Released April 12, 2012
Written, produced and performed by Jay Gironimi
Backing vocals and production assistance by Bekka Wrynn
Liner Notes
For a few years, I thought this was going to be the last All Hallow’s Evil album. Through a series of circumstances I probably don’t need to get into here, I ran out of money and lost my apartment. I went to my dad’s house and my fancy ProTools Digi 002 went into a closest and my desktop computer went into the basement.
Despite the ugly circumstances of the time, I really like this EP. The tone was inspired by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal comics and I wanted to try my hand at more fictional songs instead of just songs about how I hate church. As such, this was kind of difficult to write, which is why it’s so short.
Past the comics, I think the biggest music influences on this are pretty clear, but just so there’s no doubt, I was definitely trying to move into a Katatonia meets Ulver territory. For once, I think I got kind of close to what I was aiming at.
Of course, things were not all bad. I met my wife around this time; she even sings on the second track, though she was very clear that I was not to look at her while she did it and I had to go into another room.
-Jay G, March 2024
Track by Track
“And Then the Night Forgot Us” – I love this song. It’s fun to play, fun to sing and it has an actual chorus. I wish more people liked it. I wrote the tapping part as an arpeggio and somehow one late night after work, decided to try tapping it out. It worked out pretty well.
“I Cannot Follow” – This is probably the closest I ever got to the song in my head becoming 1s and 0s on a computer. Sometimes the end result is just different, sometimes it’s worse and in a few rare occasions, it’s better than planned. This one was pretty much right on the money. It’s one of the rare All Hallow’s Evil songs without a high gain guitar on it, but it does have a hell of a bass sound. Wish I still had the patch for it.
“Hopeless” – I am not great at either violin or the keyboard, so I played this entirely on my Mad Catz Rock Band 2 Pro Midi Guitar. I probably could have kept this going for a little longer, but it might have actually been less work to just learn the damn violin rather than try to fake it.
“Noir” – I like to run little sound experiments to see what happens, so the intro to this is an arpeggio played in one direction on the left side and in the opposite direction on the right side. It creates kind of a controlled natural delay effect. But at the end of the day, this song exists mostly to justify the e-bow I bought.
When I finished this, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was going to be the last All Hallow’s Evil song, so that’s why it fades out and leaves the song kind of unresolved. For what it’s worth, it was the last All Hallow’s Evil album recorded in Pro Tools, as all my recording equipment went into storage. I tried recording a couple of things on my iPad, though it never felt quite right (I documented the process in a few boring YouTube videos that may or may not still be up when you read this). But it seemed like All Hallow’s Evil as a thing was going into storage as well. In the aftermath, I wrote a book about my life with Cystic Fibrosis, which did moderately well. But unfortunately(?) I just love making music, so the past couldn’t stay buried for long.
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