Released March 8, 2011
Written, produced and performed by Jay Gironimi
Liner Notes
As became customary from No One is Forgiven on, after Under Dead Stars I wasn’t sure that I had anything left in the tank. I had a riff or two I was working on, but they just weren’t turning into songs. Then I caught Katatonia in a small room on the Night is the New Day tour and wrote “Darker Days” that night.
Listening back to this now, I think I should have pushed to make this a full album, but even though no one cared, I felt weird about having a large gap between releases, especially when I used to fire these things out. The difference being that I was a full ass adult at this point, with full ass adult problems. Still, I was semi-regularly dropping new one-off songs onto the old All Hallow’s Evil website, so if I waited, I probably could have had a full ass album. Something about the freedom of calling those “experiments” made them feel easier to write though, so who knows? (I collected the ones I still I have here)
I didn’t have a great cover, but I recently had a lung x-ray and they gave me a disc of images, so to the cover it went. I didn’t have a name for the EP either, so that x-ray is how “What Prayers Cannot Heal” became the title track because I thought it was funny to write “What Prayers Cannot Heal” over a picture of my mucus filled lungs.
As for the actual recording, my setup was mostly unchanged from Under Dead Stars—Pod X3 Live into Digi002 with BFD for drums—but I wanted to do something with a little more teeth, so I thickened up the guitars a bit.
-Jay G, Feb 2024
Track by Track
“Darker Days” – Here’s a fact about making music that involves high gain electric guitars: when the average person hears your music, they will say you sound like Metallica, even if you sound nothing like Metallica. Happens all the time. Except with this song, where I was told by someone they expected it to sound like Metallica and it didn’t. I’m pretty sure that was a nice way of saying “this sucks.” I think it’s pretty good though.
“Diplacusis” – I got the title of this from Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia. Diplacusis is a hearing disorder where the right and left ears hear the same sound at different pitches, hence the intro where the notes start a half step away and one bends into the other. I brought a little bit of that into the lyrics too, as it’s about how things can sound different depending on who’s doing the hearing and sometimes even your own brain will change the pitch.
I wrote and demoed this one on acoustic guitar and then I liked the performance so much that most of the melody lines are just the demo acoustic with distortion on it.
“What Prayers Cannot Heal” – I think this is one of the best All Hallow’s Evil songs. It’s also the first one in Drop C tuning for what that’s worth (all the other songs before this are in D standard).
This one was a real pain to sing. I deliberately wanted to write something I kind of had to force out, to add a bit of urgency to the more laid back pace of this one. But if for whatever reason I ended up having to play this live, I’d do that thing where the singer makes the audience sing the chorus, but it would be like 3 guys at a bar just staring at me while I hold a microphone out towards them.
“Wrong Together” – At some point, this song was twice as long, but to make up for some of my earlier sins, I became pretty brutal with the edit cursor. The intro solo was originally over a completely different riff, but I flew it over this one so the parts would sound a little “Wrong Together”. I’m not sure that intention comes through on this, but I was entertaining myself at least.
“Dead Agent” – For whatever reason, the used book store had a lot of books on cults and I was sucker for them, so I kept reading them. This is a fiction about leaving one.
I had religion on my mind here, because I kind of always did at this point. My lack of religion kind of went unspoken in my family, though if I was tested on it, I could get a pretty good fire going. I don’t know that anyone was helped by that, so I eventually learned to curb it, but if you want me to go for a bit, ask me about tithing.
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