Recording on the next Fireaxe CD, "Food for the Gods" is moving along steadily. The digital studio is working out very well and the sound quality is another major step up from that previously attained in "Lovecraftian Nightmares". The tenth and eleventh preview tracks are now available as mp3s for free.

The name of the tenth preview track is "River of Madness" and it is about the forces that drive people to embrace dreams and seek to turn them into reality. But the track is far from uplifting, as one might expect from Fireaxe, and the dark side of dreams is explored in grim passages and desperate verses. The song itself flows like a river, smooth and meandering in places, rough and tumultuous in others, and is both threatening and inviting at the same time. The song attempts to capture the ebb and flow of a mind struggling to remain sane. At some times everything is fine, but as hardships accumulate and become unbearable, anxieties grow and build to a breaking point. Once past breaking, despair and depression take over, filling the mind with awful visions until they once again give way to hopes and dreams and the promise of a better world. People become strongly attached to their dreams since they see them as their last line of defense against hopelessness, meaninglessness, and insanity. But dreams are a product of our brushes with madness, as the signature verse from the song reveals:

"Come down to the river of madness and get baptized,
drink deep from the source of all dreams."

Dreams are just idealized visions of what the world would be like if one or more of our troubles no longer exist. Some of our troubles are minor, and we can dream of ways to make them go away and make those dreams into reality relatively easily. But some of our troubles are far more disturbing, and very difficult to solve. These are troubles that eat at the very core of our being. One such trouble is when the god that you trust, worship, and obey no longer answers your prayers and appears to have forsaken both you and the entire world. Another is when the person you love with all of your heart turns away and never comes back. These things leave a profoundly empty feeling inside that can drag you into the depths of madness. They leave you searching for a dream that will take away the pain and make you willing to do just about anything to make that dream come true.

The song flows through several trials and tribulations, stopping in the depths of despair every so often to put forth a nightmarish vision. "Food for the Gods" contains quite a few disturbing images, many of them violent and brutal, but the following quietly delivered passage that you can hear in the rough cut is perhaps one of the worst...

"Maybe god wants us to fight,
to spill each other’s blood and take our brothers’ lives.
Sitting there in heaven, with a smile on his face,
our wars are his sport, as we kill in his name."

It would certainly explain a lot.

But there is no need to dwell on such uncomfortable and frightening ideas when peace and salvation can be imagined and worked towards in the form of a new dream. When your god doesn’t seem to answer, you can envision a new god that does or at least find new ways to appease your old god, who is obviously silent out of anger. When the love of your life turns away for good you can envision a new lover and search the world to find him or her. And when justice never seems to be done you can take it upon yourself to bring retribution down upon the guilty. Not all dreams are benevolent, and all inspire people to force their will upon the world whether the rest of the world likes it or not. But often we are left with two uncomfortable choices, either to pursue our dreams and invite conflict with the world, or to give up our dreams and be dragged into the pit of despair. As the song goes, there are two paths to insanity, trying to be who others want and trying to be who you want to be. Choose your poison.

The name of the eleventh preview track is "The Soul Doctors" and once again Octavio Ramos gets to play puppet master with Fireaxe. Octavio submitted the lyrics to me over two years ago and he has waited a long time to finally hear them put to music. He won’t be disappointed. The theme of "The Soul Doctors" fits in perfectly with "Food for the Gods", but since it fit in better with the songs I wanted for the modern era rather than the historical songs, it took a while to finally get to it. The song is about a man who is desperately searching for an answer to life’s big questions and who finds them within a radical conformist ideology. In order to become part of the movement, he must undergo a treatment by the soul doctors, who will remove the sinful and hateful parts of his self in order to make him free. Octavio is at his artistic best in describing the sadism and horror of the man’s spiritual surrender. I do my best to sing the lyrics with the intensity they deserve. The convert trades in his identity for salvation and righteousness and becomes a priest in the new order, but along the way he slowly becomes aware of the awful truth at the heart of the movement. He realizes that the movement does not follow god, the movement IS god.

Contrary to what the title might suggest, "The Soul Doctors" is not a funk metal tribute to James Brown. But it does depart from the classic Fireaxe powerthrash by containing musical elements usually associated with religious services. To set the mood I use a booming church organ and an angelic choir. Both sounds are provided by my Yamaha keyboard which has an incredibly great sounding church organ and a passable sounding choir (not cheesy but obviously synthetic, forgive me). Over the choir I sing the first verse, a mellow invitation, which gives way to a thunderous guitar riff where I deliver a seriously scary anti-individualism hellfire sermon. The ferocity stops for a brief moment while the main character of the song bows to the will of the soul doctors, after which it jumps into a razor sharp riff and then into perhaps the most amazingly unholy sound that I’ve ever produced.

I didn’t intend to mix the church organ with the distorted guitars when I first recorded the song. In fact, I didn’t think that it would sound well at all. But I felt that the most dramatic parts of the song needed a little boost so I gave it a try. What a payoff. The sound is amazing, and yes you too can hear it on the mp3 rough cuts I’ve made available. Be warned that if you are impressionable, listening to the cut might have you on your knees bowing to the church of heavy metal (snicker). There’s something about how a pipe organ sounds when you play chords, especially minor ones, that the Yamaha people worked hard to put into their keyboard. It’s hard to describe, but it’s something that you feel rather than hear. The notes in the chords don’t exactly go together but the don’t exactly clash either, and the harmony produced is far more than the sum of the parts. When you add to that the power of two electric guitars, drums, bass, and some lunatic singing his head off, the result is overpowering. I like it.

One of the things that happens to the convert in "The Soul Doctors" is that the doctors extinguish the multitude of "voices" in his head and replace them with a single commanding one which forces him to obey. Although this sounds like schizophrenia, it is the essence of the human religious experience. In ancient times there was only one voice to hear and obey, that of the god-king. All was peaceful for the most part as there was little confusion as to what anyone was supposed to be doing. The god-king’s word was law. But as ancient societies grew and communicated through trade the voices of other god-kings begin to spread and people were faced with the dilemma of having to decide which voice was right. One solution is to make one voice stand out above all the others as the supreme authority. To do that requires powerful psychological conditioning, and most religions and all cults have mastered the art. Needless to say the problem of trying to decide which one of the many "voices" that we hear is correct is one that has never been solved and we struggle with it today with greater and greater intensity. Everywhere you look there are ideologies of every sort try to sell themselves as being the one true path. In a world of chaos and confusion, many of us yearn for an absolute truth, a single voice that silences all the others. Octavio nails this theme perfectly in "The Soul Doctors".

You can download and listen to the new tracks at the Fireaxe IUMA site

***Disclaimer***

Fireaxe would like express that even though religion, dream chasing, and adhering to any ideology is inherently pathological, I by no means am referring to your particular religion, dream or ideology. You are just fine. It’s all those other lunatics out there who are believing in foolish things, screwing things up for you, and in general making messes that you have to clean up. Likewise, I am not one of "those" kinds of people either. We’re together, fighting side by side against all the world’s idiots. Furthermore, the obvious solution for cleansing the world of all this madness is to buy more Fireaxe merchandise. Please do your part.