Chaos Of Life came together very quickly for us.  We went from “Let’s do another song before our studio time runs out” on Wednesday night to completing it by the Friday morning.  So just over a day.

After dinner on the Wednesday night, we figured we had one full day remaining in the studio.  We also had another couple of hours after that (our time ran out lunchtime on the Friday).  We figured we’d have a couple of hours to see if we could come up with a riff.  A quick and dirty recording meant we could go back to watching Metallica’s Some Kind Of Monster video and go to bed with this idea to develop.

We re-listened to the riff in the morning and decided it’s worth keeping.  Plus we kept reminding ourselves of the goal of quickly bringing a song together.  We had the framework of a vocal melody and a verse-and-a-half of lyrics.  So while the tracks were being recorded in one room, lyrics were being written in another room.  I say “another room”, but it was from the dining room to the living room so it’s a technicality.  Not knowing exactly how the structure was going to go, about six verses were written with each on a separate page, so the final order could be decided on the fly.  And of course each page had a “ye-ah” or “womahn” reference from Metallica’s influence.  We ended up using about half the lyric sheets, with no Metallica references recorded (not even for out-takes).

The solo was done in pieces – neither of us are decent lead guitarists.  It got to the point where one played the guitar and the other operated the wah pedal.  But we bashed it together, and looking back it sounds good.  Another difficult part was playing the shakers – four minutes in one take!  And no-one laughed or coughed or ruined the take!

Mixed and mastered in a couple of hours, and now you have the song invading your ears.  Enjoy!

We are big Rammstein fans.  And so our natural songwriting creativity takes us to places that just scream for German language vocals.  The big problem is, we can’t speak German, so we’ve done our phonetic best.  And it sounds pretty good …. to an untrained ear.

There was something I read about how Kurt Cobain wrote very simple, child-like lyrics for Nirvana songs.  No idea how true that was, but I didn’t put much thought into these lyrics.  The opening line, “Es leizer, zu leizer” is a simple war movie cliché – “It’s quiet, too quiet”.

When I got to what became the chorus, I thought about those old war movies, about how the main character was able to overcome the seemingly impossible foe.  It got me thinking about the one adversary they could not overcome – the weather.  This goes back to the Kurt Vonnegut book Cat’s Cradle, how the scientist asks the general what one thing he would like to change about combat, and the general responds he’d like to remove mud from the battlefield – it gets everywhere and ruins a lot of things.  Anyway, getting off topic, random phrases and German translations later, Blitz Bringen.

I haven’t talked about the music much.  There’s not much to say, really.  Listen to a lot of Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein and KMFDM and you’ll get the influences for this song.

So, Takin’ The Fall …. This was a big rolling song for us, the kind of song to crank up in the car, wind the window down, put your elbow on the sill and just hammer it.  Who cares where you’re going, so long as you are gettin’ there fast.

We’ve always had an off-beat sense of humour, and we couldn’t think of a way to start the song.   We called in a friend of ours to do a quick voice-over introduction and a couple of sound effects later, we had our start.

The lyrics of this song are obviously political, but I love that you can’t really tell which side they are on.  You could be from either side of the political spectrum, and the words make sense.  What side are we on?  We’re happy you can’t tell.

There were some tricky bits about this song, and it took several takes to sort out the ending.  The middle break-down section also took some thought, but in the end it all fits well together.

The whole reason this song was written was so we had a definitive way to start a show.  That’s it.

The horn blasts at the start were there to get your attention in a hurry and let you know the show is starting.  It’s the “call to action”, the rallying point if you will.  After that, the soft synth sets a bit of ambience for the drum machine and synth bass to come in on.  The horns have got your attention, but the soft drum machine and synths are making you curious for what’s about to happen.

And them the crushing guitars and bass come in.  Now the song has started for real.

The early lyrics are soft and low, close up and right in your ear.  We’re singing only to you.  The end of the world is full of beauty ….

It seems this song gets to the end very quickly, but three minutes and fifteen seconds have passed by before you hear the guzheng play the melody at the end.  This song has set the stage perfectly, and with the last note left hanging in the air for the next track to come along and take over.

Hello.  We are Procrastinator.  And it’s about time we did something about this.

We’ve been a band for the last 28 years.  We have had a couple of different names, but the camaraderie has existing since 1996, so that’s when the band started.  A few line-up changes here and there, a drifting of the ways for some, but the band never went away.

We have had our opportunities, but we were never in a rush to captialise on them.  We’ve written some really good music, and then struggled to write lyrics, so we promptly moved onto the next thing that is a lot more interesting than a song that’s being a pain in the ass.  We’ve had our approached from “industry people” and by the time we’ve responded to them, they’re off looking at the next new shiny thing.

But that’s OK.  We can wait.  It’s what we’ve been doing, and what we’ve become pretty good at it.  Maybe you can wait with us.  Who knows.