THE NASUM VAULT - 1998-2004: THE ALBUM YEARS
"Shift" Rehearsal 2004
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NOTES ON A REHEARSAL
Most of the rehearsal albums that has been released so far have been waiting in line for quite a while and sort of marinated before I have decided to release them. No particular reason other than the fact that I found a lot of stuff at the same time.
This “Shift” rehearsal I rediscovered earlier this week as I went through an external hard drive. I had sort of forgotten about it but wasn’t surprised to see it. It had 11 songs under development for “Shift” performed by Mieszko and I. They were recorded on a Minidisc , April 22, 2004, and the sole purpose of the recording was to show the Stockholm guys (Jon and Urban) what we were doing between the full band rehearsals. This was just six weeks before the album recording and I really hope we had more songs in the works at this point... I'm pretty sure we did.
Some of the songs were named after their working titles and I have added them with the comments below. In general I haven't gotten anything particular to say. It's really a historic documentation on the way to "Shift". The sound is OK, I guess. I believe Mieszko recorded the songs with a nice stereo mic straight into the Minidisc as we had done before. That said, here are the individual comments.
1. HIGH ON HATE
How about some "Angry Napalm Death mosh"? That was the working title ("Arg ND mosh"). The idea of the song was to have some extreme drive to the song without going into blastbeats or fast d-beats. I guess we felt that Napalm Death did that sometimes so that's why it's called what it's called. It sure is angry and moshy, but is it Napalm Deathy? I don't know.
2. CALL AND RESPONSE
This particular song didn't become one finished song but two! I had the idea of a song with two distinctly different parts, which would be reflected in the lyrics as well. I imagined a sort of dialogue, or perhaps an argument, i.e. a "Call and Response" and called the song that. The problem with having two different parts of a song in different tempos is to tie them together and I never really felt that I got it working and ultimately decided to scrap the idea and cut the song into two. The first half became "Wrath" and the second half went through a number of versions until it became "Ingenting", a "Shift" outtake that ended up on "Grind Finale". A few years later I finally wrote a song based around the same musical idea, with lyrics following the different parts (but without the dialogue/argument idea) when I wrote "The Machine" for the last Coldworker album. That song totally works, "Call and Response" didn't!
3. FIGHT TERROR WITH TERROR
I guess Mieszko had fallen in love with the title and presented it as the working title. I doubt that any lyrics were written at this point. He always wrote his lyrics in the last minute. I am honestly surprised that this songs is as "finished" as it is in this rehearsal format. It's pretty much as it is on the album, apart from the massive production of course.
4. HETS
"Hets" might have been the working title that sort of inspired the lyrics and became the final title. It's a very hard word to translate to one particular word in English. It's never the less a very active and aggressive song that always was a little tricky to play. I hear that it had another round of the chorus at the end at this point, but that was trimmed along the way.
5. THE DEEPEST HOLE
Possible the first Nasum song written by Jon. At least the only one in this collection, which would point to that fact. As many other songs, the last part of the song gave it its working title. We called it "Kyussslutet" ("The Kyuss ending") because of its stoner rocking groove. As far as I can hear, nothing was changed in "The Deepest Hole" from this rehearsal version to the album. Good work, Jon!
6. THE ENGINE OF DEATH
I am pretty sure that I wrote "The Engine of Death" after hearing one of Urban's demos that had a certain black metal vibe. Might have been for "Creature" but I also have a slight memory of that song coming our way quite late in the writing process. How ever, this one was a little bit inspired by black metal. I wasn't and still isn't a fan of any proportion of the genre but I have listened to some over the years. I liked the 00's version of Mayhem and of course, this song was titled "Nasumayhem" before it got its lyrics. All in all, one of my favorite songs on "Shift" and it's pretty good in this rehearsal format too.
7. PARTICLES
Something in this song made Mieszko think of Urban's other band as we called it "Regurgitate" . Mieszko had done a few recordings with them so I guess he had picked up something. I can't really think of what in particular he was thinking of but it's a great song anyway. Heavy as fuck in the intro and then full-on madness for the remainder of the song.
8. PATHETIC
The working title for this song was "Rock n Roll slut" which sounds quite bad, but it's Swedish for "Rock n Roll ending". That's a description of the final parts of the song that is quite "rocking" for a Nasum song! Another good song from Mieszko that has a perfect drive throughout the song. I would say that this version is exactly as on the album. "Pathetic" was never part of the live set. I sort of wished it would have been.
9. DELETED SCENES
In its finished form, this song is one of my favorites on "Shift". It had the working title "Superthrash" for obvious reasons. It's quite the thrashy song! This version is pretty close to the album version but with one distinct difference: The verse riff is totally different. It doesn't have the drive that the album version has, which makes this pretty weird and tough for me to listen to!
10. ROS
The symmetric arrangement - A-B-C-B-A - gave this song it's working title "Symmetrisk". As many of the other ten songs here it's not exactly as on the finished album. The difference here is the middle part ("C" if you like) which is quite boring compared to the intense drum beat that was added to the album. Compare and discuss in smaller groups!
11. UNFINISHED #2
I decided to call this untitled and ultimately unused song "Unfinished #2" because that's what it's called on the "Shift: Drums & Scratch" digital album. Yes this song, with the working title "Tragedyplink" ("Tragedy strumming"), lived past the recording of the drums for "Shift" but it was never finished. I know for sure that I never wrote lyrics to it and I would say that I am pretty sure that we decided to not finish it before we recorded any proper guitars and bass in the studio. Anyway, I understand why we killed the song but I still think it has some good parts, or at least interesting arrangements. There were some melodic stuff towards the end inspired by Tragedy that gave the song it's working title and I would really have liked to hear that part with all instruments.
- Anders Jakobson, December 2, 2022
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HELP ME FUND THE VAULT AND THE RARE NASUM
I have a lot of Nasum "vaults". There are the digital vaults, harddrives, CD-R's and whatever that contains some stuff. And then there are the analog vaults. Boxes filled with documents and notes and boxes filled with tapes containing rehearsals and rare stuff. I'd be more than happy to share this with the fans, but I need some funds to take time of from work to really do all that boring excavating that's needed to find and document everything.
I have put together a GoFundMe page for this: gofundme.com/the-rare-nasum and any donation is appreciated. You can also support this cause by buying The Rare Nasum stuff at Bandcamp. Or you can make a donation without going through GoFundMe or Bandcamp - just contact me at nasum@nasum.com. Everything that comes in via these channels are ear marked for a future massive excavation.
I really hope you can help me to preserve The Nasum Vault for the world. Thanks!
- Anders Jakobson.
ABOUT THE VAULT
THE NASUM VAULT is the "umbrella" for a number of projects collecting information and items from the Nasum history.
• The Vault Blog shares "interesting, semi-interesting or uninteresting things" from the Nasum Vault.
• The Rare Nasum publishes audio goodies on Bandcamp.
• The Official Nasum YouTube Channel is the home for video oddities.
• The Nasum Vault Homepage is the portal for the whole project.
SHIFT VAULT EXCAVATION
Selected Shift goodies from the Nasum archives.
• Shift: Drums & Scratch with comments• Liner notes from the 2014 LP reissue
• Discography page
• Track by track commentariers
• Lyrics
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