Black Sheep Riot, "Zombie Barf"




Here is "Zombie Barf", a song that has taken me a particularly long time to finish due, I think, to the combination of the (unofficial but very real) upgrade of equipment and systems I've been through in the latest 1.5 years, plus the intricate nature of the particular song.

As I've mentioned in former posts, the songs in the upcoming Black Sheep Riot album will show a series of different layers of technical proficiency. This one would be in the layer 2, with 4 being the most modern. In other words, sonically, there are things about the final result that don't make me very happy (as a consolation, I try to think that perhaps this is the way it always is with your music; the stuff you put through the door is never the most perfected, because you already have something else in the works, and now you know how to do things better...)

But this song was way past overdue the "it it what it is" stage, and I decided to keep it and release it with its flaws and all because I like the composition and the message. I promise myself to re-record it at some point in the future, but it will have to be already with a proper human band: four or five musicians fully equipped and full of anger, fear and disgust against this shitty world of ours; not just one with a guitar and a laptop... By the moment it'll have to do, the feeling the song reflects is very real and, I think, other people can relate to it.

The song was composed in 2013, and entered the production process during my seismic year of 2016. Sadly such a long elaboration period hasn't made its theme any outdated. How could it, if precisely the song is about how things don't change, and we are living the constant regurgitation ad nauseam of a way of doing things that never worked in the first place. Watch one of those noir movies from the 1950s you can find in YouTube... it's abso-fricking-lutely depressing how little has everyday life changed in more than half a century; with the exception, that is, of the fact that by the mindless repetition of that same zombie routine, now we have overpopulated the planet and exhausted its resources to unprecedented  levels... and yet we keep at it. We live inside a model that was established short after WWII and hasn't been changed since then AT ALL; mindless consumption of products, pushed on us through sensory manipulation and peer pressure; those actors exciting our primal instincts from screens, the version 1 you have to throw away tomorrow because the flashier #2 has arrived... The same, the same, the same... A huge machine of solitude and waste and fear and death, changing along the way only the excuses, the official version, when required, so that it can just keep doing its thing. It didn't work when I was in my 20s and started to notice, and iterations of the same empty crap only make it worse and worse. We're eating the same barf time after time, and it's making us sicker and sicker.

This is the point of view of the song; partial, as the point of view of all songs must be, in order not to dilute in trying to be too many things at the same time. I also think there are grounds for hope in certain areas of our current reality, but they must be found elsewhere...

Anyways, I hope that you get a good slap out of the song, and that it stands as a piece on its own, with this commentary being just a bonus addition for those interested. The lyrics are influenced, I think, by the "Mike Patton school of lyrics": metaphors and similes that would be perhaps too far fetched and over the top on their own as poetry, but that (hopefully) work well with the intuitive addition brought in by the music. The vocals have a lot of Dead Kennedys, obviously; you can sing "Califorrr-nia...über-aaalles" on top of the verse quite comfortably, although apart from that I take things in another direction. There is also some Fugazi and Black Flag there, a bit of the first Megadeth album in the vocals, perhaps some Metallica in the final breaks... The list could go on and on because that's usually the "acid test" for my songs; if a song of mine reminds me a lot to X, that's plagiarism. But if the song reminds me at the same time a lot to Y, Z, A, B, R, S, T, U... as it cannot be so many things at the same time, it means to me it's just influences... And this one past the test because it reminds me a lot of other good music, and I also feel I'm portrayed in it (perhaps the other condition necessary...)

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