Mythic Hindsight by Day of Wrath

Album Overview:

Mythic Hindsight was going to be an album of me covering me but in the end only No Contest and Ocean Heading were revisitations, the latter with new lyrics. I'd begun work on neither when Birthmark came about, a theatrical reading of Hawthorne's short story, remembered from a previous century. The lyrics for Sad to Let the Day End are drawn from a poem by my big brother Anthony. We have a history of musical collaboration but in this manner it's a first. Letter to the Void and Waiting for the Storm contain a musical idea that appears in unreleased Wrath scraps of bygone years. Anything but twenty-twenty, hindsight is mythic, metamorphic. Memory as a creative act.

Liner Notes to Side one:

1. The Birthmark
The album starts understated, the falling dew of extended thirds, then the melodies of the garden, tendrils and vines. Anomalous to Mythic Hindsight in all the Wrath discography is that the first voice heard on the album isn't mine. The redoubtable Rowland Hazard acts the demonic choir that tempts the protag to embrace the absurd conviction that imposing his will upon nature he will see her humbled and receive from her contrite lips a confession of his scientific mastery. An ancient tradition has it that when satan unmasked speaks, his words are voiced in infernal three-part harmony to counter the triune, and this is what you hear as the composition ramps up.
2. A Letter to the Void
hear the History of a Wrath riff all ye who would:
2006, Cumberland Ave, nativity of a rising 6/8 guitar riff in Phrygian, and its more complex two and a half bar long evolution that circulates around the drums which persist in 6/8. Mellow vibe, clean jazzy guitar, unsatisfactory chorus, lame lyrics. I dumped it.
2018, Farmington, the Phrygian riff unearthed and done distorted, screams and weird guitar solos, new lyrics, new chorus with the words “waiting for the storm that never comes,” calm in the middle and build-up to a heavy return. But as in '06, it wasn't good enough.
2024, Wilton, I outlined two versions, a Heavy & a Lite, both beginning with the two and a half bar evolution as an intro, with the Phrygian riff for verses. New lyrics except “waiting for the storm that never comes.” Totally new vocal melodies, eerie backups, Heavy & Lite differing in other compositionally substantial ways, (Heavy has no chorus to speak of, Lite has a prominent and melodic one,) so that when you finally hear Lite – penultimate track on side two – you're not sure why you remember it, if you do.
Eighteen years haunted by a riff now happily unsettled in a pair of strange houses.
3. Ocean Heading
Under a different title this tune dates from the turn of the century, when I wrote a bunch of guitar songs knowing almost nothing of guitar and forbidding myself to check on piano to see what I had stumbled upon by sound alone. Here it is with a new bridge (I looked at the piano for that,) and new lyrics based on a toast I delivered at Seth Goepel's birthday party in March of this year, which goes to show that you don't always know the ramifications of supposedly intentional creative acts.
4. No Contest
Me covering me. This tune first appeared in early 2019 on Skin Tirade, and I wanted another shot at it. It's built on an unobtrusive ostinato, three notes descending stepwise that – a certain structural break excepted – persist through the entire song, but because it's neither in the bass nor on top, but somewhere in the middle, you have to listen for it, the surprise coming in the coda which moving to hitherto unexplored tonal territory yet still supports that idee fixe.

Liner Notes to Side two:

5. May Mood
Sad to Let the Day End's improvised prelude. May Mood's tonal relation to what follows is similar to but less complex than that of album's end to beginning, that is, The Paralytic to The Birthmark. (In both cases a root becomes a third, but here a third, without any modification, becomes a fifth.)
6. Sad to Let the Day End
My brother Anthony's poem, penned on a bad night in a hotel. He told me I could set it to music. I hope he likes how it came out! Its harmonic feel is atypical of Wrath.
7. Image in the Ice
Acoustic ballad, reflections on earthly suffering, beginning and ending with otherworldly suggestions.
8. Waiting for the Storm that Never Comes
This is the lighter result the resurrection of the Phrygian riff, sporting a chorus in which Rowland the Hazardous takes the lead, the undistorted jazzier feel hearkening back to Cumberland Ave, 2006. For a full history of this riff see the notes to track 2, A Letter to the Void.
9. Forest Sounds
A musical rumination on the foregoing.
10. The Paralytic
Three related sets of chord changes brought to unexpected places, first by things overlying and then from underneath.
The lyrics are drawn from The Sisters, the first story in Joyce's Dubliners, which deals with a precocious young boy's experience of the death of an odd and much older friend.

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