Released April 30, 2003
Written, produced and performed by Jay Gironimi
Liner Notes
“Faster! Madder!” or “Hey, You Look Like You Have Something to Say”
I swear this title seemed like satire back in 2003. Now I feel like I need to be very clear that I do not think we should arm children.
My community college was about 30 minutes from my house, but only 15 minutes from my grandmother’s apartment, so if I had an extended break between classes, I’d often raid her fridge and pass out on her couch. Being that her and my grandfather were old, they watched a lot of cable news. They were indiscriminate in their viewing. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC all got played for hours at an impressively loud volume.
I was both fascinated and repulsed by it, particularly the glee with which every channel reported on war. I was often very tired in those days, so I’d drift in and out of consciousness while some banshee was screaming about hearts and minds or whatever. I think a lot of people were aware of how cable news worked thanks to The Daily Show, but there’s no experience quite like swimming in the slurry for yourself.
So I started with the title for this one and worked my way backwards.
I never made an actual cover for this. The few discs I printed up just had a black label with a tiny picture of an air soft pistol on it. Someone was going to draw me up an actual cover, but I had a borderline unhealthy compulsion to release things quickly back then, so this went out the door without a real visual identity.
Soundwise, this is the last All Hallow’s Evil album recorded on the family computer. Soon we’ll take a bold step into the stolen work laptop era! I deleted the bass tracks for this sometime back in 2005 or so when I did a light remixing for the prior version of All Hallow’s Evil dot org. The next 3 All Hallow’s Evil releases don’t have any bass either, so when I had some difficulty getting the tracks to sit properly, I deleted the bass to make it more in line with my then current thinking. I actually dug the tracks back out to do an actual remix recently and the bass tracks really were a mess. I think the bass needed a setup, but I was just borrowing it and I needed to get these songs out now goddammit, so I just dropped some low frequency slop onto the hard drive. I tried to corral that slop for the 2024 remix, which somehow made this into what might be the heaviest All Hallow’s Evil release.
-Jay G, Feb 2024
Track by Track
“Dead Art” – I think this is the first All Hallow’s Evil song with a trem bar dive, so that’s something. I remember very little about writing it, other than I was trying to be heavy like Strapping Young Lad. The lyrics are very much in the style of those Porcupine Tree songs about how new music sucks, but more aggressive. I’ve come to find those songs lightly insufferable, but I, of course, had a unique and interesting perspective that certainly doesn’t make me cringe 20 years later.
“Not Where You Belong” – I always liked this song, but I think it’s because the main riff is pretty close to “Sun King” by The Cult. The title is pulled off a Swamp Thing trade paperback. I was trying to make something with the atmosphere of that Alan Moore run, but I was a sickly 20 year old, so this is as close as I could get.
“Fueled by Hate” – I wrote this after hearing Pig Destroyer’s Prowler in the Yard. I had little to no artistry to my lyrics though, so this one just feels like a direct to video Se7en rip-off or something. I actually think the chorus is kind of neat, I just hate the lyrics.
“Give Guns to Children” – The lyrics on this whole EP are not great, but I will give myself credit for trying new things. This was a stream of consciousness thing I wrote after bathing in the slop of cable news for a few hours. As stated above, I started with the title and worked backwards, which didn’t get me very far. So I tried some Burroughs-eque cut up method stuff, even though I’d never actually read anything that used the technique. At the end of the day, my writing is probably more “hard-boiled” than “surrealist” and at this time no one would describe it as “good”.
Still, I’m probably trying to explain this too much because the context of things has shifted so much in the last two decades. This was when the Iraq war was in full swing though, so maybe all I need to say here is a line from the chorus: “we have a tendency to eat our young”
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