Tag Archives: Despair

New Music Is Available!

So … when I’m not writing, it seems, I’m writing music. Whilst The Redemption of Erâth has been on pause for a few months, I’ve been revisiting some music I created between 2019 and 2021 – an album of symphonic metal called Despair.

Recently, I upgraded the orchestral sample libraries I use, and re-recorded all five tracks of the album using EastWest’s phenomenal samples and sound engine. Whilst the final result may not sound exactly like a live orchestra, it’s (in my mind, at least) pretty damn close.

So without further ado, I present to you: Despair, a suite of orchestral heavy metal in five parts, channeling the deepest, darkest emotions of human nature!

1: Depression

Depression is the first track from Despair, opening with quiet strings and horns, building to crescendo before the crushing heaviness of the metal band comes crashing in. Segueing to a softer, melodic verse section, things eventually take off with pounding guitars and drums, intertwining a full orchestra through rises and falls until a heavier recapitulation brings us to the outro – soft and quiet again, building into a sudden wall of orchestral noise and a thundering drum punctuation that leaves on a cliffhanger, waiting for the next track.

2: Anger

Bursting in with furious strings and brass, Anger ups the pace and energy tenfold, a full orchestra blasting away until dropping out suddenly to allow for the metal band to take over with churning, grinding riffs. Never giving in to a slower beat, the song carries forward in a kind of scherzo-and-trio format, building to a climax before a middle section that leads again with devastating riffs, before recapitulating to the opening. Finally drawing to close with every instrument at full tilt, Anger is a crushing ode to unbridled fury.

3: Fear

Opening with a rumbling, unsettled bass line, Fear is deliberately the most disjointed piece of the suite, wavering between numerous time and key signatures throughout. There are moments of melody interspersed between longer passages of chromatic atonality, but the overall mood is one of anxiety and unsettled, indescribable fearfulness.

4: Grief

Almost entirely orchestral (the band comes in only briefly at the very climax of the piece), Grief takes us through a journey of pathos and heartbreak, with sweeping strings and devastating horn lines drawing influence from the raw emotion of the greatest of classical composers – Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and more. From the soft, distant opening to the thundering timpani that bring the song to a heaving climax of sadness, Grief will tug at your heartstrings and (hopefully) give you chills at all the rights moments.

5: Despair

The epic conclusion and title track, Despair opens with a hammering timpani roll and huge, crashing chords from the band and full orchestra – nearly a full two minutes of opening to a 20-minute track that winds through many layers of instrumentation before coming to a quiet close halfway-through, only to burst back into life with grand horns and strings sustaining the melody over churning guitar riffs. Through a varied development we finally return to a grand reprise of the opening, announced with a huge gong crash, before moving on to the closing of the song, and the album, with a revisiting of the very opening of Depression, bringing the full album to a close.

Drab

I feel … drab. Everywhere I look, everything I do, just … drab.

I like the word, ‘drab’. It has such an aura of dismal, abject misery, of blandness, of boring nothingness, and it sounds exactly like it should. My life is drab.

It also sounds kind of funny, but that’s besides the point.

I slept today. It was my day off from work, and I neglected to set an alarm (didn’t think I’d need to); I didn’t wake up until almost 11 AM, well past my scheduled therapy session at 10 AM. (I kind of regret that, because I feel like I really needed therapy today.) Later, I took a nap that lasted three more hours. I really just slept all day, pretty much.

My days are like this, more or less; on work days I go to work, and on off days I sleep. When I’m at work I want to sleep, too.

On. Off. On. Off. Either sleeping, or wanting to sleep.

And all the while, everything remains drab.

Very, very little holds my interest lately. I don’t like listening to music anymore. I don’t like watching TV anymore. I don’t like reading anymore. I don’t like writing anymore. Existence is plain, boring, and drab. Even as I sit and write this post, I wonder why; who’s going to read it? Who’s going to care?

I post chapters from my fantasy novels because no one would otherwise read them. Have I given up there, too? Eh … probably not. I’ll keep posting them, I’ll keep writing them, but … just why.

Why, why why?

Drab.

I’d say it’s enough to make me cry, except there’s really nothing to cry about. Nothing’s really that wrong. The world carries on, and it will with or without me. I don’t matter. Not mattering doesn’t bother me, either. It’s just another proof that there’s not much point in doing anything. No immediacy, no sense of urgency; nothing really has to get done now or else the world will end; life doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t matter.

It’s just drab.

I’ll probably go lay with the cat in a bit; that always helps soothe my mind.

In any case, I was able to reschedule therapy for Thursday; I hope it helps.

It’s all so drab.

Mid-Life Crises, and the Naivety of Youth

About a decade ago (actually, almost exactly a decade ago), I set out to do something I thought was, at the time, completely impossible: I wanted to write a novel. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know what about, and I didn’t really know what it would take to accomplish such a thing, but I knew then that, as I grew out of my twenties, that I wanted to have written a book before I turned 30.

Continue reading →