Released October 1, 2009
Produced and performed by Jay Gironimi
Written by Jay Gironimi and Andy Forbes
Liner Notes
I think about silent films a lot. Not that I’m a scholar in any way—I saw my first silent film when I was 8 or so, but only because Simitar Entertainment put out a VHS tape of the 1926 film The Bat with a “Bob Kane” drawing on the cover that said “It has been suggested, but not confirmed, that this film inspired Bob Kane to create BATMAN”—but I find myself thinking a lot about what gets lost when technology shifts. The language of films changed once actual language showed up. I’m not going to argue that film should have remained silent or even that we should be making silent films today, I just think a lot about what performances we lost because actors had accents or even how stories morphed once they had to be spoken. It’s not than one approach is better than the other, just that they are different in ways that make it difficult for them to co-exist. Every gain has at least a little loss attached.
The why and how of this re-recording of The Zombie EP mostly match the reasons behind Knowing Then What We Know Now: I was having fun laying down tracks and not having fun with anything else going on in my life. So that’s left me with nothing to talk about here but the finished product.
Is this better than the original? Well, it sounds cleaner. I’ve played these songs dozens of times and this point, so I know my way around the material. It’s certainly less ear piercing, which is probably a positive. But there’s a chaotic element to the original that I could never recapture. We were recording the original as it was written. I was never completely sure how any part went as I was playing it. It’s loose, but I’m pedaling as had as I can. I’m comfortable here. I don’t know if that’s better.
To the outside listener, I’m going to guess the answer is “yes, it is better”. But to me it’s just different. More technically competent, but missing a certain spark. Or maybe I’m wrong. Still, it works conceptually that this one came back again.
-Jay G, Feb 2024
Track by Track
“Transgression Resurrection” – I cut the “Prelude to Sadness” intro because I’d grown a solid distaste for intros at this time and figured we should get right down to business. As with the songs on Knowing Then What We Know Now, I moved the growls to the background because I wasn’t confident in my ability anymore. That was probably a mistake as this song is a little funnier growled, but at least I didn’t go with anything that moved this any further into novelty territory than it already was.
When I played this for Andy—who played/wrote on the original recording, but not on this—he said he liked that I slowed it down a bit. I honestly didn’t mean to, but I used the acoustic version as the scratch track for this re-recording and forgot that I played it a little slower.
“Somberly Awaiting the End” — When we played this one live, we always did it with clean guitars instead of the piano of the original. So that’s what I did here. I also played this a little more in time than the original version, which actually might have taken away from the shambling zombie nature.
“The Sweet Sanctuary of Mortality” — I think this had the most to gain through re-recording, because this is closer to how it sounded in my head. I also switched out the overused Omen quote for the lyrics from the last track on This Faustian Flesh, “Post Script”. When we last did it live, I was already using the lyrics from Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” here, but I didn’t want Mark Knopfler to get mad if he heard this, so I didn’t use them here. By the time I shot The All Hallow’s Evil Halloween Spooktacular a few years later, I decided to roll the dice and use the “Money for Nothing” lyrics anyway. Hell, if they sued me, it could only put more ears on the song.
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