Released August 1, 2002
Written, performed and produced by Jay Gironimi
Liner Notes
“Storming the Charts One Small Town at a Time”
or
“A Belated Eulogy for MP3 dot Com”
Hymns for a Damned Race is technically the first full length All Hallow’s Evil album, though about half of the material is from stuff I recorded before the Perfect Plastic World EP but never actually posted on the internet.
The now defunct mp3.com had a lot to do with the early All Hallow’s Evil release schedule. Back at the turn of the millennium when All Hallow’s Evil started, mp3.com was the best place for an independent musician to very slowly upload their songs over a dial up modem at a stunning 56kbps. People from all over the world could then listen to these songs and even order on demand CD-Rs with full packaging. Both of those things may have actually occurred once or twice. Or not.
Perhaps more importantly, the geographic filters on mp3.com were super precise, so you could see charts of the top songs being made in your town. I remember little about chart placements or even who the competition was, but I remember feeling like I had to keep churning out music so I could dominate the charts in the small Connecticut town of Plainfield (the dirt part of CT, not the fancy part). The only other artist I actually remember was a guy who wrote a song about how his guitar strings were broken so he was banging on the counter for accompaniment. The song was called “Banging on the Counter”. The race for #1 was probably tighter than I’d like to admit.
As far as the actual recording, not much had changed in the 5 or so months since I made Perfect Plastic World, but I got better at playing and the recording went from bass heavy to ear piercingly high. I also figured out how to run some vocal effects without melting the family computer.
This is right around the time that I started getting really interested in black metal, to the point that the last song on here is a “black metal” version of one of the previous songs. Of course, my understanding of the genre essentially came down to “fast” and “sounds like shit”, which were two brass rings I could easily grasp.
I used the mp3.com on demand CD service to make some legitimate packaging for this and printed CD-Rs. Since my art skills were almost non-existent, I took a picture of a cemetery I found when I was trying to find a shortcut home one day. Even at the time I thought it was a little odd to use real graves on an album cover, so I got rid of the names to the best of my ability. Looking at it now, it’s not even that good of a picture, but at the time I think my memory finding the place—and the fact that I didn’t want to draw anything—overrode my critical eye.
Track by Track
“The Miracle of Deception” – I had this idea that wrong notes played with conviction could be an interesting sound, but maybe it’s not the best idea in the world to open an album with 30 seconds of discordant notes. I was probably making up for how straight forward the rest of this song is.
There’s one riff that exists here entirely because of Slipknot, thought not in the way you’d expect. I’d become quite the little elitist, which is to say I was not a Slipknot fan. So I thought it was funny when I read an interview with one of the members in Guitar Player magazine or something where they said something to the effect of “blast beats and grind riffs are the currency of our band”. So that blast beat part right after I scream “Grind!” is just to make one of my friends laugh.
“The Idolaters” – This was supposed to be an attempt at a melodic black metal song, but I loved In Flames too much and ended up here. I distinctly remember sitting at the community college, listening to the new Annihilator album and hearing a riff that sounded a lot like the main riff here (the song was “Ultra-Motion” off of the Waking the Fury album). I remember being torn on that, like my thinking should be more abstract than what anyone else was doing, but hey, my compositions are in line with a signed metal band. Only a matter of time before I get a deal as well.
22 years later, I’m still waiting.
In any case, I actually still use the melodic line right before the solo to warm up on the guitar sometimes.
“God Loves Hate” – I have no idea if they still do it, but back in 2002, the Westboro Baptist Church would post parodies of popular songs where they changed the lyrics about how we’re all going to hell because two guys kissed. The Bush administration was really starting to kick up the Christian Nationalism at this point too, so in response I wrote this song. Everyone opposed immediately saw the error of their ways and sent me personal apologies. Honestly, I should probably find this more cringe inducing now that I actually do, but I still stand by it. Hell, I loved this song so much at the time that I recorded it again at the end of the album.
“Addiction” – This is actually the first All Hallow’s Evil song ever written. For my 16 birthday, my mom got me some studio time to record in a family friend’s 24 track studio and in that process, I decided to cut out the other two guys I had played with through most of high school and came up with this instead. That initial version is lost to time now, but this one is probably a little better, even if I couldn’t figure out the timing on the pickup notes on the beginning of the main riffs. The original version also has a riff that’s very close to the riff from Iron Maiden’s “Transylvania” that Papa Roach ripped off for “Last Resort”, so I changed it here, even though I ripped it off first (by a couple of months at least).
“Fall in Line” – Listening back to this now, I think the clean intro is hilariously long, which was probably me trying to subvert expectations. The rest of the song is me trying to write something that was in the Morgana Lefay style of heavy, but I wasn’t getting enough chunk on the guitars for that to actually work. Probably would have helped to use an actual amp at some point.
“Remnant of a Past Long Dead” – This is one of those songs that I did not remember writing until I just listened back to it now. Some of the riffs are pretty good, but boy howdy did I just go with whatever lyrics I could think of. I also seem to have the mechanics of how to play a solo, but little to no grasp of the actual composition of one.
“Ascension of the Vile” – I think it’s very funny that I kept trying to write ballad type songs even though I could’t sing yet. There’s an out of nowhere blast beat in here that managed to surprise me a couple of decades later, but the gimmick can’t save this one.
“Death Synthesis Machine” – This was the third time I recorded this one and every time I did it, I kept trying to make it faster. I think I was trying to get under 2 minutes, but this was right at the edge of my ability to play cleanly and accurately. I really like the intro on this and the main riff is a lot of fun to play, though playing it today will seize up my forearm about 30% of the time. I don’t think the lyrics really deserve a mention, but this one works musically.
“As Darkness Fades…” – I very much did not have the skill to pull off a mostly instrumental piece at this point, but I respect the effort. The robot voice at the end is mostly because I missed my window to record vocals while everyone was at work and I wanted this thing done with a minimum of “what the hell are you doing in there?”
“…No Light is Seen” – This is the “black metal” version of “God Loves Hate” which I thought was a fun idea. It would have been even cooler if I actually knew what I was doing.
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