OOC: RP-only, yes I know there’re about a thousand albums with this name, including Death's, which is great, but it is built around the concept of this poem/song I wrote a while ago. Also trying a different RP style here.

Human, the new, fifth Insolent Paradox album is out now.

Who the fuck is Insolent Paradox? You may ask yourself.
Well sir, Insolent Paradox is a fairly successful band previously doing the finest progressive thrash metal around while at times throwing in different influences, they have previously released 4 albums, you could have figured that out from the statement that is the fifth album, but we all think differently, also on their catalogue there is two live albums, and a record filled with cover songs. They also made Seagull Recordings and were on the DTBOTB4 until the third round when they weren’t able to perform. So they were fucking eliminated, anyway the band (Insolent Paradox, should I repeat it in case you did not get it? Insolent Paradox ) is made by four nice Mexican folks who are:
Daniel Marquez on guitar and vocals
Jose Lugo on bass
Hector Apreza on guitar
Erik Scheder on drums
The non-vocalist dudes also sing (badly) at times. But wait….., why the fuck am I explaining this to you? If you did not knew them by now, you are not worthy of them, I have failed in life, I'm gonna go shoot myself.




Side one
1 - Cain 4:06 (Marquez)
2 - Life's Picture 6:10 (Apreza/Scheder)
3 - Run 2:53 (Lugo/Scheder)
4 - Noise 3:08 (Apreza/Lugo)
Side two
5 - Shepherd 4:36 (Scheder)
6 - To Face Deception 1:49 (Apreza)
7 - Now 4:12 (Lugo)
8 - Abandon! 3:33 (Apreza)
9 - Sleep 5:20 (Lugo)



Sound

The album is a major change of direction, while all the past albums, even Thoughtcrime, that featured broader influences, were all based upon a prog-thrash formula, fast, complex riffs, and shredding solos, supported by solid drum beats, while bass was mainly floating over the music playing solos always, in Human we can find Insolent Paradox doing experiments with sampling and hip-hop in To Face Deception, industrial and post-punk influences are all over the album, specially in Cycle and Running, in fact the sampling is more reminiscent of industrial than of hip hop, there's also a bizarre Latin feel mixed with gospel in Now, more world, specially eastern influences are present on Surrealism, and reggae also finds its way in on Behind, yet drone, noise and minimalism are the main innovation to the band’s sound, the album’s centerpiece and the band’s magnum opus, entitled Existence consists mainly of noise passages and drone/doom sonic assaults.

Jose: We all tried to expand whatever we were playing. For me it meant cutting sown on the bass wankery. And we all broadened our influences, there are about a thousand effects going on the guitars at the same time. Hector and I started doing programming and sampling also.

Hector: Yeah, programming and sampling, fine. The real deal was the way we did Surrealism and Now, we hired this lovely Mexican fusion band, they mix jazz and indigenous music, really cool, and Jim gave us sitars and brought all this weird percussion instruments for Erik, African and Latin stuff.

Erik: It was great, I had this huge variety of drums and sounds so I got the chance to show off, instead of just being them doing crazy stuff while I kept the beat, I also “tuned” my drums to sound deeper, so they are more rhythmic, so to speak.

Daniel: Jose started playing Hammond organ and piano for this Ocean thing, I joined in and it sounded really cool, so we added it to a few tracks, not all of them, because it would not properly fit. Jim added an orchestra in some tracks too.

Jim Garrison (producer): We went through an awful lot of production on this one, it was a real pain in the ass, first the guitars had this fuzzy sound so we emphasized that, because that was what they wanted, to have an unusual guitar sound. It is a very layered album too, so that brought pain. They overdubbed acoustic guitars, organs and many stuff within the first month or something, when we heard the first rough cut of the album, they thought we could achieve this Phil Spector's sound, so we kept overdubbing stuff, sitars, trumpets, syntethizers, etc. Then I ran into this Mexican fusion band, and we brought them in as well, then I ran into the director of Mexico's National Symphonic Orchestra, and they helped out too, yet after about two or three months of work we still did not thought the album was finished at all. So we started working with glitch, which is damaging the tapes to achieve whatever sound you want, that didnt worked out too well, but knowing them, they'll end up doing something with that, still we got this lo-fi sound that really helps the album, they dont sound like being recorded with a shit mic on the middle of a highway on rush hour. But it does not sound over produced as it did.

Lyrics

The lyrics to past Insolent Paradox's albums have always been dark, misanthropic, and pessimistic, Human continues pretty much the same themes, yet with a darkest humor, surreal phrases and overall taking themselves less seriously.

Jose: We all started taking ourselves not as importantly as we did before.

Hector: At the start it was pretty much destined to be a more ambient/drone thing, basically our previous albums, but less thrash-y. By the time we recorded To Face Deception and Abandon! (because the album was recorded almost entirely in tracklist order), we just went nuts.

Jose: Daniel was doing this frantic, nervous, over the top, kind of hardcore scream, and we were doing everything in our hands to make it sound as big as we could, adding the orchestra and stuff. And the lo-fi gives it such a beautiful contrast.

Erik: We stopped recording for one week or something when we had almost half the album done, I think we had eight tracks done by then and some songs sketched out. And all we would do was write, all day. We would write everything that crossed our minds. Jim called it mental puking.

Daniel: After those long songwriting sessions, we had a huge mess of lyrics, so we started sorting them out and most of it was really bizarre.

Hector: We would demos songs on acoustic guitar or piano, or some instrument and pass them around.

Jose: It was an amazing experience to do that. Some songs were really changed or even merged by the whole process.

Concept

After the release of Thoughtcrime reports indicated that the fifth album would have been a “normal” album by the band’s standards, it also would have followed the established, organized storyline of Son, their critically acclaimed third album, yet as stated above, things got bizarre on the making of the album, the first half album (first nine tracks) loosely tells a story about a man joining a sect, and the sect’s leader rantings and egotist speeches, the second part of the album, could be considered as a conversation between the protagonist (the man who joined the sect) and the sect’s leader. Yet unlike Son and its clear misanthropic message, Human could be considered as an optimistic hope message, as a mirror of Son and its pessimism, or simply as one big joke.

Influences

Hector: I would say the bigger influences on the album are Swans, Ministry and Throbbing Gristle. But then all of them would say something else.

Jose: As usual Hector is wrong, there is Sunn O))), Orthodox (a Spanish band that mixes local folklore and drone) and Old Man Gloom, then there is also a Mexican band called Radaïd that mixes indigenous Mexican music and several other styles, we took inspiration upon that too.

Song by song

Cain
Daniel: I would say I made Jim and the studio people remix this about five or six times, we ran a keyboard through a leslie speaker like in Echoes (by Pink Floyd), but instead of playing whole notes we did sixteenths to give that helicopter sound in the beginning, then Hector and Erik enter with this slow, grinding riff and Jose sung the verses with a death metal voice.

Noise
Hector: This is our first noise collage, we taped Dani playing on a seven-string guitar without him knowing, and we added layers of noise, with Jose screaming incoherent, Dada stuff on top. I think Daniel hasn’t find out yet he plays on this song.

To Face Deception
Erik: This the turning point in the album, I was warming up with this drum beat (something you could dance to) which I always do, and Hector and Jose were going around recording everything they could, so they gave it to Jim who added this cool echo thing and slowed it down to it so instead of going *pum ths pum tum tsh* it went *pum pum ths pum pum ths pum tum tsh tum tsh* and it kind of fades in and out through the song.

Abandon!
Jose: We used some of the stuff we recorded on Noise and To Face Deception later we also used that through the album, that’s what makes you say “oh I’ve been here before”, so we had this sampled base and we started building the song, as a fat riff, hardcore/thrash song over it, and the real twist is Dani’s voice, which really freaks you out, that screech he made up for this.

Sleep
Erik: This is what the album would’ve sounded like if we didn’t started pulling out crazy stuff, it is definitely a great song though, kind of like Candlemass. We originally wanted to make it more like stoner doom, but it came out this way.

Ghostly Faces
Hector: Heaviest song in the whole album, this is kind of a nod to our earliest days, where we played death/thrash metal, this is more death than thrash anyway.

Cycle
Daniel: Happiest song we’ve ever made at least on paper, it is definitely not metal, but I feel we were able to pull it out. The lyrics are really pessimistic, they say basically you are always tied to do something and thus you’re never able to do whatever you want, so the song is obviously supposed to be a joke.

Abandon Everything
Jose: I was really shocked that Dani got into doing the industrial stuff, because he was really reluctant to do it at first, and this is an amazing work of pure sampling art.

Visions of Nothingness
Erik: I was going through Hector’s demo tape collection and I found some riffs (some dating back to before the band was formed), recorded bass and drums and came up with the vocals, it has the orchestra in it, so combined with the old stuff it sounds really big.

Existence
Jose: Every single album we’ve made ends up with a great, epic song, this is definitely great and epic but in an entirely diferrent way, it starts with a noise build up, and we actually come in about five minutes into the song, from then on we followed this formula of build-up/breakdown/noise and we repeat to death, I don’t feel it becomes boring though because besides us playing the main riffs, there is so many things going on, we have the orchestra and a bunch of arrangements us and Jim made, and it becomes this massive epic sound, on a different way to what we understood as epic.

OOC: Feedback, please, biggest RP I’ve ever made.

Edited by user 11 May 2010 05:58:46(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Eric: I'm usually not a huge fan of the Thrash genre, but this looks really good! It seems like you guys put alot of time into making this album worthwhile.