Released July 27, 2010
Written, produced and performed by Jay Gironimi
Liner Notes
I did not know if I was ever going to make another All Hallow’s Evil album after With Regrets…, but I kept poking at a couple ideas and eventually had an EP worth of stuff. Then I kept going and ended up with a full album. It’s fine.
I wasn’t listening to a ton of full on metal at this point. According to my iPod, my top played albums from around this time were Cave In Jupiter, Mclusky Do Dallas, Jesus Lizard Goat, and Paper Chase Now You Are One of Us. The noise rock influence meant I tried to give the album a looser feel than previous, kind of shooting for the sound of an actual band playing together. Of course, it’s just me doing everything, but sometimes it’s fun to pretend.
I don’t listen to this one a lot. The copy I wrote at the time pitched it as “further explorations of what we think it would sound like if pop music led a misfit youth and listened to a lot of metal,” which was my way of saying I wanted to follow in the footsteps of bands that left metal behind but never lost the accent, like Anathema before they went full adult contemporary. Ever since No One is Forgiven, there’s been a point where I considered changing the name All Hallow’s Evil, but it always feels like all the good names are taken (we’ll cover that later…) so I stuck with it even when it didn’t fit. A lot of my favorite bands stuck with their name as their music changed, so I thought it was fitting to dig my heels in.
So now we get to the awkward part. I was incredibly lonely when I wrote this, so my concept was to write a bunch of vignettes about relationships. I thought it might be interesting to write about these things from the outside, like I was the fucking Watcher or something. It sounds painfully cheesy to type it now, but honestly it helped me work through a lot of stuff at the time. I don’t find this as difficult to listen to as Cold Taste… or We’re Going to Die…, but I do get a light “who the fuck does this guy think he is?” vibe that may or may not translate to other listeners.
Also, I was attempting to do a watercolor painting for the cover, but I didn’t use enough water and hadn’t actually painted in a about a decade at that point. It’s not all that professional looking, but when ever I went to Best Buy it seemed like ugly covers were in, so I went with it.
-Jay G, Feb 2024
Track by Track
“Under Dead Stars” – The main riff of this one was actually written for With Regrets…. It was going to be a song about Frankenstein and was about 90% done before I realized it suuuuucked. So I brought it back here and I think it ended up being the best song on the album even if I’m a little iffy on the lyrics.
“No Spark” – I read an article in Sound on Sound Magazine about the production of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” where someone from Stock Aitken Waterman explained that the bridge to that song was added real late in the process by flying in lyrics from other parts of the song, so when I couldn’t figure out what lyrics to write in the bridge of this, I just copy pasted the lines from the previous part and called it a day. Other than that, I remember writing this and thinking I was doing a great job of ripping off Cave In.
“Cameras in the Bomb Shelter” – I still wanted to do some metal-type stuff, but in a different context, which lead me to this. The lyrics are about two people in a fallout shelter who aren’t getting along, which I thought was real novel at the time, but looking at it now, I think I was just ripping off Night of the Living Dead.
“The Power of Negative Thinking” – I don’t know why I called this “The Power of Negative Thinking”. It’s about the Catholic Church scandal of the 2000s. I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to scream without disturbing the rest of the house, so when it was time to go, I tried to get through as many songs as I could. That means that sometimes I’m pushing my voice a little harder than I should and it starts to sound raw, like on this song. I don’t know if that’s good, but at least it’s something different, I guess.
“Jesus Christ Has a Plan for You” – This is me trying to write some Mclusky-style noise rock and missing the mark. I thought “fun blasphemy” was a neat angle at the time, but I’m not sure I made it all the way there.
“Sticking the Landing” – My original idea for this was to try and write a fugue where I’d start with something indie rock-ish and iterate on it until it ended up screaming. That didn’t work out for me, so I ended up trying to add a new part or variation every 8 bars. I got closer to that idea, though a couple of the 8 bar parts repeat later.
Lest you think I was doing heavy research, I definitely learned what a fugue was while reading a magazine in Borders that I didn’t have enough cash to buy.
“An Acceptable Loss” – I get this song confused with “As Long as It Hurts” from With Regrets…. I think “As Long as It Hurts” is probably the better song, but the solo is better on this one.
“Tell Me Everything” – I thought it would be a fun challenge to write a love song that wasn’t (overly) cynical, because at this point in my life I was probably the most cynical I’ve ever been about relationships. I think what holds this one back is that it’s not actually about anyone and I’m real good at feigning anger, but maybe not great at pretending to be in love.
“Scraped Away” – I accidentally used a riff very similar to this for “No Gods, Only Monsters” later, which is a better song. This is about someone who has trouble with relationships, so they give themselves a lobotomy. Kinda like a more base Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I read a book on Walter Freeman, the Michael Jordan of the lobotomy, so I didn’t want all that research to go to waste.
“Watchmaker” – I had a funny moment listening to this because I forgot I wrote lyrics to it. It was a instrumental for a very long time, but then I had the idea to repeat the phrase “I am not what I thought I was” with each word coming from a different sentence. The original idea was that it would be a round and the phrase would slowly emerge, but that theory didn’t work so well in practice. The title comes from a chapter in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, because I wanted the end to feel similar to the way Doctor Manhattan experiences time. I may come back to this idea when I feel like I can actually pull it off.
“But, is it Art?” – There’s a lot of different things happening here, though I’m not sure they gel together. I like a lot of individual parts though. I honestly wish I’d kept the static at the beginning going longer, but my idea was that it would morph into the drum part, but in practice it just sounds like it stops. The piano is on here because I listened to The Paper Chase’s Now You Are One of Us for like a week straight after I stumbled across it in Decibel’s top 100 albums of the 2000s.
Of course, the most important bit here is how I scream “LOOK OUT!” in tribute to Dio right before the outro. This was the year he died and not coincidentally, the year I got Murray from the Holy Diver cover tattooed on my arm with the words “LOOK OUT!”
“One Month” – Hey, finally a good instrumental All Hallow’s Evil song! I had a friend who loved this and said it was one of the best All Hallow’s Evil songs, which I took a little as “maybe you should stop singing”. One day I’m going to take that advice and make an instrumental album.
This song has an actual story, in that it’s supposed to follow a relationship from the sunny early days to the breakdown, so it switches from D to Dm roughly halfway through and starts speeding up. I wanted it to sound roughly like a panic attack by the end.
At one point there was a coda, where everything was okay again, but I got rid of it because it’s more fun to be a cynical bastard.
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