Of the Deadlands (2023) track-by-track

https://absentine.bandcamp.com/album/of-the-deadlands

I have struggled increasingly with executive dysfunction. Between 2020 and 2023, I really felt unable to get around to recording this album, despite not struggling to write songs. It's cruel to sum up such frustrating impotence in a quick sentence, but I'm writing about the actual output: after a constipated trickle of tracking across the years, I eventually unlocked the ability to record in a large batch of focus in November 2023, amassing all my Annual Leave, with material I'd written across years prior.

1. Deadland melody/"The Haunt"
This melody came to me while wandering literal rubble of Hanley. It was an era close to pandemic restrictions, but either way, that's what my home city is now. I know I am privileged compared to many other countries and localities, but I have witnessed our apocalypse. It was with this melody that the album gained identity, and form.

Pretentious subtitle is a result of Deadland Melody having multiple (3 is multiple) intended iterations, once intended to recur through the album. I dropped this when a separate near-instrumental track became canon, as I felt it was too many near-instrumentals and not enough variety. The chordset is similar to that of March of 2001 (and, thereby, Kayleigh). I could probably publish another of the Deadland variations at some point.

In a character I indulged on this album and will have to later decide if I'm morally comfortable with or just live with the self-righteousness of, the lyric enacts a sanctimonious extreme of my abandonment issues: I have experienced people keeping me nearby but consciously non-accessed. I feel ghostly and ghosted, & sometime I will stop being around, we hope! The character is toying with concepts of self-worth, and doesn't realise it's repulsive. It me.

Album cover photo is of some rubble not in Hanley but close to home, still in the Deadlands to me. This has since been cleared and there's a new, needlessly capitalist building, so I wonder if it's intellectually dishonest to highlight the rubble, but it was like that for ages, and many other places around here are, and it definitely describes the era of [de]composition.

2. Eye of the Darkness
Along the way I thought this feels like a Peter Murphy song. Ultimately, it doesn't, but those drums kinda work and there's something in the vampiric relentlessness of it. Somehow upping the sanctimony, this is a villain song, a gender reveal where the gender is doom. I intend at least two texts: one of the impudent attempt at mockery, like "you couldn't let yourself access me, Hence you'll be sad", but I intend to narratively earn this by the flipside where the narrator is consumed by insomnia and winter and loneliness by the same rubric.

Meant to be a strong leading track (allowing for its same-key buildup minute). I think some of the riffs here have a simple effectiveness that make for some kind of a hit song.

3. The Fork in Your Path
The start of the chorus has been in my head since... 2012 maybe? The rest of it is very simple chordally, allowing for the various solos, allowing for a jam structure. This took ages of procrastination to assemble, and has a patchwork construction but became whole enough. There's a David Bowie song quote in a little melody of it. I broke the working file while rendering this track, so it's one of the Absentine tracks I can't go back and edit without some eking and compromise.

Like everything, it's about wanting to die and lacking the executive function, but considering whether life actually has conscious choices in it (yes).

Since I don't have enough audience to rely on anyone noticing, and I like to applaud my own extensive genius, I must highlight that the described fork in one's path is revealed to be converging, not diverging. Tiiiines.

I was playing this live for a while but it's possible I can't be bothered now; too baggy to engage an audience with a solo performance?

One later track also discusses the possibilities beyond the deadlands.

4. Don't Leave Me (With All) This Time
I think I intend to remain proud of this as one of my best compositions. And though it's long and majestic, it's not got all that many layers. It was written on piano ages prior, & it was very difficult to know what to add to it. I eventually stumbled unto this bubbling synth voice, which I need to note down to reuse forever. Another essential trick present here I learned from Piper from Atrophy Wife: putting a tempo-locked decay on the drums. It makes for a trippy, but not trip-hop-tedious, drum rhythm. I think this earns its rhapsodic duration and structure.

Obviously it's a naked plea about the horrors of existence, particularly existence alone and alive, in contrast to the balm of understanding company. I appreciate the opportunity for emotional maturity offered by experiencing the same awful situation many times, and intend this song as the epic culmination of this feeling. It's also a conscious refutation-sequel to the Paper Truth song Leave Me, a decade later, when our somehow-alive protagonist gains the chutzpah to request a morsel of non-abandonment.

I used the internet-absorption and world-destruction of pandemic measures as convenient amplifiers of this feeling. It is not about one individual, but, narrowly pre-lockdown, I was trying to ask someone to engage with me more in-person, and I think they had the ability and will to do so, and I think of that when I play this. A lot of this lyric might precede that though: life felt like lockdown for ages before that.

Do you know the last minutes of being with someone, really fond, really keen, sure there'll be a next time soon, and experience teaches that you actually won't see them for years, maybe ever again?

5. The Ghost Gave Up
Last song written? I wrote it on [the day before] hokey holiday Halloween and it's got that word in it and a word from its glossary in the title, befitting the song's cheese. I consider this song to be really stupid in a way that doesn't matter because it's so propulsive. That wobbly synth lead's so tasty! The lyrics barely mean anything, but so does religion.

6. Succour Rumour
Would this track exist if not for the title pun?
maybe.

It's foreshadowing; it's a recontextualised distillation of a later track, but it's an essential expression of the "irresistible" appeal of connecting with people that a later track callously lacerates. It's intentionally insufficient as a 'song', because it's just a pre-echo, a few elements misremembered fondly.

7. Marx for Creativity
I think the first half of the chorus was with me as far back as 2013. I like to maintain tracks I can play entirely solo, but I like to not have many really bare tracks on my albums, so I hope this is sonically engaging enough.

I enjoy that the verses are chordally distinct with the same melody.

The wordplay in this feels almost too much for Absentine, but I've done it now, so that's what Absentine is.

8. Railway Out
I cringe at twelve-bar blues. There are some I can enjoy, but it is quite difficult because they're barely distinguishable; they barely count as songs. It's not the twelveness: it's the identikit structure. So what if a bluesy, twelve-bar arrangement was conducted with any kind of intellectual presence? And what if I tainted it with really cheap keyboard sounds and a silly lyric?

The way the chord sequence centres downwardness is kinda meant to sound like a battery running low, tamed ambition. Or it's not, but it happened and I want to applaud me.

The loose 'hometown' theme of the album returns fully here: I live in a way that involves aspects of isolation, and this involves the Beeching Cuts. I believe my town is one of the largest in the UK without a train station. Not that privatised rail is worth using.

I'm a bit insecure on this one because it's SO hokey, and outside of album context this might be interpreted as unintentional. And on the first beat you think you're hearing a stupid Depeche Mode demo, before it acclimatises. Someone used it, just at random, on a Tiktok, and I thought how cheap it sounded.

9. Agony×5
I have lived overwhelmed by constant chronic pain for years on years on years. I consider it difficult but salient to express in art: AAAAGGGH? What words are sufficient? I will keep trying, different aspects, and this is a classic one: existential existing, & the social taboos against escaping discomfort. The word 'agony' was looping in my head for a decade or so so I spilt it into music.

The guitar solo might be the most predictable one possible, but it's me successfully doing a guitar solo. Or half of it is. so allow me pride in that; I suck at lead.

Is this song too simple for my wheelhouse? No; I'm no better.

10. Come to Me
On this album, I meant to branch out, to express aspects that hadn't yet been parts of my songs, and here's ...sultriness, for some reason. I am losing my ability to play bass guitar due to carpal tunnel strain, so I ration it out, and something about the robotic 'rhythm section' feels correct on this one, like, an organic bass would be too loose and characterful. The piano's darting everywhere, and that's the main thing. Similarly to the bass thing, across the long-term I am becoming less able to play guitar, mandating a piano focus. This correlates with an increase in piano tech access, and tbh, there's barely anything it's possible for me to play on guitar that I've not already recorded, so I may as well do the one I'm good at.

I said 'sultriness', and some form of attraction is an intentional present aspect of this song. I am projecting a situation in which someone finds the narrator alluring but doesn't understand that they are invited. I am projecting a situation I self-understand that I've felt a lot, but that's after the distortions of ego and misinterpretation. I think sexuality can be inferred of the lyric and sound, which contrasts nicely with the impotence of the exasperated narrator: "You said yourself!". "Come" is a verb meaning "approach", and I sincerely do not mean any other reading as the song's own text, though of course I allow interpretation. This is very clearly a song of beckoning.

I allude to a fox on a Street. I've not seen a fox on a street of that name, but it fit the sound nicely & sounded more real than any real reference, maybe slightly feels Pulpy, and I don't want to foxdox myself. If you want the sexual reading, it's you who's a furry, but foxes do fuck a lot.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah" feels gutsy to include, but hopefully earned. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah?

There's an OOO near the end that I clearly pitch-shifted. I cringe; I'm sorry, I dunno why I figured that was acceptable. I think I hit it in a demo, left it for ages, couldn't use the demo take, couldn't make a better take.

I realised after publishing that "company comes for free" ought to have been in the lyric. Also noticed that IAMX's Song of Imaginary Beings might have influenced my chorus topline; not just the rhythm but the sibilance.

11. Scope
This album is about the frustration of post-industrial gloom. This song is about a contextual inverse. It results from my only 'Holiday' of the last decade, a trip to Brighton in an odd part of 2021 when we could actually go places. I had felt stifled by my small scope, and I quickly noticed across the seafront, just an environmental healthiness that is not present in my day-to-day life. I followed this with some instinctive determination to pursue escape, to actually find life bearable, but my health plummeted and I can no longer access that scope. It was true for a moment, and it came with this exact melody. It's obviously sad to accept life ain't gonna get better, & deal with the logically odd result of still being alive.

I think I don't want to play this song much. Just let it sound like this version.

12. Sucker Rumba
I don't understand myself to have much experience of anger. I don't generally consider it within my remit. I noticed an experience of anger in 2020, when I felt mistreated, jerked around (this bit recurring in my self-righteous writing). My reaction was unreasonable, & could've exploded at someone, blameful, entitled, unpleasant, but I took a long walk and it sounded like this. Why lash out when you can lash creative?

It was much later that I managed to record the song, but the majority of its form was in place from that tantrum itself. I do not ally with the vengeful character I was for a few minutes there, but I decided to allow it the airwaves. It's ugly: it's not likeable, even has blameful feminine references. and it's a good song.

Rhythmic influence from Kuusou Rumba, which I've since covered in English. Or maybe that just means, rhythmic influence from rumba.

"Chewing gum gets bitemarks" is nearly the stupidest lyric I've let through, but I think the rest of the stanza balances it out strongly, and chewing gum literally DOES get bitemarks in a context... but I hope there's a self-demonstrating redundancy in the vocal narrator claiming this: ain't gonna stop at thrice. I can't compute chewing-gum as edible, so I speak from inexperience, but also to relate to those disgusting used-up mouth-rejects on school desks.

"It's sorry but it's true" is one of the MANY times in my lyrics I refer to a cliché but change basically one consonant to deliver a distinct meaning. It makes me insecure to deliver it specifically enough that I'm not confused for actually indulging something literally not worth saying, but still, the discernment is the reward.

The vocal melody at the end feels really Placebo to me.

13. Reparations
This felt like the bleakest thing I'd ever done, but maybe I can outdo that these days.

I wrote this quickly to process the feelings of managing to reconnect with someone I had considered lost, and still not finding it reassuring. Noting the resonance of that feeling, I did my best to nail it in song, 'cause it's better as art than denoting someone responsible for my emotion. It's processing the futility of communication, of effort, of apology & understanding each other. I intend that the lyric is somewhat assertive, but the song's tone is resigned, hence commenting on how pointless assertiveness can feel.

14. My Motherhood
I recorded this album on the cusp of a friend choosing to quasi-move-in-with-me, in ways that quickly led to quite thorough hurt. The lyric was completed a while before this, over a year I think, but I recorded it last. It's so difficult for me to understand that My Motherhood isn't about my reaction to this person. Maybe it ultimately subconsciously is (to prior behaviour), among others. I dislike to pin the experience of a song unto one person: it feels unfair, a power imbalance. I can't claim I've never done that, but My Motherhood is literally not that. It's about all my children. It's Film on Girls. It's me self-analysing my nurturing complex, how I freak to care, and how that feels like an exhaustingly dramatic song where I'm protesting my position. I mean to critique my sanctimony as much as others' choices... well, in this iteration, not quite as much.

"Trust" rhymes with "dust".

Potential cringe, but I noticed long into writing this song that it has melodic things in common with popular song I'm Not Okay (I Promise). I studied that song to wonder if I need to change anything, and I think I gave up on making changes when I heard a Creeper song that's more directly imitative of that.

I enjoy the ability to use one of these kinda arpeggio drone verses: not all that musical, but something motorik about it, something for the megachorus to lift off from.

don't make me believe in you

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This was the first work I submitted to streaming services, and I regret it, at least in the regard of Spotify, but it's on shit like Amazon too. It was a move that conflicts with my general morals that I allowed myself to compromise on the interpreted wishes of others. I might retract this if possible but it's not like it gets listeners, so it doesn't feel actively harmful. I threw other works up similarly. Bandcamp forever.