Released August 15, 2002
Written, performed and produced by Jay Gironimi and Andy Forbes
Liner Notes
“Two Clowns Walk into a Coffeehouse” or “Play the Zombie Song!”
The Students Performing Arts Guild at my alma mater—Three Rivers Community College—used to hold open mic coffeehouses every semester. For whatever reason, my buddy Andy and I thought it would be funny to show up and do a jazzy version of Cannibal Corpse’s “Skull Full of Maggots.” Though I have an allergic reaction to ironic covers, this was mostly a punk ass way to infiltrate what was probably a pretty fun event for everyone and “freak out the squares” by having backup vocals sung by Boris the Talking Skull.
Boris the Talking Skull was a Halloween item I purchased at Walmart specifically because the box advertised you could change your voice by speaking into Boris’s “micro-bone”, a cheap microphone that looked like a femur someone had resized without containing proportions. When speaking into the micro-bone, your voice would then emanate from Boris himself, albeit a little fuzzier and slightly lower. His jaw would move relatively in time with his speech. It was among the best $20 I ever spent. The cover of “Skull Full of Maggots” was not very good or clever, but the Boris gimmick worked well enough that somehow Andy and I eventually took over hosting duties at the coffeehouses.
Not content with covers, I eventually wrote a song specifically for the coffeehouse, “The Sweet Sanctuary of Mortality”. It was an acoustic ballad about a zombie who just wanted to die. I swear that seemed like a fun idea two years before the Dawn of the Dead remake came out.
Somehow the idea of a ballad about zombies turned into a concept album about zombies, which eventually settled into a small EP about zombies. Hence, The Zombie E.P. was recorded in a mid-August week while my family was on vacation and I was finishing up the last Hymns for a Damned Race sessions.
It’s the first All Hallow’s Evil recording with synths on it, though in this case “synths” means a $200 Casio keyboard Andy’s sister had recently purchased. You can hear all 200 of those dollars in the sound, though we tried to layer a bunch of different instruments to mask it.
This is an odd piece and when we were working on it, I never really brought up if it was an All Hallow’s Evil album or not. It seemed like a good gimmick though, so I slapped the logo on the cover. I’ve perhaps come to view that as a mistake now, mostly because it means All Hallow’s Evil has a “comedy” tag on Metal Archives and I’ve read at a couple of reviews of later albums that say something to the effect of “finally they leave the comedy behind.” Still, in most of the few live shows we did, we started dressing like zombies and this remains the only All Hallow’s Evil work anyone has ever requested (it was one girl who yelled “play the zombie songs!” after the first of three live shows we did for This Faustian Flesh, but still).
Speaking of the cover, that’s me in a zombie mask I bought at Spencer’s Gifts the previous Halloween and a “living severed hand” gag I bought at the Halloween store when I was 12. I’m standing shirtless in front of the headlights of a 1990 Dodge Caravan. I thought it would be funny to have MS Paint style skin, but now that I think of it, it probably would have been funnier if I just left the picture as is. Eh, you live, you come back, you learn.
-Jay G, Feb 2024
Track by Track
“Prelude to Sadness” – I’d love to lie to you and say the title is a play on the 1948 Italian film Prelude to Madness, but I really took it from the “Prelude to Madness” that comes right before Savatage’s “Hall of the Mountain King”. Some of those movie samples I was able to download from fan sites and what not, but for a couple I held a micro cassette recorder up to the speakers of my tv and then played them into the computer. I probably should have used the micro cassette for all of them, because it has a bit more charm.
The movies sampled are (in order):
“…the beauty of obscenity” – The Satanic Rites of Dracula
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara” – Night of the Living Dead (I swear this seemed novel at the time)
“In God’s name…” – Satanic Rites of Dracula
“Do I look like someone…” – Hellraiser Bloodline
“You will pray for death…” – Satanic Rites of Dracula (I think…)
“Your suffering will be legendary…” – Hellbound: Hellraiser II
“The blackest eyes…” – Halloween
“When the Jews return to Zion…” – The Omen
“Jesus wept” – Hellraiser
“When there’s no more room in Hell…” – Dawn of the Dead
“Transgression Resurrection” – I was listening to a lot of Mr. Bungle at the time, so that’s why this one is so odd. We thought we were real fuckin’ clever with that dance break. And stacking all the parts at the end…couple of real geniuses at work. Still, there’s a naiveté I find kind of charming here, even if I think the song is a little too joke-y to actually be funny.
“Somberly Awaiting the End” – This would have been so much better if I could sing back then. I sound like Frank Sidebottom for most of it. The zombie choir is probably too cute of an idea to really work, but a couple of decades with give you some hindsight. Pretty sure that main chord progression was Andy’s, because he used to play it anytime there was a piano within a 100 yard radius.
“The Sweet Sanctuary of Mortality” – Pre-2008 or so, if someone knew an All Hallow’s Evil song, it was this one, even if almost everyone called it “Zombie Army”. As noted above, this was the first song written here and probably my favorite one.
There are at least 3 rip-offs here worth noting. I listened to a lot of Savatage when I was younger and I was always fascinated by their vocal rounds, so the outro is an attempt at that. And that little lead break in the second chorus is a rip on the Mozart break in Spinal Tap’s “Listen to the Flower People”. Finally, the quote at the end is obviously from The Omen, but we probably wouldn’t have used it if Iced Earth’s “Damien” didn’t have it first. Fun fact: two decades later, having an Iced Earth phase would be embarrassing for even more reasons than their lyrics.
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