Track By Tracks: Byron - Chapter II: The Lotus Covenant (2024)

1. Overture:

We jammed "The X" guitar solo and the modulations kept on coming and coming and decided that this would be a good intro to the album. So it's just the riff under the guitar solo of the last song "The X" which makes a great start, the record forming a sense of circle. The noise from where the intro fades in is the same as the first album The Omega Evangelion's last track "Over The Wall" fades out, so a taste of continuation too.

2. The Lotus Covenant:

The name track of the album is based on a nightmare I saw. A dark, silent monastery of some sort, a lot of black-robed figures in endless hallways holding lotus flowers, and a very disturbing sensation of ungodly, suffocating horror.

3. Resignation:

This went on as "Kiukuttelulaulu", or "The Tantrum Song" before the lyrics found their final form. The song is about personal frustration with lying politics and religious leaders who have lost their sense of reality. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite religious myself (and studying orthodox theology at the moment, which btw why the single cover) and I don't have anything against religion in general. But some individual cunts using their position wrong just deserve to have as much shit as they give.

4. Sword of the Apostle:

The longest and most epic song in Byron's short history. Lyrical themes bound it to the first album's track "Through the Eye of the Nightingale", and continue the story of the fictional hyperborean empire after the revolution and on to a war caused by the assassination of the God-King. I think Johanna made her best vocal performance ever on this one, bringing life and sensation to the lyrics. And Elias Kahila with the cello gave the final perfect cherries on the top of this cake.

5. Sometimes Dead Is Better:

Influenced by Stephen King's Pet Sematary, and to be exact, the remake movie about it. I had a close visit of death as my father died recently. It made me think that death is basically a natural and even a beautiful closing of a story. Like the feeling of finishing a massive book, it leaves an empty space in life, but there's much beauty in the feeling too. Of course, like in the story, losing a child is not natural or beautiful in any way, but the way I think it, the sorrow felt is constructed of people mourning more of themselves than the dead, and the wish to have the deceased person back is because of themselves. Not always, but sometimes dead is better.

6. The Golden Galley.

This song should be considered as an intro to the song "Return to Celephaïs", and it covers the same themes as the H.P. Lovecraft novel. The longing for childhood and the feeling of powerlessness when seeing years and decades passing by is something universal you finally understand when you bury your parents. Let the sweet dreams be our place of eternal joy.

7. Return To Celephaïs:

Howard Phillips takes us to the city of Celephaïs with the voice of Magus Corvus and by the sonic interpretation of the story by Byron

8. The X:

With the lyrics, I experimented with something called automatic writing and I wrote them rawly in 20 minutes. The results are somewhat a stream of consciousness, flowing in themes of the ancient and the occult. The song title does NOT refer to any messaging service but is an allegory of destinations and waypoints in spiritual development, the x's and pins one might find in maps or graphic illustrations of life lived. Karma, if you will. An educated listener can hear again some Stephen King -references in the lyrics too.

The song itself started as some kind of a trash metal imitation and even after a lot of changes when I recorded the drums I was not sure if it would make it to the record. But when the rest of the band did their share, the song really came to life. I think it turned out quite nicely.