Track By Tracks: Orion - The Lightbringers (2024)

For those who reviewed Passing Through, you will already be familiar with the first three tracks. However, I have still included them in the notes below. I’ve tried to keep the notes as short as possible! If there’s anything that’s unclear, please do reach out to me,

1. The Tumut of My Heart:

The opening track was inspired by a book of the same name by Jason Spencer from The Prog Mind (A thank you to Jason for giving me his blessing). He describes the book as ‘a nonfiction release about confronting the harmful religion of my past.’

The song itself tries to deal with these issues. There are many good elements to religion, and there are many bad elements. There are areas of certain religions that seem contradictory, and when you look into those contradictions, you can sometimes find that they originate from a certain person or group that was trying to achieve a certain end. Is eternal damnation really a thing? Or is that something that has been injected into religious ideology as a means of inducing fear? We all know that fear can be used as a means of control.

2. The Ghosts Among Us:

The second track comes from the gut-wrenching experience of caring for someone with a profound disability. Whilst it’s not something I’ve had to do, it is something I’ve had to watch. Sadly, I’ve witnessed people that have spent years in an unresponsive state. Kept alive by the love of the people around them, as well as an awful lot of modern medicine. The questions that have always weighed on my mind are, “Who are we doing this for? Is it a benefit to them or us? Is it a benefit to anyone?”

3. This Sickness:

When I finally become the Supreme Ruler of Earth, Tik Tok will be burned to the ground… Vote for me.

I’m not a fan of social media. It’s just terrible. I appreciate the irony of the fact that my entire following is based around Facebook and Bandcamp, but that’s different. I don’t do absurd dances to terrible music… I write my own terrible music.

As with all things, there are good parts and bad parts. In my view, the bad parts of social media seem to outnumber the good. People live on their phones now. They don’t even know what it is they’re looking for, so long as it’s anything other than reality. The imagery around this song is all based around a mental institution. However, it’s hard to tell who the patients really are. Is it the social media addicts, or is it the utterly, utterly fake “influencers” that are desperately clambering for views? Either way, it needs to stop.

4. As Best We Can:

This song was intended to be a stripped-back acoustic track. I failed on that part, didn’t I!? As Best, We Can tackles the sadness of a failed relationship. Just to be clear, this is a failed relationship, not a concluded relationship. The people in this relationship have drifted apart, but they’re still together. Why? Maybe they’re staying together for the kids. Maybe they’re staying together out of fear of taking that step into the unknown. Whatever the case may be, they’re just doing what they can with what they’ve got.

The Cycle of Light:

This is the four-part epic that closes the album, comprising Spark, The Scattering Stars, The Falling Heavens, and The Lightbringers.

5. Spark:

Although this is an instrumental, I think this track says a lot. It was at this point that I really started getting into my orchestral sample libraries, hence the ramped-up presence of strings, French horns, trumpets, and god knows what else during the second half of the album. Spark has various time signature changes, some heavy riffs, choirs, orchestral sections, and plenty of grandeur. I feel like it’s a good setup for the heady heights of this epic.

6. The Scattering Stars:

As I said in the intro to these notes, the idea of The Lightbringers was a force, or a collection of entities, that have no concept of bad. They just do what they do to bring about a final state of good. The idea of The Scattering Stars is that these forces are seemingly chaotically moving. In reality, they’re just getting into position so they might exert their influence. A repeating lyric throughout the epic is ‘They just bring gravity’, and that they do. They pull all things.

7. The Falling Heavens:

We’ve all heard of people talking about the sky falling down around them. It’s catastrophic, it’s apocalyptic…. But maybe it’s necessary. Maybe these things are here to burn down our temples so that we might build better ones.

8. The Lightbringers:

This piece is partly written from the perspective of The Lightbringers. It is also the home to one of my favorite lines on the album, ‘We come out of the darkness, and we bring the light with us’.

There are other telltale lines in this song, namely during the outro section: ‘And though we rain upon you, we see so far beyond you, to a place where sparks come alive’. Although it’s tragic, maybe a person will pass away before they get to even see what light they brought to the world. I can’t imagine that in Anne Frank’s final moments, she had no concept of what her diary would bring to the world. Perhaps The Lightbringers had bigger plans.