For a period of about three years I answered only to the name Reaper. My hair style changed slightly, but I still retained all of the b-movie mentality of those early days (I ask myself now, has it ever gone away?) The tapes I had made found their way into the hands of some older musicians who wanted to start a band, and so Dead End was born. I continued to write new material and when we could, we would borrow devices to record. Thus, documenting the rise of Reaper - through puberty and beyond (you can actually here my voice change throughout these recordings.) After a few short years of playing parties, roller skating rinks, and punk clubs the band drifted apart.

As I moved throughout the years, boxes of these 4 track master tapes would get shifted from state to state until I finally got around to digitizing them. I transferred a few songs to Pro-Tools to see about remixing them - what I found was some dreadfully recorded instruments, and a whole lot of poorly played music. My first instinct was to just re-record the songs, perhaps change some lyrics, and re-arrange the songs a bit. But while I am hopefully a more accomplished musician than I was 18 years ago, there's a spirit and energy to those songs that I could never recreate. It lives in the words and the vocals. So the decision was made to re-record the music around the vocal tracks.

I set about picking my favorite of the songs, digitizing all of the vocal tracks and EQ-ing them to sound half-way intelligible. I spent two days relearning and re-recording all of the guitar parts, then I took the recordings to Sonic Iguana Studios. There Mass Giorgini and Phillip Hill helped me to record the drums. In keeping with the original spirit, everything was recorded and mixed as quickly and haphazardly as possible.

Now it's posted on the internet for your listening pleasure - this is Reaper's vision come true!



MP3s | ARTWORK (JPG FORMAT) | ARTWORK (PDF FORMAT)


SONG SYNOPSIS:

Born Wolf - One of the oldest songs, written during the "Songs for the Macabre" sessions and no doubt inspired by Samhain's "The Shift". Several versions existed of this song - some adding a third verse, the vocal take here was the shortest of the three, but had the most attitude.

The Monster - A late entry for the "Songs for the Macabre" sessions. This is a 12 year olds attempt at re-writing Frankenstein. This vocal take was taken from a second version recorded with Dead End - featuring Matt Kovach and Scott Doerr on backups in the first verse ("Terrorizing, Murderizing"!)

Had A Corpse - A short, fast number about being best friends with a dead body.

Morbid Entertainment - Another old one, inspired by a film I saw on a horror double feature. A renowned movie star passes away, only to have his corpse stolen by fans - soon he returns to take revenge!! It's worth mentioning that I mispronounce the word "Morbid" throughout the song.

People Under the Stairs - Inspired by the film of the same name and recorded in the last days of Reaper. For the original version I used a Casio sampling keyboard to capture the "I'm gonna kill you" line from the movie.

Space PC - That's "Post Cataclysm" for whatever reason. Written and recorded while playing with Dead End. Utilizes an old space echo that I borrowed from a friend (maybe the inspiration for the title?)

Vampire - The oldest song in the collection. The original drums bled through onto the vocal track, which can be heard throughout this version.

Final Gasp - My inner Elvis coming through - or perhaps it was "American Nightmare" part two? I stumbled upon an acoustic demo of this song, which is where this vocal is taken from.