A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

The last song I wrote with Dementor for Death Beast, “Invoking Villainy”, was sent along with “Enslaved Cadavers” after we had already written the first six songs from that initial email. As with “Enslaved Cadavers” he never got a chance to record any vocals for it, so I wonder what he would have ultimately done. As it was, it was pretty sparse with only two short verses and two short choruses, plus a tag line, so I knew I’d have to add some more musical content somehow to get it to full-song length.

Whispers turn to screams in the black mass
Orgies of fiends in the black mass
Sacrifice for sin in the black mass
Nothing is forbidden in the black mass

Invoking Villainy
Conjuring Devilry
Invoking Villainy
Black Mass Insanity

Scourging virgins in the black mass
Raping purity in the black mass
Only sinners survive the black mass
All others die in the black mass

Invoking Villainy
Conjuring Devilry
Invoking Villainy
Satanic Insanity

...the Black Mass!

The constant repeats of ‘black mass’ at the end of each verse line, along with the very similar short vocal lines for the choruses, pointed to something that would lend itself to a chant-type of feel. As such, my options were to find exactly the right riff that would lend itself to repetition without being boring or to build something elaborate with a lot of musical sections and changes with just not that much singing. My first thought was the latter, and thus I started trying every kind of riff in the world, finding stuff I could build together to build a monster of a song - perhaps along the lines of “Live Undead” by Slayer, which was my first thought, or “No Love” by Exodus. I tried for weeks to get anything that would work on its own or that I could get to gel into a bigger structure from smaller riffs, but nothing worked for the heavy section.

However, I also thought I could do kind of a clean intro piece with some noodling solos, perhaps like Testament’s “Musical Dirge” or some of the clean intros they had on other songs on that album. In that vein I played a bit and came up with what you all now know as the clean intro, “Psychosis” - it’s a simple Dm-Abm-Eb5-repeat, with a minor 3-minor-2-root every fourth repeat for the turnaround, that uses my love of simple half-step changes resulting in large chord changes. While the rest of the song languished, I got the intro totally fleshed out. It’s a rhythm that can be played completely in the low-open position and up an octave in the 7th position, and it lends itself well to just being arpeggiated clean or having the arpeggios be played over ringing open distorted chords. I worked out the arrangement for the progression of heaviness and wrote a solo that I was happy with, but then when it ended I didn’t know what to do…

… until I realized that I should have taken my first option with the meat of the song. On a lark I tried just doing a thrash-style gallop on those chords over the open low D and BOOM! - that was the trick. The riff ended up being perfect for the verses - repetitive in a way I like to think goes more towards ‘hypnotic trance’ than ‘unimaginative repeating’ - hammering on the dissonance of the tritone and minor second, along with the ringing chords allowing for bass fills every fourth repeat, makes it nice and compact, and with the song length padded by the intro I could make it a short, fast banger. The chorus part came from just using simple chromatics - it’s the same half-step walkdown as the ‘chorus’ riff in Sabbath’s “Into the Void”, just thrashed up and in a different key (I tune to D, they tuned to C#), with the D-Eb at the very end with a stop leading right back into the next verse.

Once I had those two parts I just slammed them together - V-C-V-C, with the solo leading to the outro next. For the solo, I kept half the same verse riff, but used riffs to connect the chord alterations (D to C, a good solid minor-key classic for soloing). I tried pulling out all the stops, even going so far as to work in a tapping descending arpeggio which is so far outside of my usual solo wheelhouse it’s not even funny. It worked, though, adding just a bit more difference to the solos on the album as a whole.

I’m still not sure how I came up with the ending. I think I had just decided somewhere along the way that I would try to work in bits where I juxtapose major and minor from the same key into the same riff or song, and that’s where the notes I used for those riffs came from - in Dm for the song as a whole, the chords at the end are Gb and F, with A as a single note in between. I liked the sound of the intervals but didn’t know what to do with them, so I thought I’d just slow down and let them ring out, which is exactly what I ended up doing once I heard how it played out. I was also especially happy how the solo blended into that ending progression, since I accidentally just ended up trilling on the same notes. I did that on the demo version, then forgot it, and when I was recording this for the final album version I remember I had to go back and re-figure-out what I had done back then.

Speaking of progression from demo to final version, there was no real change in arrangement, but I did do some playing with instrumentation. On the demo I just did one clean guitar in the low octave for the intro, but I wanted it to have a bit more sparkle, so I used two clean guitar tracks, one playing in the low open position and one an octave higher as I described above. I piled on some chorus and then panned the two tracks hard left and hard right - I think it sounds like you’re inside the middle of a 12-string guitar that way, which is neat while the cleans are playing alone but they still got a bit lost in the mix when the heavy guitars came in. Oh well - it’s a learning process and I’m still overall pretty happy with how this one turned out.