Track By Tracks: Cerebral Hemorrhage - Exempting Reality (2024)

1. Beaten and Dismembered:

Lyrically, “Exempting Reality” is an album that operates the same way that an anthology of horror stories does, in the sense that it offers a series of dark, disturbing tales. And the first song, “Beaten and Dismembered”, is the first of those tales: the first chapter, you could say. It’s a fictional story about someone who doesn’t know how to deal with the disgust for humanity that they feel other than to commit violent murders. The story is loosely inspired by a quote from Charles Manson, who once said in an interview, “if I started murdering people... there’d be none of you left...” Musically, it’s a straightforward, no-nonsense death metal song that is intended to punch the listener in the face and demand their attention by offering a high concentration of all the essentials of a brutal, slamming, heavy, and powerful opening track. And if anyone is wondering about the sample at the beginning of the song, that clip was taken from the 1989 original movie rendition of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary”.

2. Abusive Power:

“Abusive Power” is the second chapter of the album’s horror stories, so to speak. But this song deals with a less fantasy-like, more real-world sort of horror, such as the kind that unfolds when sick-minded people take positions of power, like becoming an enforcement officer. So, the story is that of a New York policeman whose maliciousness leads him to abuse his power until his evil ways spiral out of control and he ends up meeting the fate that he deserves. Musically, this song is intended to offer a huge variety of grooves, slams, fast parts, surprises, and technical parts, thus taking the listener through a lot of peaks and valleys and twists and turns along the way, with the song evolving quite a bit but with it returning to a few key foundational riffs that keep the song anchored. It’s also the song where the guest vocals on the album are most prominently featured: the guest vocals of Jimmy Beach (of Pyrexia and Tomorrow’s Victim), Ray Lebron (of Internal Bleeding and Immortal Suffering), and Ralph Spadafora (of Immortal Suffering).

3. Remnants of the Final Solution:

Breaking the pattern of the songs that precede this one on the album, the lyrics for “Remnants of the Final Solution” are entirely historically based, rather than fictional. The song is like a historical documentary. It portrays the mass-scale, industrialized, systematic executions carried out by the Nazi military during World War 2: what the Nazis referred to as “the final solution”. The lyrics expose the listener to the idea that no matter how much civilization progresses, the evil of the human mind remains, and the tools of technology only offer more efficient ways of acting on that inherent evil. Musically, this song is the most somber of the entire album. It has its share of heavy, fast, or high-intensity parts, but there are places where it gets really doomy, moody, or atmospheric. And of course, there’s the jazzy, clean section toward the end of the song that has generated a lot of attention throughout the years since the album’s original release. That’s a particular place where our sound got experimental and strayed from typical formulas of death metal songs. That was very intentional. That’s an example of a song part where we wanted to add some elements that would allow our sound to be more multi-dimensional and offer some original, unconventional elements while being careful not to detract from the cold and dark tone of the song. The sample at the end of the song is a line froma  1941 broadcast of Franklin D. Roosevelt’spublic speech the day after the Pearl Harbor bombings in which he argued that the Axis Powers of World War 2 needed to be defeated at any cost; otherwise, the world of the future would’ve been theirs to shape.

4. Null and Void:

The lyrics of “Null and Void” portray a different sort of horror story: it’s about the emotional horrors that some people have to deal with who, due to no fault of their own, suffer from mental illness or trauma that haunts them and prevents them ever being at peace with life. Musically, this song is somewhat more technical, especially in the middle section where we alternate between speedy blast parts and groove riffs without any single pattern being repeated. Another part that probably stands out and offers something that the other songs on the album typically don’t, is the doomy slower section, which features yet another sample from Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary”. But while the song has those sorts of parts, it’s still jam-packed with some really heavy slams and intense, straightforward speed parts. This song was what came out of us when we really wanted to push ourselves musically and add newer elements to our sound while also maintaining the sound’s baseline characteristics of brutality and heaviness.

5. Exempting Reality:

Lyrically, “Exempting Reality” is the most heavily psychological and surreal of all the songs on the album. In fact, the story it presents is so otherworldly that I’d even call it psychedelic. It presents a twisted story of someone who, with the aid of mind-altering substances, goes through a nightmarish psychological journey of exploring a state of mind in which they’re consumed by the worthlessness and futility of human existence. Musically, this song offers just about every type of element in our sound: grooves and slams, some melodic parts, blasts and fast parts of different varieties, old school-ish parts, experimental parts, and some doomy places where the song becomes very dark and foreboding.

6. Deranged Perception:

“Deranged Perception” brings the album’s lyrics back to a real-world type of tragedy: the type that is sometimes found behind the closed doors of someone’s own home, someone who is victimized by an abusive family member. So, this song portrays the grim reality that some people have to face that has nothing to do with folklore-ish, fabled demons; the demons that some people face are their own loved ones, or even a part of themselves that makes them monsters to those they love. Musically, the song is intended to offer a series of to-the-point, blunt-force song parts while also evolving quite a bit through various peaks and valleys that allow it to remain dynamic and interesting.

7. Resulting in Homicide:

With “Resulting in Homicide”, finishing the album’s anthology of tragic tales, the final track (or closing chapter) is another fictional horror story, but one that is loosely inspired by real cases of people who were otherwise mentally healthy but because of a mere swelling of their brain, they felt such intense aggression that they couldn’t help but commit murder (like the case of Charles Whitman who, after carrying out an indiscriminate shooting spree, was revealed to suffer from a brain tumor that asserted pressure on the part of the brain that produces aggressive emotions). Hence, the song captures the theme of the very band name because it’s about neurological abnormalities which can lead to death in some cases, but in others, can result in far more tragic, sinister, murderous consequences. Musically, this song is intended to be multi-faceted but still straightforward in that it offers a large variety of song parts and lots of surprises while at the same time never losing its cohesiveness or its blunt and brutal feel. After evolving through plenty of twists and turns, it eventually evolves into a climactic ending that winds down the energy of the album with a heavy and intense but dark, epic, doomy section, giving the album its closure.