- Subways
- Good Life
- Friday Night
- Ballad Of An Anarchist
- Orbital Paths
- Let Blood Flow
- No Fun
- This Town Is Dead
- Sunday Morning
- In The End
All tracks written, produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by Neil O'Brien.
Cover art by Neil O'Brien.
I've got quite mixed feelings about this album. I think conceptually it's a pretty strong record but the execution was quite badly flawed. Certainly I was trying to do something new for me: there's several tracks that are drawing more on punk and hip-hop and indie rock stuff in addition to the rave / electronica stuff my work had always previously been rooted in. My musical ambitions definitely outstripped my abilities though, and there's a whole range of problems, from weird unintentional dissonance, super-lo-fi vocal recordings and truly fucking awful synth guitars that spoil it. But I still sense that there's a decent album buried in there somewhere, even if it would require a pretty substantial remake to bring it out.
Thematically, it's obviously another record about depression, which I suspect I was going through another bout of at the time (honestly, my memories of the 2000s are pretty hazy so it's difficult to be sure). This had been a near-constant theme of my music from the late 90s through to maybe 2002. As I recall, I had a few years more or less clear of it before, well.... this Relapse. The dates are uncertain: the old Rude Corps website said this album was made between March - July 2005, but evidently it had a re-mix around Jan 2006 and that's when the song files were overwritten, except "Orbital Paths" which had a third version made in 2008 with re-recorded vocals and the melody line cleaned up to remove the dissonance. Also, the lyrics for "Good Life" were pretty old at this point: I'm sure they were written around 1998/99, which now makes them sound bleakly amusing to me in a "Jesus, how jaded and melodramatic was I at the age of 18?" sort of way. (Should also note here the obvious sample from Oasis' "Champagne Supernova" on this track.) There were also a couple of other tracks that were intended to have vocals: "Ballad Of An Anarchist" and "No Fun". The former, I'm not sure if any lyrics were actually written; the latter does have lyrics but for some reason I never recorded them.