Track By Tracks: SIDE EFFECTS - Descending Rabbit Holes (2018)

The album is named named Descending Rabbit Holes which is a line from the song Lint. What the title means is that every song aims to deeply explore the topic it deals with and therefore descends into the proverbial rabbit hole.

The sound of the album revolves around the organic sound of a rock power trio, no frills.

Don’t Contradict The Facts is a socially themed song which talks about the negative effects of pseudoscience which is very abundant in this internet-oriented day and age. The focus is the deniers of global warming in particular. It’s a bit of an apocalyptic prophecy you could say. :D Musically, it’s a straight hard rocking tune which takes no prisoners. It’s aggressive and unapologetic about it.

Scratch The Surface was inspired by a quote from Stephen King on writing which says: “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” It greatly sums up how I feel as a songwriter. That blank page can feel very intimidating and I’m facing fears that maybe I have somehow lost the ability to write a good song (or at least good from my point of view) until the first few notes start to pour out and then I get drawn in and feel like nothing can stop me. So, I’m kind of rationalizing with myself that I just need to start and the worst thing that can happen is that I don’t write anything good, which is exactly what will happen if I don’t sit down to write too.

In The Shadow Of A Crumbled Fort talks about a man having difficulties with continuing his life after his wife’s suicide. Last year I was pretty shaken by the news of Chris Cornell’s suicide and was reading some interviews and posts from his wife Vicky. It kind of inspired me to come up with this story to a degree.

Colorblind is quite obviously about racism. I don’t get to witness a lot of racism on a daily basis since I live in a country which is pretty racially homogenous, but lately we’re getting more and more tourists. So, one day I witnessed a local guy molesting a couple of black tourists on public transportation and it got me pretty infuriated and resulted in me writing this song. The story of the song doesn’t really have much in common with the actual event, but that’s where it came from. Moral of the story: don’t be a jerk!

Obituary Of Common Sense talks about how little sense we humans seem to have oftentimes. Some things just don’t add up. I’ve heard many times that in the future we might face drinking water shortage and it’s likely that we’ll wage wars for drinking water, yet still so much water is wasted every day. When you read the facts about water leak percentages, it’s absurd. I recently read somewhere that just in the UK, so much water leaks out on a daily basis that the water lost would meet the daily needs of around 20 million people. We’re talking about water leaking from the pipes before even reaching homes. And I’m willing to bet UK has less leaking pipes than some much more underdeveloped countries of the world. And also, we’re still using clear drinking water to flush away our feces. Wow, nice going humanity!

The Siren Song is about escaping the allure of our comfort zones. We all get stuck in our routines at a certain point and there’s nothing wrong with that unless it impedes our progress. It can be very frightening to break out, but also very beneficial to keep growing. So, this song is a sort of a reminder to myself to dare to do things differently if I want to and pursue different avenues to a goal I might have.

Recoil was the first song written for this album and we recorded the first version of it at the same time that our last album Counterclockwise was released. Lyrically, it talks about an unstable person who is always on the border of a train wreck. An interesting fact is that in the instrumental section before the solo, the rhythmic accents spell out the word “recoil” in Morse code.

Lint talks about a fictional girl who is a writer and a huge perfectionist and is never satisfied with anything she writes, so all her ideas end up in the trash can. I actually know a couple musicians who are like that. The moral of the story is that while it’s good to strive for best results possible, at some point you just need to draw the line and decide that it’s the best that you can do at the moment and leave the further improvements for future works. Musically, it’s got a bit of an Aerosmith/classic rock vintagey vibe to it, but with a screamy twist in the middle which stands out stylistically from the rest of the album.

Diversion is another socially themed song and talks about how we engage in endless discussions about things that don’t matter anymore and miss out on sneaky plans happening underneath while we’re too busy being smart about things that don’t matter anymore. In Croatia, World War 2 is still one of the frequent topics and I just find it absurd that a lot of the people leading heated arguments about it were born 40 or 50 years after the whole thing ended. Finished, done, move on please! But in the meantime, the fuel prices can increase and new taxes are being introduced, but we have no energy to react to that since we’re too busy lamenting who’s fault it was that the dinosaurs went extinct.

Don’t Turn Away is pretty self explanatory in its title and talks about not giving up on your goals when it gets hard. Might be somewhat of a cliché topic, but I like the visual angle of a foreign hostile planet that was used as a metaphor for enduring the hardships on the way.

Hideout is the only lyric on the album written by our drummer Alen Frljak. Stylistically this track is a bit of a departure from the album sound, driven by acoustic guitars and carrying a Beatlesy feel to it. The lyrics talk about not letting others step on your toes and standing up for yourself.