Here's a new Deformed Elephant Surgery song, with a new guitarist/bassist, Joey Mousepad!
Download from Bandcamp, CLICK HERE.
Here's the new album! I'm really proud of it musically, since it's probably my most consistent album in terms of sound (with basically just one outlier) and I feel like it really works as a whole better than as individual songs. I also tried some new things, while doing some things I hadn't done in a while, and it just ended up being how it ended up being. The lyrics are by far the most political I've ever written (although not in every song), which is of course not everyone's cup of tea, but I just had to do some venting. So, yeah, there are a lot of leftist and anti-authoritarian lyrics on this album... and some other stuff.
6. Parastasis
7. Webs and Nets (feat. Jared Spry)
8. Over Clay and Blood, Flowers and Fire
10. Penetralia
12. The Dolour of Pomegranates
13. Crucession
14. Umbra
Click on song titles to listen on Youtube, or click here for the full album.
Free download on Bandcamp, as always. Also on Mediafire if you prefer that.
And now I'm going to ramble a little about the lyrics of all the songs. I'll keep it reasonably short, though:
"Coronation" is about, well, you know, the coronavirus. Mostly about how it'd already be over if politicians didn't care more about making money than saving people's lives, and how it's been used by authoritarians to pass bullshit restrictions that'll last long after corona while doing little to nothing to actually stop corona itself.
"Apotropaic Atrocities" is about people assuming the worst about each other, always picking the most uncharitable interpretation about everything, and how everyone is a part of society, etc.
"Blind Basileiolatry" started out being just about the Taliban, obviously against them. It kinda expanded and eventually ended up also generally being about how people justify and glorify violence, oppression, etc. with religion and nationalism and other bullshit... but also about how spirituality could be a force for good, if different religions got along and agreed to disagree.
"Cancerous Chrysopoeia" is just a song about the destruction of the environment, and how no matter what individuals do, as long as governments and big companies keep polluting, it's not going to stop getting worse. Might sound pessimistic, but I mean, I'm convinced rich assholes would keep killing the planet even if only for their own amusement.
"Dignified Dogmata" is about people who (pretend to) self-flagellate over every little thing they or their ancestors have ever done and who constantly give others shit for shit they or their ancestors have done, and who pretend to have an impeccable moral compass while at the same time being OK with all kinds of injustices as long as they don't get their hands dirty, and are narcissistic and high-and-mighty and all that stuff. You know the type.
"Parastasis" isn't political at all, it's mainly inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy (or at least the Inferno part of it... which I read once forever ago so I don't remember much), and generally about Hell in a kinda ambiguously erotic way? Or something like that, it's the most abstract song on this album as far as lyrics go.
"Webs and Nets" is mostly about cyberbullying and catfishing, with an angle like... go ahead and catfish me, I don't care if you're lying, and it's fine if you cyberbully me, you'd only be hurting yourself in the end; but also pretty explicitly about how it's still bad. Obviously I don't want to be cyberbullied or catfished, so it's mostly just edginess... but there's a little bit of truth to it, as in if it's very obvious trolling it doesn't really bother me, and I don't even want a real-life relationship so if someone was catfishing me, it wouldn't be that big a deal.
"Over Clay and Blood, Flowers and Fire" is just an anti-authoritarian song, with some stuff that isn't really obviously political but also some that's pretty obvious. It doesn't matter much what kind of economic policies an oppressive government has, and even less whether authoritarian individuals are right-wing or left-wing, because authoritarianism is bad. It may well be more effective than non-authoritarianism, but that doesn't make it good.
"Elusion and Somnia" is just an imaginary love song, or... not necessarily a love song, but a song about beautiful women. I'll admit it's inspired by real-life women, who I never even tried to date or anything, and in hindsight I'm almost certainly happier because I didn't. I don't mean that in a sexist way, it's not like I'd try to actually date a dude either. But writing weird lyrics about love and sex? Of course!
"Penetralia" is about priests molesting kids, obviously condemning it. I wrote the lyrics after it was in the news how the Catholic church in France had known about the stuff going on there for decades but kept covering it up, which isn't even surprising anymore but still manages to piss me off. It's not just Catholic priests, either, and it's like... maybe repressing your sexuality like that isn't healthy, and leads to shit like this? But the song is just a "fuck you" to priests who molest kids.
"Sanctum Sanctorum" is just an outro to "Penetralia". Originally it was one song, with the outro being just ambient guitar stuff, but I decided to add harpsichord, piano and organ and split it into a separate song.
"The Dolour of Pomegranates" is a song inspired by Salvador Dalí's painting Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening and the film The Colour of Pomegranates. So, yeah, it's kinda surrealist with some "symbolic" stuff as well, but also specifically about that post on Tumblr where someone thought pomegranates were gore. That post is something that I think about from time to time.
"Crucession" is, probably unsurprisingly, about priests. Yeah, again... but this one's about their conservatism, and more focused on Orthodox and Lutheran priests who pick and choose their bigotry specifically so that they can remain homophobic (while coming off as kinda homoerotic themselves with their passion for Jesus), and in some other ways adapting to the changing norms to appeal to people. Also how they're clown-like in a way, you know?
"Umbra" is about sleep paralysis, but in a way compares conservatism to sleep paralysis. It's not a necessary interpretation, though. Thankfully it's been a while since I've had proper full-blown sleep paralysis, but even the lesser form where there's no hallucinating sucks, and my literal first memory is of sleep paralysis.
You might wonder why I don't just publish the lyrics, but... nah. That's not something I want to do with most of my music even if the lyrics are meaningful, because it's still pointless and it's not like the lyrics are actually deep or anything. If you can make them out, you can, but if not, that's not detracting from the music. Unless you think it is, but in that case my music probably isn't your cup of tea anyway for the most part.
ANYWAY, if you listen to the album, I hope you enjoy it! If not, that's fine too. It definitely is my most "normal" and simple album, but at the same time my most "sloppy" so that can probably be offputting even for the few people who usually like my stuff haha.
Today, I finished writing the sequel to Moult. It's called Moult and Purify and it's one of the stories I'm most proud of. It does get a bit weird compared to the first part, but I don't think it ended up being too weird or going too far off the rails or anything like that. Well, I mean, maybe for some people it ruins the first one even if they liked that, but... eh, that's how sequels work.
There are kinda spoilers in the following ramblings, but not really.
A big struggle was avoiding infodumps while including at least some kind of explanation of what happened in the first part, and in the end I decided to make it have a couple of infodumpy parts but make sure they also deepen the mystery in a way.
Also, the plot went through two major revisions. Honestly, the first version was so batshit insane that when I read it after it was close to "finished", I just thought "wtf did I just write?" and knew I had to rewrite basically two thirds of the whole thing. Even the notes started getting ridiculous, to a point where I was coming up with characters that lived 300 years ago and had zero relevance to the plot just to keep track of the timeline... I shit you not, the first version went so over the top with everything and in such a different direction from the original "Moult" that I'm embarrassed I wrote it as a sequel to that.😂
Oh, and there was a part where I first wrote this because it just had to be written:
Will there be a third part? Uhh... I do have a potential plot in mind for that, but I'm not sure yet.
This album is just remastered versions of the more black metal-leaning songs from "Numen", a few of them have minor differences but that's literally it. The actual new album is coming soon, I promise. Just figured I should release this first, since, you know, it's less important.
01. Enlightenment and Annihilation
02. The Night the Sun Will Set in the East
03. Ouroboros
05. Adorcism
Click on song titles to listen on Youtube. Alternatively, the full album in one video.
Download from Bandcamp: click this
The only differences any of the songs have from the original versions is that "Feeding the Demiurge" doesn't have the jazzy part, and "Adorcism" has new vocals at the end.
All of the songs are brickwalled to hell and back, because why would I do remastered versions of them if I wasn't going to brickwall them? You might say "wtf they were already brickwalled" and you wouldn't be wrong, but now they're doubly brickwalled! So if you want your metal to leave your ears ringing, this might just be your cup of tea. If you don't want that, then you may want to avoid this.
Some time ago, I decided that someday I'd make a proper death metal album. I'd also decided that I'd make an album with lyrics entirely in Japanese. Well, this album is technically neither of those things, since it's not entirely death metal and not all of the lyrics are in Japanese, but it's close enough that I feel like those goals are fulfilled. Doesn't necessarily mean I won't set one or both of those goals for myself again, and actually sticking to it 100%, but I don't think that's very likely to happen.
(Click on song titles to listen on Youtube, or click here for it as one video.)
This album had a lot of "firsts" for me; the first album with actual bass on all tracks, the first album with five-string bass (but not on all tracks), the first album with sanshin (but only in three tracks), the first album where I recorded guitars directly to my interface without pedals (except for compression and noise gate), the first album where the process of making songs was more "traditional" rather than just recording random shit and mashing it together, and I imagine the first album I can actually call metal without pissing somebody off.
...unless it's still not metal enough thanks to the weird psychedelic parts, the random jazz part and synth bit in the third track, the borderline nu metal-ish fourth track, the entirety of the seventh track and the fact that it's not released physically because everybody knows it's not metal unless it has a limited cassette run of 666 copies signed with blood.
On Bandcamp
So, here's my newest album! I'm really proud of how it turned out.
1. Ouroboros
2. The Day the Sun Will Rise from the West
4. Grotesque Florescent Symphysy
6. Numen
7. Adorcism
9. Iridescent Manifestation of the Celestial Serpent
10. The Night the Sun Will Set in the East
11. Enlightenment and Annihilation
Listen the full album on Youtube or as a playlist, or click on the song titles to listen to them individually.
Hopefully someone likes it!
Since there's a limit of 200 free downloads a month on Bandcamp and that has run out three times, I figured it's time to have somewhere that people can download all the DES albums from without having to go on potentially shady sites.
Currently, the entire discography is free to download and there is no option to pay (except for the latest single but you still shouldn't pay for it). If you want to support DES, don't.
With regards to the older stuff, please keep in mind that I started DES as a solo project when I was 15 in 2009 so everything before around 2012-2013 is absolute shit and cringily trying way too hard, etc. I regret a lot of early lyrics, song titles, etc. but the past can't be changed, and judging the late 2000s' and early 2010s' myspacegrind/myspacecore and post-myspacegrind scene(s) by 2020s' standards is kinda stupid. Don't get me wrong, it was fun at the time to just go for maximum edge and not care about anything for shits and giggles without thinking ahead for longer than a week, but it was a different time. If you like early DES, whatever, but if it's BECAUSE of the lyrics... well, please keep that to yourself and don't tell anyone about DES, ok?
I've decided to remove the download links to the first three albums. If you're into goregrind, there are thousands of artists out there who still do exactly that same type of shit, and don't try to tell me "nooo your early stuff was unique" because it was literally the most basic myspacegrind you ever heard... in fact, the worst. But since those are the albums you'll find everywhere when you google DES, unfortunately that's the legacy.
