Not much to report this week: our Australia Day weekend band session went well and we finished Doll In The Dust as we expected. The chorus gave us the most difficulty, as we had planned on sticking to what we wrote in the original version, but it just wasn’t working out. We tried a few different things to give us the sound we wanted, and ended up using a different riff, but most of the original lyrics, so that was a good compromise.

The final structure will still need a bit of tweaking, but as with our other tracks, we’re going to leave it for now and come back to it later for final polish with a fresh view on it. I still feel like we’re getting better and better with every song though, so I have high hopes for our next track.

Another prolific week. We realised that we’re writing songs at the same rate as when we did Initialise, one song every 2 weeks, which is pretty cool.

We decided to go back to some of our old unfinished work, so we had a look at Doll In The Dust, which we wrote just before Rob went to Japan at the end of 2005. (After we finished Initialise we started writing some new tracks without actually getting together to rehearse: Jay would put down some drums in his sequencing program, Rob would put some guitar over the top, and I would write and record some lyrics to finish it off. Funnily enough, we managed to do this for 4 or 5 songs before Rob even left, and then didn’t do anything the whole time he was there)

The only thing we kept of the song was the chorus and the general themes; it’s interesting and exciting to hear the chorus that we’re used to from the old recording meshing so well with the new riffs and melodies we’ve written. The other major difference between our new version and the original is that it now feels like we’re evoking the emotions we tried for in the original, but ultimately failed to get across. It’s extremely gratifying to see that we’ve improved in that way.

So, I’ve actually lost count of how many new songs we have now, but I think Doll In The Dust will be our 8th. The plan is still to reach 12 new songs then cull it down to the best 8 and polish them up for release. At this rate it’s only 2 months away.

Well yes, as Ben has stated we have been working on yet another new track. This one has something extra special about it I think, and we are all happy with how it has been coming together… there is almost no doubt it will be making an appearance on the next album. I’m happy with where the riffs are going and having a great time belting them out, on all the new tracks.

Keep well all…

I’m embarassed that after writing about how much new content we were going to put up this year, we haven’t posted in two weeks. I meant later in the year.

We have been discussing what we’re going to do with the site and how we’re going to try to spread the word, and have come up with some interesting ideas that we’ll be working out over the next couple of months. I’m pretty excited about it and if we can get it to all come together I think it’ll end up being something pretty cool and a bit different.

We just finished another new song, this one is a bit of a self indulgent ‘theme song’, but it’s all in good fun and we’re all pretty happy with the way it’s come out. It looks like we may end up putting it second on the ‘album’ after Rising From The Flames, but those decisions will be made once we’ve got enough songs to choose the best from.

Other than that, we’ve been up to the usual shenanigans; I was hoping to do some video at some point to put up on the site as a bit of ‘making of’ thing, but I wanted to keep it even a little parent friendly, it would end up being half an hour of us laughing at our own dirty jokes, without the actual jokes.

We have 7 completed songs towards the album now, with the goal being 10-12 before we cull it down and get 8 tracks to polish and practise and record onto an album. If we keep up our current rate we should reach that goal in around 10 weeks, which I’m looking forward to. Next week I think we’ll probably start looking at some of our older unfinished songs we wrote before Rob went to Japan, and try to rework them and bring them into our newer style, so I’m looking forward to that.

Until next time…