A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

As I was in the middle of working on the six songs that Stan/Dementor gave me for the first Death Beast demo, we were happy enough with what we were working on that we thought we should fill it out to a full album, and so some time later (either later in 2001 or through the earliest part of 2002) he sent me lyrics to two more songs, “Enslaved Cadavers” and “Invoking Villainy”. “Enslaved Cadavers” was the first one in the email so it was the first one I picked to start working on:

Thousands of rotting coffins lay empty
Under thousands of tombstones
Paranormal morbidity stirs as
Corpses are reborn to serve

Undead minions of darkness
Fight for their master...
An army of corpses
Enslaved cadavers...

No mortal shall remain alive
Nightmares haunt those who breathe
No escape no matter if you live or die
Blood curdling terror burns deep

Undead minions of darkness
Fight for their master...
An army of corpses
Enslaved cadavers...

Join us...  Join us...
Join us...  Join us...
Join us...  Join us...

The structure as written pretty much implied the structure of the song - two verse/choruses, a solo section implied, and then an outro. I had done quite a bit of work making the other songs so far pretty involved, arrangement-wise, so I thought a more straightforward song would be okay here. I started by trying to find a riff to hang the song on, and while listening to Slayer’s “Chemical Warfare” I liked how stripped-down and simple the verse riff on that was - no chords except the accent at the start and end and with long-steady strings of single-picked-notes in between. I hammered around and found what you hear now after about a half-hour - true to form, it was a pretty simple Dm-plus-tritone around the open position, with the basic ‘chords’ centering around D and Ab.

I broke up the verse feel in the prechorus by going with something that reminds me a bit of those 3-on-2 crunching inverted power chord riffs like Metallica used on Kill ‘em All (the verse to Whiplash, a bit, or more like that pre-chorus thing on No Remorse) - it still uses the open string as a pedal tone, but it sounds a bit like a chord/key change because more focus is put on the accent chords than the pedal. For the chorus I went back to the same notes/chords as the main riff but with a changed feel around a more open drumbeat and ringing chords, plus a quick 16th note chromatic bit at the end plus a dramatic stop at the very end before going back to the verse.

For the solo section I decided to use the stop to preface a key change. I went back to the verse riff but moved it up from D to F (third position) and straight into a solo that followed the same verse-bridge-chorus map in the higher key. At the end of the solo I thought it would be neat to hang on that stop, but with an extended drum fill going down into a more simple outro-type crunchy riff. I straighted out the riff I used for the ‘chorus’ section of the solo (in F) and just worked on a straight-8 pumping, marching drumbeat feel that would be good to fade out on with the ‘join us’ repeated.

I never got a demo of this from Stan so I don’t know what he was going to do with it, so a good deal of the arrangement of this actually came from what Ryan/Juggernaut did on his demos. First, he noticed that I left the quick solo between the two verses shorter than I originally meant to and it ended up being too few words - we needed a new stanza. He wrote one, which you can hear on the demo version of that song on the Prophecies of Doom compilation (I wrote my own extra stanza, which is what made it to the final version on the album). Ryan’s real genius came through, though, on his idea for the ‘join us’ repeats on the outro. Instead of just going with single repeats or a simple gang chant, he started doing a lot of different versions with different vocal effects that pan around in different spots and start working in extra rhythms in between the main repeats. Though the details are different, the basic idea for what I ended up doing on the final version of the song for the album follows in that same vein. Using the Acid loop-joining/layering program in conjuction with Sound Forge’s manipulations and effects, I recorded a few different versions of me singing/screaming/growling “Join Us”, and then used pitch shifting (up AND down) to generate many different versions of the line, all at tempo with the music. I then took those samples into Acid and layered a steadily building set of repeats, starting with a basic set that repeated on every loop, then adding new samples above and below that repeated every other time, or every four, and with the different up/downshifted samples interspersed with the regular chants. The idea was to have a steadily-growing sound cacophony, like the army of the dead just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and I think it worked out pretty well.