While Grae was 'up North' revelling with his family over the Easter period, the rest of the band decided to unleash their distinctive brand of joy and happiness on the unsuspecting partygoers of York... needless to say both Grae and Gibbo, Pete and Daymo were feeling somewhat the worse for wear on the Sunday (Andy had been working and so was for more sensible than the rest of us)!!
As if that wasn't enough, Anne-Marie Helder had taken a short detour from her current support of the Ultravox tour to support Nick Harper at The Duchess in York on the Monday night; we couldn't miss that one, could we! Anne made it perfectly clear that she was feeling kind of nervous... with members of Mostly Autumn, Morpheus Rising (for whom she has become the 'de facto' Official Photographer) and other friends and musos she knows it was hardly surprising! The gig was sublime with Anne's performance proving she can stand up there with the best of them. Watch out for a review of the gig at some point.
Tuesday was a well earned day of rest... for us at least. We received our first independent review of The Original Demos 2008. Gypsy Cinnamon, who writes the Graceful Degradation blog covering music, movies and all things entertainment, is a freelance journo who has been published in the likes of Kerrang!. She has written a great review of our demo EP, you can check it out here.
Wednesday was a different story. As most of you will know by now, two of the band members have significant commitments with other bands; Pete is the guitar tech for Marillion and has been busy with the 2nd leg of the Happiness Is The Road tour and the two conventions, Andy is the bass player for Mostly Autumn. As if that wasn't enough they both work extremely hard as techs, lampies, riggers, you name it, and this makes scheduling the MR sessions and rehearsals a logistical nightmare!!
Making the most of the periods over the last few months when other commitments have meant we couldn't rehearse or gig, Grae has worked on several sets of lyrics for material we had there waiting. Wednesday was the day we put them down on tape (metaphorically speaking of course!). Over the one day session we managed to get rough internal working copies of 6 new tracks, these vary in style ranging from fairly smooth rock songs to AC/DC style stadium rockers to HUGE rock anthems and coming to rest on the dark and brooding style of metal... an eclectic yet interesting mix! It was a great session and the resulting 'Internal Use Only' CDs have some real gems...
It was a hard day’s work and, although we planned to record on both Wednesday and Thursday, we decided to give the session a miss on Thursday in favour a full rehearsal on the Thursday night.
After resting most of Thursday it was off to The White Rooms to have our first rehearsal in quite some time... after the cobwebs were dusted off our recollection of the older material we fired through what had been the set for our Boxing Day gig last year, the 5 tracks of the demo EP, and then we dug in for some thrashing out of the new material...
Six new songs in one rehearsal would have been quite an achievement, in fact it would have been a bloody miracle!! We had listened to the roughs while setting up the kit for the rehearsal and, like the true democracy all bands are, Gibbo decided which songs we'd try out that night! (Only joking DOOD!)
Hold On was a no-brainer, a straight forward rocker it was the first track which Daymo recorded a solo for, and what a solo!! It's a great, powerful track with a much simpler structure and melody than the other material, expect to hear it rounding off some of the future shows... it ROCKS!
These Four Walls is just mean and dirty. A real AC/DC style riff, with lyrical content which wouldn't be uncomfortable in the company of Dirty Deeds or Big Balls, this track sees Pete and Daymo bouncing licks off each other throughout the solo, it's something to behold!
The final new addition was the track which has been available as an instrumental on our ReverbNation profile for some time as D116. Brave New World is no longer the working title... it is THE title. The song delivers on all the early promise of the instrumental with another apocalyptic style lyric from Grae with a melody that'll have you screaming along in no time. There's no other word for this, it's HUGE!
The mood throughout the whole rehearsal was great. Everyone was buzzing and the new material certainly made everyone up their game that little bit. It feels as if a huge hurdle has been surmounted and we're now on the road to bigger and better things. A friend on Twitter said earlier this week that she found getting past the 'half-way' point of a project a difficult process, we didn't really understand what she meant until this rehearsal. Without being aware of it we had hit a stand off, the first 5 tracks had come together so quickly, An Ordinary Man had just happened, we weren't used to waiting for our muse, or even really having to work for things to come together... what happened at that rehearsal was a watershed, we have moved forward and not just in shuffling steps, we've made great leaps and bounds towards what we want to achieve!
That would have been a great week in itself, but we received an email today which we're really pleased with... The Original Demos 2008 is now live on CD Baby!!
We are only too aware that many of our listeners and fans are spread across the globe with a large number being in the US and Canada. As a result we have decided to make The Original Demos 2008 available via CD Baby, this means that they are distributed direct from CD Baby in the US reducing postage etc. We hope all our international fans will take advantage of this facility, it's something we intend to continue from here on in.
We're looking forward to a chillaxing weekend now, before we get back into the rehearsal studio early next week...
As we said at the start of this blog, it's been a helluva week!
Remember, you can keep up to date with everything MR, as it happens, on Twitter, follow us here.
All the best,
Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy & Gibbo
MORPHEUS RISING
...resurrecting British Heavy Metal!
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