up from the 1 to the 4 in the middle of the verse was another nod to Sinner, though I also changed a bit of the way I played the chords to break the feel up a bit more.

The pre-chorus/chorus part is where I broke from the source, using something that I thought could easily be a Metallica riff (simple minor/blues scale riff, heavy on the tritone) for the prechorus and then letting the chorus open up with ringing Ab chords and an interlude riff that mixed the major and minor thirds between repeats for a bit of a diminished sound before climbing up to Eb and wrapping it around back to the verse riff. On the demo version I let the guitars ring on an open D while the bass started the prechorus riff, but thinking in thrash terms I thought it needed more rhythmic punch so I had modified it by the live album to have the whole band stop except for one guitar grinding on the riff.

Another change from the demo to the live/studio versions was that bridge verse, which originally just had accent notes over a D pedal tone, but it felt too straight and so I started shifting bass notes on the repeat, then ultimately just changed the guitar riffs to mirror that, so that the whole verse took on that melodic contour (ugly as it is - D->Ab->A->Bb->the turnaround Eb->C->back to the 1). The climbing harmonies after that were something I’d done before, with Rampage’s “Wanderlust”, where I harmonize in one position then progressively skip the lower guitar up an octave per repeat until the crescendo. Then, just to keep it simple, I slammed out the solos over the prechorus/chorus riffs.

As for the lyrics, once I had the whole ‘menacing figure approaching’ vibe from “Sinner” in my mind, it was easy and fell together without a lot of coaxing.

With iron fist and steely glint
The Devastator rides
Destruction and mayhem on his mind
Death behind his eyes
A black sun falls, your time is short
Your death has now arrived
Cower or run, it matters not
Just kiss your ass goodbye

Death's fist, an iron grip
Choking out your life
The blood runs down your broken throat
And drowns your weakling cries
No time to run
No time to hide
Only time to die
Devastator

The landscape is littered with the bones
Of the fools who called him foe
Corpses broken, red blood waters
The seeds of death he's sown
Stench and plague, filth and rot
Harvest of brutality
The grinding heel comes crashing down
The last sight you'll ever see

Death's fist, an iron grip
Choking out your life
The blood runs down your broken throat
And drowns your weakling cries
No time to run
No time to hide
Only time to die
Devastator

Avatar of death
Herald of The Plague
You're all fucking doomed
There's no one to save you

A good deal of the imagery and direct lyrics from Sinner are pretty obviously cribbed (the black sun falling in verse 1, red blood watering seeds of death is a nod to both Sinner and The Sentinel), but there was a bit of a Baloff/Exodus nod too in the idea of choking a victim in his own blood. This method of paralleling or directly quoting lyrics and references to other bands’ songs would be expanded on later, though I didn’t know it at the time. Another theme I would expand on is at least making nodding reference to the entire concept of the album The Onslaught. The song “Death Beast” on the first album referenced three names for the beast - the Death Beast, the Plague Beast, and the Hell Beast, which I imagined as a sort of Unholy Trinity. Since “Death Beast” was on the first album, I knew I’d have a song “Plague Beast” on this one, hence the reference to being Herald of The Plague. Also, even though I hadn’t written the song yet I did have the title for “You’re Fucking Doomed”, so the nod seemed to fit.

I remember finishing the demo version of this around 2007 and I know I shared it with Hartmuth and with a few other die-hard fans I knew from message boards and such. When the live album idea came around, doing a few songs from the upcoming album was a given and since this song was finished it was a shoe-in. The only other change bewteen the live version and the final album was a little rhythmic pause before the bridge. Metallica was always really good in their MoP/Justice days about doing interesting rhythmic modifications by adding just a single extra beat or note in the oddest places, and that extra ‘stutter’ before the bridge helped shift it from drive to overdrive, I thought.