Track By Tracks: Hands Of A Saviour - Paralysis (2016)

1. 32 Rue Vandenbranden | Caden Cotard:

The opening track is really two songs in one. The first is hard and driven, dissonant and groove-oriented with these machine-gun fast vocals; the second opens up into more melodic sections. For that first half, the lyrics are quite abstract with a lot of references to pop culture, things like Arrested Development or the movie Hook. That comes from being inspired by Childish Gambino’s album Camp, one of our singer Henry’s favourites.

The second half of the song is about drifting away from the people you were once close to and feeling you’re losing your grip on reality. It’s named after the main character the movie ‘Synechdoche, New York,’ which also deals with an element of losing grip on reality (and is excellent).

2. What I Wouldn’t Give:

This is probably as ‘hooky’ as the band’s linear song structures can really get. There is a beautiful melancholy in the track between the instrumental music which is uplifting in some ways and the lyrics which are asking questions; begging for answers. The song is essentially about overthinking. It’s about when you’re so used to negative things in your life that when something positive appears on the horizon, you just obsess on all the ways it will inevitably go wrong. You wish you could be someone else for just that moment so you won’t mess it up like the myriad of things you’ve messed up before. Feeling trapped inside your own head is a big theme for the album, so “what I wouldn’t give for one day outside this head” is one of the EP’s most important lyrics.

3. Follow the Buzzards:

The main riffs in this song were written by our drummer and when drummers write, that’s when things get heavy. Accordingly, this is one of the more overtly heavy songs on the EP and is strongly reflective of the band’s core sound. In an attempt to seek lyrical inspiration outside of other music, the song’s title and a lot of the lyrics are embellished and extrapolated from the chilling and tyrannical promos of WWE superstar Bray Wyatt. had been delivering at the time.

4. All Mimsy Were The Borogoves:

The entire song is centred upon a melody played by clean guitar. This tonal foundation throughout allowed us to play around with different styles of riffs within that tonal framework. This creates an atmospheric feel of anger and sadness. Emotions are never as simple as “I feel like this or that.” Within a moment of anger spawns a moment of transcendent relief or vulnerability and it’s the same for all emotions, at least in our experience. That’s what we were trying to capture here.

“All mimsy were the Borogoves” is famously a line in the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky poem. Its significance is in the word “mimsy” which is a nonsense word meaning flimsy and miserable. The song is about feeling that; about losing a grip on who you are and feeling empty.

5. Welcome To the Borderline:

The most overtly technical song on the EP, and one of the band’s favourites. The track ends with a glitchy, wavy outro with some trap-influences snaps. The lyrics are emotionally raw and honest, conveying a selfishly-narcissistic world view, through which its own inadequacy is belittled and ridiculed. It sort of charts the paradox in all emotion and the cycle of you go through with yourself when you don’t like who you are: the anger; the shame; the disappointment; the disgust; confusion; self-pity; even the brief ray of light and short-lived calling for help, all before the cycle starts up again.

6. Fireworks On New Year’s Eve:

New Year’s Eve and the build up to it can be a miserable time of year, one where you reflect on what disappointments the past year has brought and what horrors the next will bring. The song’s lyrics cover that, as well as a more specific scenario where you imagine what it would be like being able to go back and talk to your past self – what you would say; how they would react and feel about the future self confronting them. It’s a miserable, morose and self-reflective close to the EP with a techy, proggy middle section and interspersed grooves building up to the crushing beatdown finale.