Track By Tracks: Brutalism - Solace In Absurdity (2024)

‘Asphyxiating on Vomitous Excretion’ was a lot more of Cams lyrical idea to start with. He had the lyrics and title to it before we had the music, so I just wrote what came to mind after reading the lyrics & song title and tried to write something that sounded like what the lyrics represent.

‘Solace in Absurdity’ was a project I was working on for about a year and a half. It started out as a 5 part epic in the style of Rush with how they structured their older more progressive songs. After months of refining and tweaking it came out as just a short song about coming to grips with reality, being okay with things you don't understand and being content with not having all the answers.

‘Astrocytomic Hemorrhaging’ is kind of goofy. I was looking up random medical things while we were on tour with Mutate, Ironfront, Texas Ketamine and Barn, and came up with the title on the road. Then as a band we all sat down when we got home to write the song to fit the title and that was kind of that, haha!

‘Accelerated Decrepitude’ was a title I got from the original Blade Runner movie. He wanted to write another song like ‘Solace in Absurdity’ but was having a hard time putting a title to it until he heard that phrase mentioned in the movie. I'm sure Cams lyrics have a different interpretation as we all try to come at the songs from our own view points, but to me it was basically about life being really fast and uncertain, hence the Charles Bronson sample "Bang, you're dead"

‘Flesh Pyramid’ was just a song we sat down to write after practice one day. London and I basically just bounced riffs off of each other until we had a whole song. Cam had the lyrics and title before we wrote the song, but they weren’t attached to anything, but he realized they fit over this track really well after we finished it and there you have it!

‘Sickening Synaptic Pathways’ is one of the first ones I finished for the album. I took heavy inspiration from Defeated Sanity and Anal Stabwound on this one. It was basically a trial to push my writing as hard as a I could before continuing to finish the album so I could make sure it was 100% of my best effort. Cam later titled it and I believe he had these lyrics done/on hand before I finished the song although I'm not sure. I know he had been working with that title for a long while before the song came about.

‘Compulsive Acts of Repulsion’ was actually all riffs from the original ‘Solace in Absurdity’ track when it was a ten minute epic. It's mostly the riffs that got pulled from that song that I still really wanted to use. I just felt like they didn't fit in with what I was trying to do with ‘Solace in Absurdity’ so I wrote a couple more and then made a different song out of it.

‘Elimination of the Heliosphere’ was a completely experimental thing. I wasn't sure what I was doing with it or what for. But Dante really liked it so we kept it in as a Brutalism song. Cam later wrote lyrics to it based on the title I came up with and then as a band we tweaked it here and there to make it what it is now.

‘Consuming Obsession’ is another song that Cam had lyrics and a title for before we had any of the music. London, Dante and I wrote it together at practice one day after Cam showed me the lyrics and that's what we ended up with. Definitely one of the bands favorites to play live.

‘Asyncritus’ is the second attempt at a Rush style epic, but this time as a band instead of just me. ‘Asyncritus’ is a biblical name that means "Incomparable" and that was exactly what we were trying to do with this one is make a song that wasn’t like anything else in our area. It's by far the longest track we've wrote for Brutalism. It's got a bit of everyone's handy work in it, and it's definitely a neat way to wrap the whole album up.