A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

“Every Church Shall Burn” was kinda the ‘bastard child’ of the first six songs that Stan/Dementor sent me in Summer of 2001. As you can see from the lyrics, they don’t scan in a regular rhythm, there are odd line counts, and the overly-long repeated section doesn’t really lend itself well to what we would think of as a chorus. As I described before, I left this one for last, and so it’s the only one of those first six that Dementor never did a demo of - though he tried, and based on what I ended up writing it was confusing on paper because I distinctly remember him emailing me and saying he wasn’t sure what I wanted him to do with it.

They call me a blasphemer, call me a lecher
I call 'em fools, mindless sheep, worthless beggars
I shall indulge every sin, rebel until I die
I shall reject their book of lies
It's hypocritical content is only god for one act
Take your holy bible, and wipe your shit-soaked ass...

...I blaspheme thy holy chapel
Make the nuns suck my dick...
Perversion of the Holy Virgin
Inversion of the Crucifix...
...Sadistic, scourging thy wife brings me pleasure
Psychopathic, I laugh as I slit the priest's throat...
I'll thrust the Devil's unholy trident
Up the mother Mary's cunt...

So the idiots call me sick
Say I should be imprisoned
When the time comes to kill
You shall all know my reasons
The bastards are stupid, they drive me insane
One day some of them shall feel the edge of my blade...

...I blaspheme thy holy chapel
Make the nuns suck my dick...
Perversion of the Holy Virgin
Inversion of the Crucifix...
...Sadistic, scourging thy wife brings me pleasure
Psychopathic, I laugh as I slit the priest's throat...
I'll thrust the Devil's unholy trident
Up the mother Mary's cunt...

As the Virgin's hymen is torn...
As the Antichrist is born...
As the end of time dawns...
Every church shall burn...

Despite being a thrash band, I wanted to work in at least one slower song, harkening back to the way that older thrash, death, and black metal would use slow or midpaced songs to break up the constant-speed feel. Since we had covered Slaughter on the demo, my natural thought was to come up with something that had a similar feel to one of their slower songs, perhaps along the lines of “Tales of the Macabre” or “Fuck of Death”. I already had the main F-B tritone riff just sitting around (when I first came up with it, I was thinking it was a bit like Darkthrone, in the vein of their simpler old-school songs like “In the Shadow of the Horns”), but when I changed the last chord in it (sliding up to Ab) from a power chord to just a vibratoed single note it sounded a lot more like Slaughter.

First I just came up with a couple of basic variations of the riff, figuring on stringing them together like “Verse part A, Verse part B”, and varying the lengths until I could come up with a vocal line that fit the repeats of the riffs properly. I also tacked on that direct quote of Slaughter as the intro just for Hartmuth to smile at, and since anything worth doing is worth overdoing I also pretty early on decided to also do that trademark Slaughter “One Two Fuck You” count-in. Since the repeated part didn’t work quite so well as a traditional chorus I decided to treat it like a verse with a different riff, so a couple of hours repeating the lines over the prospective guitar riffs helped me hammer out the arrangement. I added the quick key change up to Ab between the two verses just to break up the arrangement a bit, and then when it came to the solos I thought it would be a good idea to keep up the variation by having two different riff styles in different keys with the tradeoffs - I kept one of the verse riffs for one of the solo riffs and then had a step-down new riff in low D for the other. Those solos were fun trading off, because I had just bought the wah pedal you all hear me abuse now and this was my first time giving it a workout.

After that, I wasn’t sure how to get back to that four-line stanza at the end, but I thought even after all of the variations up to this point it was still basically just a slow song and some kind of thrash or more upbeat bit would be best. I stuck with the original key of F and came up with a new uptempo riff, then figured it would be good to repeat the ‘chorus’ there so that it didn’t sound like just a tacked-on bit. It also helped that riding out of the end of that chorus gave me a way to bring the song full circle back to the original main riff of the song, which ended up being a perfect way to put that last stanza to some music. I felt at that point that the riff could just repeat to a fadeout, but with slightly changing drumbeats and basslines under it, slowly building in intensity. I ended up leaving the space for the last stanza at double the length it needed, so I had to write a few more lines to fill it out properly - if you’ve read the lyrics on the album (or online) you know what parts I added.