The parts have all been recorded and put in their places. The tracks have been mixed and balanced and equalized and the composition has gelled into 100% pure power-prog. The mix has been mastered with a light hand and attention to the dynamic as well as a desire for a heavy and powerful sound. And the artwork, oh man the artwork, is probably good enough to sell a hundred discs on its own. The wait has been worth your while.

The CD is out of my hands now and in the hands of the men who are going to crank out the copies of the best Fireaxe work to date. If all goes well I should have the finished products back in a couple of weeks, but there always seem to be complications and so I won't accept orders until the CDs meet my standards. I'll send out a short e-mail when they are ready, so for now you will have to be satisfied with reading about the new CD instead of hearing it.

The Artwork

After ambivalent reactions to the covers of the last two Fireaxe CDs, "Food for the Gods" and "Lovecraftian Nightmares", I realized that the problem was that I needed to get my ugly mug off of the cover and replace it with the visage of some incredibly beautiful woman, such as the case was with "A Dream of Death". So instead of a portrait of me getting sacrificed to various ideologies or one of me about to get eaten by something which must not be named, this time you will be treated to a stunning and fiery portrayal of the Dark Goddess herself in all her malevolent glory, painstakingly illustrated by none other than yours truly.

I know what you're thinking, that perhaps I should have shelled out some cash and had a professional artist do the cover art. I concur. After taking a lot of flack over the cover art for "Victory or Death" it was clear that I either needed to work a lot harder at being a better artist or hire someone who did that kind of thing for a living. I asked an old friend if his wife would be interested since I'd seen a number of impressive color pieces that she'd done on her website but unfortunately that didn't go anywhere, so I took a crack at it myself, figuring that if I fell short of what I wanted that I could hand it off to someone else to transform it into something awesome. Well, to my surprise I didn't fall short. I'm not sure what happened between the release of "Food for the Gods" and when I started work on the new CD but apparently I acquired some serious skills in the graphic arts category. Okay, maybe they aren't that serious, I mean, I'm not going to make anyone forget Frazetta or Vallejo, but I'm pretty sure that the days of getting snide comments about the cover art are over.

Simply put the Dark Goddess is beautiful. She looks like a combination of Kali, Pele, and a drow priestess with eight arms, jet black skin, and a pair of brilliant burning wings. She might make you think about the line from "Black Knight" that I quoted at the top:

"I watched my beloved angel shed a tear for my lost love, and become a demon goddess with wings of burning fire."

After which you might pull out your copy of "A Dream of Death" which has an angel shedding a tear on the cover and place them side by side. Nifty symmetry don't you think?

Anyway, I didn't want to try and squeeze the Dark Goddess into the puny 5" by 5" space provided on a standard CD insert. Such a tiny portrait would probably be considered an insult and you do not, I repeat, YOU DO NOT want to get the Dark Goddess angry at you for any reason, so I decided to go with a six-panel foldout booklet and allow her to luxuriate inside a generous 15" by 10" domain. That's roughly the size of an old album cover for those of you who are old enough to remember them and also those of you who've seen any of those ancient artifacts. I always loved it when bands put out albums with brilliant cover art since it added to the listening experience. I've wanted Fireaxe CDs to be the same way and I've tried hard to provide artwork that matched the style and themes of the music even if the result was a little too amateurish at times. This time around I think that I nailed it, but I'll let you be the judge.

If it helps loosen up your purse strings, the Dark Goddess appears completely nude, save for her necklace of skulls. Don't worry, they don't cover anything up and neither does her hair, which is another trick that artists use to frustrate their male viewers. Also, she does not look like the statue of Kali that appears in the "Food for the Gods" booklet in the section containing "The Servant of Pain". No, in my imagination the Dark Goddess is not a skinny old hag, instead she is beautiful enough to appear in the pages of Playboy, which is the source of the pictures of the women who I modeled her after. Of course, I had to use magazines for that purpose considering that it's nearly impossible for me to get a beautiful woman into my apartment for any reason let alone have her take off her clothes and stand still for hours while I draw pictures of her. But then, one of the benefits of using magazines was that I could raid the stash that I collected as a teenager in the eighties. That was back when the magazine took pictures of "the girl next door" instead of "the ho down the street". So, needless to say, the Dark Goddess does not have implants.

The Sound

Between the time when I recorded "Food for the Gods" and "Eternal Devotion to the Dark Goddess" I made a few upgrades to my digital studio, most notably the addition of a Neumann TLM-103, one of the best cardioid microphones in the business along with a state of the art vocal processing unit. That was a big step up from my old microphone and the result was that my vocals on the new CD sound extremely clear, warm, and strong. That combined with a solid year of practice resulted in a dramatic improvement in the quality of Fireaxe vocals. I no longer see my singing as a liability to the music and in fact in many places I feel that it is an asset. As usual I do a lot of different styles of vocals on the CD, from clean to gruff to quiet to screaming and everywhere in between. I even had to do a few parts which I wanted to have sung by a female vocalist and I feel that I pulled them off pretty well too. So maybe, just maybe I'll be free of reviewers' snide remarks about Fireaxe vocals once and for all too.

Another improvement was the guitar sound on the CD. In the past I had a strong tendency to pump up the high-middle frequencies on the guitars so that I could get the sharp, crisp sound that I wanted. The trouble with that was that the sound often ended up too thin and "crunchy" and didn't sound too good on some speakers and systems, especially cheap ones. So this time around I put a lot of work on trying to clean the "muddiness" out of the guitar tracks without sacrificing the sharp sound that I was looking for. It's not as easy as it seems. There are about forty different knobs, sliders, and buttons that you can tinker with between the guitar and the final mix so triangulating on the correct formula takes a long time. Plus, since I need to record directly into the board instead of through an amp and microphone I face the additional problem of needing to clean all of the fuzziness out of the signal that an amplifier does naturally. It's quite a challenge, but this time around I feel that I've got a really strong and balanced sound from the guitars, especially in the solos, where the tone is rich and smooth. I was also able to get the bass guitar sound to emerge out of the mix without being intrusive or overwhelming and it rounds out the sound rather well. Slowly but surely I'm learning all the tricks of the trade.

The final mix flat out rocks. It sounds much, much better than the rough cuts that I released earlier this year. I made good use of the limiter to get the volume up but stayed away from compressing the mix so that the full dynamic was left intact. That was critical in achieving the "Rock Opera" feel of the CD which has a lot of transitions between heavier parts and lighter movements and needs to have the volume fluctuate between them. Compression will just squash everything up to full volume and crush the dynamic. I'd advise other bands out there to avoid compressing your mixes, even a little. It only sounds good that way for about twenty seconds, after which you just wish that the music was out of your face.

I also worked hard on getting the levels balanced between the individual instruments so that the emphasis shifts around from one instrument to another throughout the songs and the harmony blends nicely. That was one of the reasons why the mixing and mastering took so long. Each time I listened to the music I found a few more things that I could change to make it sound better, and with each change I got more confident that I could produce something that sounded just as good as professionally recorded music. After a couple months the tracks were really sounding good and I fell victim to the curse of rising expectations, trying to squeeze a little more out of the tracks than what I could accomplish. By that time the CD was almost literally burning a hole in my studio. It desperately wanted to get out and be heard and so I set aside my perfectionism and cut a final mix. The CD isn't perfect, but it is really good, and not just "good for music recorded in a home studio".

The best part about the mix is that it sounds good on just about any platform without needing to make any adjustments to the equalization. So far I've listened to it through three widely different sets of speakers and three pairs of headphones from the cheap ones that come with your iPod to a pair of two-hundred dollar Sennheisens and in each case the music came out sounding clear, well-balanced, and strong. I didn't have to make many compromises, it sounds how I want it to sound. And while I know that I can do better with better equipment and more experience, I am proud of what I've accomplished. Also, I have to give credit where credit is due and thank you all for your support over the years. Those of you who've related to me your honest criticisms and sung my praises with ringing endorsements have given me confidence that I can compete alongside the "big boys" and inspired me to work all the harder to match that level of quality. You have personally made me a better musician/producer/artist. I thank you deeply.

The Music

Fireaxe continues to evolve. Within "Eternal Devotion to the Dark Goddess" you'll find all of the elements of Fireaxe music that you've come to appreciate, from simple soft verses to towering stacks of harmony, from ferocious driving riffs to methodical power ballads, from scintillating guitar solos to calmly plucked melodies, and all of it wrapped around a central theme that cuts brutally across the grain of the modern landscape. Told in nine parts and filling almost every available second on an eighty minute CD the work is another epic tragedy that explores the ideologies of today and foretells a dark and dreadful future.

Of course, that's what you've come to expect from Fireaxe. So what's new about this CD? Well, of all the tales that I've told through my music, "Eternal Devotion to the Dark Goddess" is without a doubt the darkest and most disturbing story of all. I'm not going to go into detail about it so as not to ruin the impact of your first listen to this work, so instead I'll just say that any search within this CD for an uplifting or positive message will be completely futile. The protagonist is anything but heroic and the antagonist has gaping character flaws as well, and their conflict is summed up well in a quote from the final track, "The world is not black and white, it is black and black." The tale is a journey through our modern world where sadism, deceit, and exploitation lay waiting behind every shining promise. It is a tale of cut-throat capitalism, of torture and abuse of power, and of the desperate struggle to preserve love and purity in a world of lust and debauchery, but mostly it is about lies and how they used to create and destroy. In the CD I unravel the fabric of our ideologies, institutions, and dreams and reveal the base threads that form the core of our society. As always I leave nothing sacred and if I didn't get around to tearing into your particular beliefs in this CD then you'll just have to wait for the next one.

Those of you who have the first Fireaxe CD "A Dream of Death" may notice a number of plot similarities between it and the new CD. That's a sign that I'm running out of ideas. He he he. No, while there are similarities between the two stories, it is the differences which are most important. While "A Dream of Death" had a protagonist which was idealistic and hopeful, the protagonist in "Eternal Devotion to the Dark Goddess" is anything but. And while he does begin the CD with youthful ambitions and a naïve view of the world those traits are stripped from him very early on. Instead he takes the listener on a tour of the dark side of the world where aggression, greed, and ruthlessness are the traits of the victors and in which he rises to power by embracing those ideals. The CD is somewhat like "A Dream of Death", but with the lovely blue, yellow, and white colors obliterated by a convulsing mixture of black and red. This is no dream, it is a nightmare from start to finish.

Those of you who've heard a lot of Fireaxe know that I don't use profanity very much in my music. I feel that it generally detracts from the lyrics and that there's usually a more intense way to capture the same feeling, but in the new CD I use profanity a lot more than usual. Of course, the point is not to sell more CDs. There are a few reasons why I loosened up my standards, the most important of which being that vulgar words were often the best ones to use in many of the passages. When used judiciously, one "f-bomb" can go a long way, and there is simply no better term to use to describe politicians than the one that suggests that they are having sexual relations with one of their parents. Secondly, not only do I use profanity in the CD but I get pretty graphic in a lot of places, often using words that are going to get bleeped out if the songs ever make it to the airwaves. One reason for that is that the profane words greatly increase the emotional impact of the events I describe, but I also wanted to capture the general vulgarity of the time period that we're living in, one that I will not mind seeing come to a close. Too many things have become saturated with vulgarity to excess which has made anything subtle become all but invisible. Nuance is dead and extremism rules the roost. I tried to capture that modern decadent feel in this CD and I think that I have. Be warned, you might find yourself grasping for the lyrics sheet asking yourself, "did he really say THAT?" Yep, I probably did.

Also new in this CD is a bona fide love song, or rather a lengthy section of a longer track where I put away the guitars and weave a elegant tapestry of love and romance with only my voice and my keyboard. I'm very pleased, and more than a little relieved, that it turned out as good as it did. It's so sweet and innocent that it feels out of place in the rest of the CD, but the contrast is what I needed to make the song work. The track, "My Angel", is perhaps the most emotionally intense Fireaxe song ever, which saying a lot, so you don't want to miss it. It's also the longest track on the CD, weighing in at nearly sixteen minutes. The song is an epic tragedy in and of itself but it fits in well with the rest of the tale, speeding the protagonist's descent into hell.

Overall I feel that the music is more "mature" and refined than that on previous Fireaxe CDs. By that I don't mean to imply that the previous CDs were "immature" in any way (it's not adolescent rebellion, it's pointed social commentary), but that the new CD has a more confident and relaxed feel to it. That is probably due to me growing as an artist and getting a firmer command over the medium that I'm using. Maybe some of the mature feel is due to the better recording and production quality too. It's hard to tell for sure, but I do know that this CD sounds terrific.

Anyway, enough about me going on and on about my music. I'll go back to going on and on about the sorry state of the global economy next year. Until then, praise be to Kali, may she continue to frolic down Wall Street with reckless abandon and may she keep dancing and grooving until each and every one of the "Masters of the Universe" are humiliated, penniless, and begging her to release them from their wretched lives.