Released January 31, 2003
Credited Line-up:
The Abominable Dr. Gironimi – Vocals, Guitar, Keyboard
Count Andy – Guitar
Erich Zann – Bass
IG-88 – Drums
Actual line-up: Written, produced and performed by Jay Gironimi
Liner Notes
“We Have Dark Tranquillity at Home!” or “Eh, I’ll Cover It Up with Some Synth”
This is the first good All Hallow’s Evil album. I don’t know if it’s good in the traditional sense of it being something that someone who is not me would listen to, but I managed to impress myself 20 years later with a few of these riffs. It was not financially successful—really none of them have been—and it wasn’t popular—again, none of them have been—but I mostly stand by it. Though just so you don’t think I’ve gone mad with self-praise here, this also has my least favorite All Hallow’s Evil song.
The original production still sounded like it was recorded on the family computer, but there were two big upgrades: I borrowed the Casio keyboard previously used on The Zombie EP and I borrowed an actual bass. I knew little to nothing about using either instrument, which might make the bass suffer a bit, but I think it improved the keyboard arrangements.
I could not actually play the keyboard very well, so a lot of these parts are played into the Casio and quantized. Since my computer wasn’t set up for external midi, I would hit the play button on the keyboard when it was time to trigger the part and then nudged everything into place if it didn’t sync up. Also, I think this is when I started using a Behringer V-Amp 2 for my guitar sounds. I still hated the cabinet simulator on it though, so the sound ended up sounding like lightly agitated bees in a jar instead of clinically angry bees.
In early 2024, spurred on by some fatal water damage on the 20 year old desktop computer I’ve been lugging around to access my old stuff, I decided to remix a few All Hallow’s Evil albums that I still had tracks for, starting with this one. I didn’t replace any of the sounds, I just tried to present the version I would have made if I had access to actual equipment back then. Honestly, I kind of like the sound on this one, though that doesn’t make it “good”. The guitars on this one were mostly in frequency ranges no one would ever actually use for a guitar, so it was a bit of a battle to carve them into something listenable. It was also a bit of a battle to access the tracks. I never thought I would willing run WindowsME—the worst OS I ever used—on anything ever again, but shout out to the Internet Archive for having a virtual machine available for download. And shout out to whoever cracked the long forgotten Pro Tools Free so that I could still open these projects 20 years later.
This marks the first album with credited band members, even though it’s just me playing everything. I officially took on the stage name The Abominable Dr Gironimi, based on the Vincent Price film The Abominable Dr. Phibes. I thought it was really funny to have a stage name but keep my weird to pronounce last name in place (for the record, “Gironimi” rhymes with “astronomy”)
I put Andy in as Count Andy on guitars, because we were early on the making fun of Varg train. The bass was credited to Erich Zann, from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann and the drums were IG-88, a droid bounty hunter from The Empire Strikes Back and an action figure always found warming the pegs if you were one of those guys that would go to multiple stores to see what new action figures had arrived.
-Jay G, May 2024
Track by Track
“A Means to End” – Pretty much my entire idea about how to use keyboards came from Soilwork’s Natural Born Chaos and Dark Tranquillity’s Damage Done, and I thought I would differentiate myself by contrasting that with brutal guitar parts. The arrogance of youth, I suppose. Still, I really like this song and the little solos in it, as this was when I started to think more about the composition of everything.
“The Angel and the Abyss” – At some point, I thought an S.O.D.-type heavy satirical band was going to be the path to riches. I’ve never mentioned this to anyone else before, but I even came up with a perfectly edgelordy name—Post-Natal Abortion—and wrote entirely one riff, which happens to be the first riff of this song. Left a lot of money on the table by not following through on that…
“The Art of Dying Slow” – Because I was using artificial drums, I felt it was really important for the guitar parts to contain feats of strength and dexterity. Which is to say that the first minute or so of this one does a real number on the ol’ tendons. I used to do really long takes too, both because punching in was questionable in Pro Tools Free and because I felt like I had something to prove, even if no one but me would ever know.
Also, Andy had purchased a Montana brand acoustic guitar which I borrowed for a week to do the acoustic break in this.
“The Frailty of Vanity” – I was trying to be literary here, so this is about The Picture of Dorian Gray even though I hadn’t read the book at that point and was just going off a two paragraph review of the 1945 film adaptation I read in a book of horror film reviews my mom got me for Christmas.
I eventually read the book, but my overriding memory of reading it was being on the MetroNorth train coming back into Connecticut from an Emperor show in Times Square. The train was packed with both concert goers and club goers, so every seat was filled. The club going lady next to me said in a French accent that it was her favorite book, then proceeded to have an angry, ugly cry phone call with what I’m assuming was her boyfriend. It was a real awkward train ride.
“Smiling at the Void” – Look ma, I’m Dark Tranquillity!
To be fair, what I was actually ripping off was the verse from In Flames’ “World Within the Margin”
“Achromatic Future” – I don’t remember writing the music for this, but I remember the original title was “Black Future” until I took a bold step into the brave new world of online thesauruses. And that the line about “robot maids” kept making laugh, so that’s why that got to stay in there. Big Jetsons fan.
I should also note that the last little bass doodle is the intro from Alice Cooper’s “Caught in a Dream”, which I used to love to play.
“A Black and Comfortless Sky” – I hate this song. At least I used to. The remix has improved it’s standing a bit, though it still would have been maybe 10-15% better if I had used an acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, I had already given the borrowed guitar back to Andy and patience has never been my strong suit. The dissonant intro was an idea I took from Anathema’s “Leave No Trace” and the whispered growls were supposed to be Agalloch-esque. Also, to continue the literary theme, it’s about Frankenstein.
I honestly think this song is kind of important to the development of All Hallow’s Evil, because it helped push me to actually work on my singing. It sucks a lot here, though I may have lightly nudged some of it on the remix.
“As We Suffer” – I knew just enough music theory to be dangerous at this point, so I don’t remember what kind of algebra I did to write that intro, but it’s something I could never come up with today. Maybe one of the better All Hallow’s Evil songs of the family computer era, this was rehearsed a few times when All Hallow’s Evil was briefly a live entity, but I had a hell of a time playing and singing the verse, so it never made it out of the basement.
I re-recorded a version of this years later when I briefly tried out the band name Slowbleed.
“The Beauty of Decay” – I wrote this song specifically to play at the Open Mic Coffeehouse at my Community College. After the relatively warm reception Andy and I got for playing The Zombie EP there, they let us start hosting the shows and I wanted to prove we were well rounded performers, so I wrote this. It’s maybe a little long, but compared to some of the absolute trials on this album, this one is actually pretty fun to play. I had already given the borrowed bass back to Andy’s brother by the time I recorded this, so the bass here is actually just my guitar with an octave pedal on it, just like I did it on Perfect Plastic World and Hymns for a Damned Race. I took another shot at this a few years later on No One is Forgiven.
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