Released May 1, 2005
Written, produced and performed by Jay Gironimi
Liner Notes
The recording of this one isn’t all that much different from We’re Going to Die…, other than the previous drummer—a Zoom MRT-3 MicroRhythm Track—left. It was replaced by Dr. Rhythm (a Boss DR-3, to be exact), who would retire after this album and officially end the drum machine era of All Hallow’s Evil. But in spite of how exciting all that is, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss All Hallow’s Evil as a live entity.
The All Hallow’s Evil Live Spectacular grew out of the semi acoustic performances my buddy Andy and I would do at our community college’s open mic coffeehouses. Eventually, they let us start hosting the coffeehouses, which somehow made us feel bold enough to do “full” band performances with distorted electric guitars and drums on a backing track. Given that these coffeehouses took place in a room originally built for very quiet priests to give mass, they never got too loud, but I thought it was funny to show up dressed like a zombie in lab coat to sing “The Cold Taste of Nickel Plated Steel” to an audience that just did not care.
Most audiences did not care, but that’s part of what made it so fun for me.
I loved to play live. I think Andy was less enthused about it, but was kind enough to put up with me. Eventually I roped his younger brother into playing bass, but Andy getting a straight job and my health heading to straight shit kicked the dirt on the coffin of the live version of All Hallow’s Evil.
I think we did something like 10 official “full band” shows over 6 years. I like(d) to make slightly too much of a production out of things, so there was always a lot of preparation involved and I spent way too much on stage makeup over those years. My stage look evolved from zombie to corpse painted zombie devil to vastly underweight guy in jeans with undiagnosed diabetes at our last show. I think I should have found it sadder to play for a disinterested clientele at a bar that didn’t even stop the house music, but I loved it.
I particularly loved playing GazeboFest, a free festival my good friend Bentley organized at the local park. The first one took place right after The Cold Taste of Nickel Plated Steel and the second one was going to be right after this album was finished, so at least two of these songs are written to be played live (“The Light Has Died” and “No One Loves You”). Something about putting on zombie makeup and firing up the drum machine in a gazebo or on a flatbed trailer really got the creative juices flowing. There was a drum solo right before “No One Loves You”, which I thought was really funny. I think I might have been the only one.
The artwork on this was done by my friend Heather Stone, whose photo of a church I had commandeered for the cover of We’re Going to Die, Then We’re Going to Hell. She was kind enough to turn around two custom pieces very fast for this. It’s easily the best looking cover of any All Hallow’s Evil album.
This one didn’t require much when it came time to remix, though the slight changes made a big improvement. Sounds like an actual album now instead of some kind of outsider art.
-Jay G, May 2024
Track by Track
“The Light Has Died” – I always think of this as a Rotting Christ-type song, even though it sounds nothing like them. It’s just that the orchestral parts were somehow inspired by me listening to A Dead Poem for a week straight.
This has a lot going on, but it breathes a little better than most of the stuff on We’re Going to Die, Then We’re Going to Hell. I think it’s the best song on here and it’s probably one of my favorite All Hallow’s Evil songs.
The “God wouldn’t take me” sample in the middle is from Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
“No One Loves You” – I’ve claimed this was about at least 3 different people, but the honest truth is I thought “NO ONE LOVES YOU!” would be a fun thing to scream live and then I had to come up with a song to support that notion. The rest of the song could stand to be a little more clever I guess, but I thought it was fun to write a serious song to support a ridiculous idea.
“Rip Me from This Flesh” – A lot of these songs are very close to good, but don’t quite hit the mark. Some of them are let down conceptually and some of them suffer by my refusal to throw a bass onto my credit card. I think this one kind of suffers on both those fronts. The clean bits are interesting and I’m reaching for something, but I couldn’t quite grasp it at the time.
I’m like 90% sure I ripped the idea of this song — someone skinning themselves — from a Clive Barker story, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the name of it now.
“At a Loss” – I wanted to experiment with time signatures, but that was a pain in the ass with the drum machine, so I settled for 3/4. I think this song is fine. Writing it made me realize that maybe some things work better with a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, instead of verse-other verse-prechorus-chorus 1-chorus 2 like this one has.
I ended up doing an acoustic version of this later for “Calm down and tell me again.”, thought I think I was just trying to prove to myself that this song was okay.
“We Break by Design” – I always wanted to write something with a theremin as a lead instrument, but it never really worked out for me. The clean break of this doesn’t use a real theremin, mostly because I a.) couldn’t afford one and b.) couldn’t play one. But it’s the thought that counts.
Much like the old days, I wrote this song then played it at a speed that I could just barely handle. I had to do a startling number of takes of the mid tempo break in the middle, because that syncopated part on the left side is easy to play once or twice, but a real pain in the ass to do for 30 seconds. Since I was doubling the guitars too, it had to be real tight. The smart thing to do would have been to copy/paste one good section, but I felt like I had something to prove.
“No One is Forgiven” – This is kind of a preview of what’s coming next, because this song is about Faust. I read Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus around this time and became obsessed with reading different versions of Faust, which of course turned into me wanted to make my own version. I think the chorus on this is pretty fun and kind of presages the “ProgPopMetal” I’d try to make a couple of years later.
“God Eats Children” – Look, I was 22 years old and of questionable health status, so I thought it was real clever to be like “maybe God does have a plan and his plan is that children are delicious to him”. The song is maybe a little better than the title, but it really does come off as someone who recently bought the Penn and Teller Bullshit box set.
Originally, the vocals are really low on this one, which was an intentional touch that did not work out at all. I kind of wanted to capture a In the Nightside Eclipse thing where the vocals are just another instrument, which is fine for cold black metal, but kind of sucks when the vocals are supposed to carry the hook. I fixed that for the 2024 remix.
“Failure” – Andy rightfully laughed when he heard the toms in the intro for this one, but I kept it because I figured people would sort of mentally insert their own sounds when they heard these very bad ones. The sounds work better in the remix, at least. The construction of this one is kind of aimless, but I think the chorus is pretty strong and I like the bridge a lot.
At the time I was trying to write something Anathema-esque. I loved everything from Eternity through A Natural Disaster and listened to them constantly. Strangely enough after seeing them live on the Weather Systems tour, I somehow got my fill of Anathema.
“Never Meant to Shine” – I spent a lot of time at the used bookstore, so a lot of my reading around this time was influenced by what other people didn’t want to read anymore. Somehow, I ended up with a lot of books on cults. So, this is a song about cults. Possibly could have used a little more empathy here, but let’s say that wasn’t my strong suit back then.
This song really exists for two ideas: the “church singalong” of the verses and the acoustic break at the end. The singalong would have been better if I had more of an idea of how to hit notes with my voice and then harmonize those notes. I hate to keep repeating myself, but a lot of these early albums involved me confidently taking a risky shot and ending up a little wide of the mark. I took a similar swing on “Year of Our Lord” from No Gods, Only Monsters.
“I See Black” – I pretty much wrote this one backwards, as I had that last distorted part first and then had to build up to it. I think that part is pretty good, even if I keep trying to jump up a few notes at the end of a line, a thing I was trying to rip off from Arcturus’s “Kinetic”. Often when I try to write more traditional songs, it comes off as pedestrian, and that’s 100% the case here.
“The Beauty of Decay (v. 2005)” – I’m not entirely sure why I re-recorded this one here, other than I felt like I didn’t quite get it right the first time and it would fit in nicely with the rest of the songs here. I actually think this is a pretty good version, even if it does make me want to take another run at it.
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