Mercy

Like a lot of flesh releases, this was heavily inspired by a beloved book. Matt and I had gotten real into Death In Spring by Mercè Rodoreda, wonderfully translated by Martha Tennent.^1 That book has some of the most incredible, surreal prose. It’s simultaneously very moving and upsetting, which drove a lot of what we wanted to do with this.

Matt deserves credit for the big sweeping structure of this album, the title track especially. We hashed out a lot of the big riffs and bits and bobs across the record, but when it comes to the form of the thing, it would be absurd to call this anything but Matt’s concept.

These songs were enormously complex with so many one-offs and required a lot of attention to detail. I can distinctly remember leaving Matt’s house ashamed, furious at my own inability to remember it all. I just got mad about it, the way you can’t get your fingers to move the way you want to. When this one was done and out, I felt like a very good guitarist, but I had lost some of the joy in the practice.

Rites

Rites was my baby for this record. I spent something like two years picking and prodding at that track. There was some truly cutting feedback from Matt and Nico (that ultimately they were right on) regarding removing extra time signature complexity and the speed of the final repetition of the riff (I wanted it like, 40 bpm slower which seems ludicrous in retrospect).

Big reference point for me on this was Warning and the little three note inversion guitar trick they use. I also took an idea from “You Never Give Me Your Money” (see section Z for the direct inspiration)for the breakdown section of Rites that uses this very cool minor third up key modulation (until you hit your home key again an octave up.) Was real psyched about the harmonies and whatnot on this record. The flourishes were all incredibly breathtaking once they were properly hashed out.

Negative Harmony Trick

Quite proud of a specific harmonic trick that Matt and I worked out on Mercy where we flip the 3rd interval harmony and melody on a guitar riff so that the harmony sits in the octave below the melody (becoming a 6th interval). Sometimes less conventional “theory” can scream “look at me! look at how smart I am!!!”, but this felt like a great practical application of the concept. We brought it in for a variation on one of the riffs and it totally shifted the perception of the theme in a way that felt right at home with the nature of the song.

^1 Martha Tennent’s work on Merce Rodoreda’s Happiness is a good sample of prose (though WAY more domestic than death in spring )