Ada (Wraith of the Ropes album)
Ada is the debut full-length CD by Wraith of the Ropes. The sound is a mixture of Funeral Doom and Horror Film score type music. It's very slow-tempo, atmospheric, creepy and depressive music. The vocals are a combination of distorted old-school Industrial Music style vocals and Black Metal.
Track listing
- "Chamber of the Wraith" – 3:24
- "Final Reflection" – 10:23
- "Lake of Decay" – 9:41
- "Alone" – 9:08
- "Death Bed" – 11:15
- "Snow Dragon" – 10:21
- "Untitled (a.k.a.: The Wraith's Rope)" – 4:04
Credits
- Scarecrow Rottinghouse: Vocals, Keyboards, Programming
- E.M. Hearst: Guitar, Bass, Drums, Programming
additional musicians:
- V. Rottinghouse: Background Voices on "Chamber of the Wraith"
Track-by-Track Synopsis of Ada
...quoted from an Interview WotR did with Eternity Magazin in 2006...
CHAMBER OF THE WRAITH:
SCARECROW : It was originally written as my idea of what the journey down the river Styx would sound like. Over the years of recording for Ada, I slowly added more and more sounds that I associated with passing on to the afterlife.
HEARST : Imagine Charon rowing your [...] soul down the river Styx, taking you to the underworld. Imagine the sound of the boat creaking as his oar pushes through the black stagnant waters of Hell. That is the imagery intended with this intro track.
SCARECROW : It has been said that this song has a lot of samples, but in fact it only has one sample and the rest is done musically or vocally. The chant that repeats in the song is my re-wording of the inscription on the gateway to Hell, from Dante's Inferno. I incorporated the band name into the lyrics because bands never seem to use their names for anything except marketing. Our name means a lot to us, it was chosen from a list of fifty or so possible names that we came up with. Wraith of the Ropes is something that we are a part of, and it is a part of us, not just a name. This will become more apparent as we release more material.
FINAL REFLECTION:
SCARECROW : The music was written over so many years that I can only tell you that the bass-line was written for someone that was part of my life at the time, and the lyrics are an anti-[...] message.
HEARST : Yeah, Final Reflection is song about the horrors of [...] abuse, addiction and self-destruction. We are both strongly against illicit [...] use. We're not exactly straight-edge though, because we do drink alcohol and Scarecrow smokes cigarettes. We are not militant about our anti-[...] stance, but we did want to express our viewpoint with this one song.
SCARECROW : I refuse to be around drugs and I wrote this song about what I had witnessed people around me going through, and what their eventual downfalls were/might be.
HEARST : Musically, this is the heaviest song on the whole album, I think. I have no problem saying that the guitar riffs were mostly influenced by Black Sabbath and Pentagram, especially the heavy final section of the song which is my favorite passage on the whole album.
LAKE OF DECAY:
HEARST : Another heavy Doom song. Musically, it was somewhat inspired by the bands Evoken and Khanate. It is also very influenced by George Romero and Lucio Fulci zombie films. There are actually warped samples from Lucio Fulci movies throughout the entire song, but you could never tell because we messed with them so much. The song seems to deal with a sort of "zombie apocalypse" scenario, but I didn't write the lyrics so i'm not sure what it's really about.
SCARECROW : The main theme lyrically is about a house that I used to live in when I was young. Something about that house always gave me the feeling that death was close by, and I imagined that the lake near the house could have a connection with death. The basic concept is a lake that has the ability to re-animate a corpse that's submerged in the water. This concept may not seem to mesh well with the rest of the album, but it has to do with what awaits us beyond death, much like the other songs on the album.
ALONE:
SCARECROW : Alone and Death Bed's lyrics were mainly written by Hearst, so I'll let him explain.
HEARST : This is by far the most "Funeral Doom" sounding and depressing song on Ada. It's also my personal favorite WotR song so far because of the [...] atmosphere of hopelessness that it evokes. It's a very powerful and cathartic song for me, the lyrics deal with the true [...] emotions that I have had to endure for my entire life. Some of the lyrics in "Alone" date back as far as 1995 when Scarecrow and I were in an Industrial band together called "Kindergarten". We saved these lyrics for a decade until we finally had some music that sounded as depressing as the lyrics.
DEATH BED:
HEARST : This might be the best song on Ada in terms of musical composition and song structure; it's a very epic track. It also seems to be almost every listener's favorite WotR song. Lyrically, it's the most personal song for me. In early 2004 I became extremely sick with heart trouble and I thought that I was literally on my "death bed". I was somewhat psychotic at the time, I couldn't think clearly because of the illness and I was hallucinating. I was too sick and exhausted to get out of my bed for many months. Many of the lyrics were written while I was laying there waiting to die. I wondered if my life really had been as meaningless as it seemed. If there is a Hell, I knew that I was about to go there. "Will death bring me peace or will the inferno engulf me?"; I was facing my own mortality and wondering if there would be anything after I die. I consider myself an atheist, but when I was facing death I started questioning my faith, or my lack of faith. Obviously I eventually got better, but I still have nightmares about returning to that horrible mental and physical state. This song holds some very bad memories for me and it's somewhat painful for me to listen to.
SCARECROW : Yeah, it was a very odd sensation doing the vocals for this song. During the time of Hearst's sickness, we were unfortunately out of contact because of some things that I was dealing with emotionally. When I found out he was sick, it forced me out of my self loathing and depression. We saw each other more regularly after that, and started finishing Ada's recording. When doing the vocals, I tried to imagine what he must have been feeling during his time alone. I added some lyrics of my own that I thought matched the mood and concept of the song, and did what I could to capture the anger, depression and dementia that he must have been dealing with.
SNOW DRAGON:
SCARECROW : Snow Dragon is my proudest moment musically so far. The emotions that I tried to capture with it are all the emotions that I was dealing with from the early writing and recording of Ada up until the recordings were finished. I've also tried to put an instrumental track on everything we've ever released, all the way back to our original band Kindergarten's two demo releases in the mid 90's. This is actually the musical sequel to a Kindergarten song entitled "Dragon". The underlying theme to Snow Dragon is the loss of love, and the feeling that it may never be replaced.
HEARST : Snow Dragon is the one non-Horror track on Ada. It's musically closer to themes from epic movie soundtracks like "Braveheart" or "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon". It's the false happy ending to the album.
SCARECROW : Yeah, someone actually commented that this song might have been scary on an early album by "The Cure" (laughs) it's not even meant to be scary. That's what I'm talking about, people don't listen to us for what we are, they listen to us thinking they know what we are. Apparently we manage to surprise them, but they're too blind to realize it.
HEARST : I'll never understand how anyone could possibly think we were trying to be "scary" on this song.
UNTITLED: "Track 7":
HEARST : This is the real ending. There is no such thing as a happy ending in this life, in the end there is only suffering and death. The lyrics are a chant of the name "Ada". It's an invocation to our deceased friend, we tried to channel her spirit through this song. The real title of this hidden song is "The Wraith's Rope".
SCARECROW: We've actually not gotten much of a response to this track, it seems like the fact that it's not listed anywhere, and it's really more a grouping of sound than music, would at least get it some attention, but so far no one seems to notice that it's any different than the rest of the album. This was by far the song that I had the most fun working on. I thought of each sound as a part of an orchestra, and there is no sense of timing, each sound has it's place and they all devour each other until the song's conclusion.
HEARST: Someone recently compared this track to Hellraiser's soundtrack, which was a great compliment and something I never actually heard in it myself.