EPK – Necrambulant – Upheaval of Malignant Necrambulance – Gore House Productions

The artwork for the new album is a landscape of gore: living and dead / human and non-human. I contacted Nev of Gruesome Graphx with a general idea of what I wanted to incorporate into a scene (guts, gore, death, all those types of adjectives) and let him take the reins with it. He came back with a few different ideas and the first one he threw our way was an immediate “YES”. So he deserves all recognition for the art, as he absolutely knocked it out of the park with what he created for us.

About the album as a whole (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

The album is an anthology of all that Necrambulant represents – horror, gore, and slamming brutal death metal. Musically, we incorporated a full arsenal of both death metal and slam to further define our original descriptor of “Inhuman Slam Grind”. Lyrically, the album has something to offer on many levels of thematic brutality; zombies, serial killers, cannibals, sci-fi, and Warhammer. Musically, I would describe it as “relentless”

Track by Track (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

1. “Amalgamation of Gruesome Curdling Abomination” – The theme of this song was largely inspired by a combination of the 1988 remake of The Blob and John Carpenter’s The Thing. The story is about an extraterrestrial protoplasmic glob landing on Earth, growing into a monstrous carnivore “thing” that starts to mimic the forms of all it consumes.

2. “Inhumane Creophagous Repulsion” – This song was inspired by a combination of BTK’s criminal history, ritualistic cannibalism, and the August Underground films. In a nutshell, it’s the story of a serial killer cannibal that breaks into a home, hides until it’s time to strike, kills the victims and eats them with a sense of occult fervor; believing there is some kind of life-force to be gained by consuming the dead.

3. “Catastrophic… / Epoch 0” – I wrote this song as somewhat of a continuance for our previous tune “Epoch of Nihilistic Cosmic Failure”. I wanted to take the theme of that song one step further and rather than being about the death of a star / solar system, I wanted to write a more fantastical “end of the entire universe” story. The lyrics are written in a traditional story form with a Prelude and then the monologue of a primordial cosmic annihilator that comes from beyond our scope of reality to kill the known universe.

4. “Barbarian Brute Force Annihilation” – This is the first of the Warhammer 40k inspired songs. I wanted to write a story based on the World Eaters faction of Space Marines, since they are probably the most “death metal” of all characters in that universe; Just blood thirsty, rage-fueled berserkers whose only release is mass slaughter in the name of their patron deity, Khorne.

5. “Sentenced to a Gluttonous Pit” – This was actually the first song written for the new album. Lyrically, the theme came from watching movies like Army of Darkness and Return of the Jedi; where there is some sort of criminal sentence of being cast into a pit containing something within that will consume you. In this story, it’s a septic pit that serves as both an open sewer for human waste and a habitat for flesh hungry zombies awaiting someone to be “sentenced to the pit”…

6. “Pestilential Ascendancy” – This is the second Warhammer 40k inspired song on the album. The focus of this one being the traitor Death Guard / Plague Marines. In my opinion, the second most “death metal” faction in the 40k universe, as they are literally Death personified. Mutated, rotting, stinking, undead harbingers of plague and pestilence who aim to conquer the galaxy in the name of their god, Nurgle.

7. “Ineffable Tormenting Possession” – This theme comes from more of a personal place after I had experienced a massive anxiety / panic attack one night while trying to fall asleep. That night, I had an indescribable feeling of impending doom weighing down on me and my mind started to uncontrollably spiral. It was the feeling of losing control and being taken over by something malevolent – as if I were a passenger through my own eyes succumbing to insanity. Pretty scary shit. Thankfully, my wife was there to talk me through it, and the attack passed. The following day I reflected on the experience and felt like if there was ever a feeling of being “possessed”, in the mythical sense, then that was probably it. From there, I took that feeling and decided to turn that experience into a fictional horror story about a demonic possession. Thus, “Ineffable Tormenting Possession” lyrics were written.

8. “Chunked Pus Chowder” – This is one that was written with more humor in mind than anything else. Really just a song that’s gross for the sake of being gross. Peter Jackson’s 80s films “Bad Taste” and “Dead Alive” (especially the dinner table scene) probably played a role in coming up with this one.

9. “Upheaval of Malignant Necrambulance” – Good old fashioned zombies. On the “A Feast of Festering Flesh” EP, I had reworked the lyrics of “Infernal Infectious Necro-Ambulatory Pandemic” into a revisioning with the EP’s “Necro-Ambulatory Slamdemic”, and that theme was based on the George Romero’s style of zombies. So, for the new album, I wanted to do another straight-forward zombie song based more on the occult-driven Lucio Fulci styled zombies. The story is exactly how the title sounds; a mass uprising of undead corpses taking over the world.

10. “Coffin Meat” – This song is about a cannibal hobo. The character goes from picking through dumpsters for a meal to robbing fresh graves for something to eat. You can never have too many cannibal songs on a Necrambulant album.

11. “Self-Biological Carnivorous Cannibalism” – This song was originally written musically and lyrically by Chad when we recorded our demo. It was eventually reworked musically for the 2013 full-length and has been re-worked again for our new album. The new version has a subtle update to the intro and I reworked Chad’s lyrics to better fit the music while keeping most of Chad’s original lines and adding some of my own. The theme here is that a victim is attacked and taken to a secret location to endure everlasting torture. In the story, the victim awakens to being chained to a table, tortured, and starved to the brink of death. They are then revived using human protein and byproducts to be brought back to health for the purpose of enduring the torture all over again. Rinse and repeat.

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Fun Facts – Story Angles

1. Initially, the idea for Necrambulant was to be more of an early Decapitated style death metal band, but that idea never saw the light of day as the guttural slam appeal quickly took over by our first practice.

2. Ron, from time to time, will watch horror movies to generate inspiration for riffs he writes.

3. If you pay close attention in the Grimes music video for her song “Genesis” you’ll see one of the o.g. Necrambulant logo t-shirts on display.