SONG: Sevengill (Notorynchus Cepedianus) (a penitential Giant Squid cover)

SONG: “Sevengill (Notorynchus Cepedianus)”, a penintential Giant Squid Cover. (OGG version here.)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: This isn’t based on any specific research. It’s a cover of a majestic song by the mighty Giant Squid.

ABSTRACT
Notorynchus cepedianus is the broadnose sevengill shark, a predator and scavenger of the Pacific. Giant Squid is, or was, a San Francisco heavy metal band who wrote lots of songs about marine biology, and archaeology, and horror, and awe. They sometimes had a cello and a flute, so sometimes they got called “symphonic metal.” They use odd time signatures and have songs with sections, so sometimes they got called “progressive metal” or “post metal.”

I do not have a metal voice.

This is as far as I can tell a song about suicide, or about despair turning a lovelorn man into a shark in San Francisco Bay. It may be that the shark has eaten a man who jumped from the Golden Gate bridge and absorbed some of his memories. The survival of the memories has made the suicide a failure. (There is a whole narrative for the album it came from which is a little bit impressionistic, but not inconsistent with my interpretation here.)

I don’t believe there is such a thing as an uncoverable song, unless it is a very bad song, and this is a very good song. It was nearly uncoverable by me. The first half of it has a very 1950s/60s dream rock vibe, and then there’s a cello solo, and then a sludge metal end with harmonizing female voices and a throat-shredding screamed chorus. Weird thing, the first bit (which is a mode I write in) was harder for me than the last bit (which is so beyond me that I knew I’d do something different). Part of it is that there are odd time signatures, which do my head in as a solo multitrack guy, because I have to make drums separate from everything. There are also odd *tempo changes* between sections, which is very hard to do on a DAW. And also… Giant Squid’s lyrics have a weird scansion – there are unusual emphases on specific syllables. They make it work with good musicianship, but man, that’s a challenge for me.

I spent more than a month tweedling out the various riffs and underlining syllables in the lyrics. I knew it’d be funny to swap the cello (which I can’t play but often fake with a SoundFont sample) with a banjo (which I do play, and which I’d need to play to make this arrangement work).

(I am not as good a banjo player as the Giant Squid’s cellist is a cellist.)

The thing that made this song fall into place — at least the first section — was figuring out a rhythm guitar part (which doesn’t exist in the original), which somehow converted that song into an almost upbeat indie pop song. I had no idea that would happen, and it delighted me. The melancholy of the choruses was suddenly very obvious — the original is more haunting and creepy than actually sad, if that distinction makes sense. I added a recorder, a SoundFont of a woodwind instrument, to sort of stand in for a foghorn or a beacon, as well as to fill in for where the original has a flute doing some jazzy arpeggios in that one part.

The last section… well, I recorded the riff with the banjo first, then considered turning it into a sort of jamboree, but to do that justice would have taken six *more* weeks of learning, and this is a penitential cover… I had to just get it out. So I recorded two basses (one as a lead guitar, more or less), whomped the arrangement as metal as possible, and then just sang the thing like a song, and tried layering voices in the shoegaze way instead of screaming in the death metal way. At the last minute, I slowed the end section down electronically (just stretched a mixed-down track) to more of a sludgy pace and added some lady-voice oohs. and tried to clear up my own vocals. There’s some sonar sounds from an Acid CD-ROM from the 1990s in the chorus. It’s metal, I guess, in my way.

There’s so much more I could do here, but no, it’s time. The first section is kind of amazing as a stand-alone song… I think if I was still gigging, I’d add it to my setlist.

LYRICS:

[IN 8] D-C-BbBb, Eb-A-GG
Down here I wait / with all my benthic friends
Underneath the gate / listening to lives end //
Those with seven gills / will investigate
each thunderous crash / and corresponding shape
In great detail, / I described you to each of them
In case the bridge / is how you choose to end //

[IN 9/8] A-A-Bb-Eb-G
I’d like to have some last words with you before
you end up on the Farallones’ rocky shores
Where the real beasts await to have their way
With all the failures washed out from the Bay //

[IN 8]D-C-BbBb, Eb-A-GG
A hundred years have passed / since just last autumn
Please come to the Bay, / see who now lives on the bottom //

[IN 10/8] A-A-Bb-Eb-G
I’d like to have some last words with you before
I forget how to walk upon these muddy shores
and cease entirely to breathe like a man
Seeing things with only the tips of my hands

[SOLO IN 7, then 3 3s, then 7]
[RIFF OUTRO][IN 8] (Eb-D-CC, C-Bb-GG)
My heart is crushed by the jaws of regret
Upon knowing where you now make your bed
The depths at which I’m chained to you, I pray
those shackles eventually rust through

(G – F – G# ) [IN 6]x8
Held under / by chiton like lies
Amongst the corpses
I’ll never surface
Debris bouncing
off my hide
Covered in detritus
I’ve lost purpose

[IN 8]
What comfort lies in years of hating me?
Haven’t you in some way found a rare peace?
Please re-alize / your very soul’s at stake
you’re still a man, and I was just / a tool of fate

(G – F – G# )[IN 6]x8
Your bite marks
riddled my soul
It got damn cold
with all those holes
So I left it on shore
for all the gulls (Take it)
There wasn’t much left (Take it)
But it’s all yours (Take it)