Track By Tracks: Zebadiah Crowe - Lych Milk (2021)

1. A Gathering Of Earths Blood In The Gallows Wood (full title):

 

Where to start? Originally this song started as a black and white scribble as I sat in a bus station on my way home from tour with Gorgoroth. Tours are weird things, they can either make you or break you. So you can imagine there’s me, at around 6-7 in the morning surrounded by early morning commuters dressed in my shabby leathers and reeking of tour bus and generally giving every one in the buss station the stink eye with my hood up. (Another guy in a band might give you some edgy story here but I just wanted to get home, shower and maybe play with my cat) so I’m scribbling on a notepad and listening to an audiobook by Clive Barker to pass the time till my ride home appears and I doodle this drawing and write “gallows wood” under it. I knew I had to step it up from the other recordings and this title stuck. I think this song has one of my favourite riffs in the verse and I’m pretty pleased with the lyrics 

“Take a measure of this place 

flee the breaking bows that bite! 

Flee there cold embrace! 

With horrors coming thick and proud

 

Name your broken oath

 

And speak it’s name aloud

 

Don’t leave the path the ground is old

 

it’s cold as sin and rotten 

and no more friend unto the bold 

the wind cuts deep like poison knives 

cuts deep to bone 

And will separate your lives” 

As a template for things to come I’m not sure I can do better. 

2. Sabbaticus:

Eugh! Not the happiest story this one. Whilst musically it’s another song I wanted to save from the scrap heap of history and breath new life into, the lyrics always remind me of darker times and how sometimes the world needs a bad guy and how you sometimes have to be that guy. it’s just the way it is, so you may as well get used to it. People like that are needed sometimes. y’know? 

Now to this day... I don’t know how I made the middle eight of this song the way it is. I remember I was up late, toiling away at it on a really shitty laptop that kept freezing up with broken fans on it, trying to get it correct and it was just not having it! At all! No sir! Nothing! Then I swear I blacked out for a second or did something, maybe moved the mouse in a random way on a button? I don’t know, and it suddenly just clicked. Little known fact: Forrrr hates the guitar parts on this (as they are ludicrously chainsaw and fast) but insists we play it. 

3. Fortunes Foretold In The Footprints Of The Insane:

I have a love of the bizarre and dark, religious cults are a constant fascination, the weirder the better. I’m talking nail a fish to your head on the 13th of every other month type weird sort of thing. I read that one such Spanish sect in the 16th century would visit the local asylum/prison and get the worst criminals and murderers etc to walk around in the sand in the forecourt and then the leaders would come in to “read” what there footprints would tell them about the future. Did it work? Who knows. He he! But you can imagine all these long red pointy hooded figures taking it all very seriously as the local sex offender trudges round a sandpit in his socks can’t you. Ridiculous! But at the same time fascinating if you consider chaos theory and add it to the equation. Musically it’s a barrage of unpleasantness and a fantastic tide to howl along to. Also it’s always nice to hear people singing the chorus with you and this has a good one just before it dives back into the chaos.