originally published: 09/01/2024
Post Death Soundtrack continue the promotional push of the explosive Veil Lifter album with a new music video for the particularly vicious thrash grunge anthem "Lowdown Animal".
"The concept behind the Hyena is many-fold. I grew up in a school that operated as 'Lord of the Flies'. Bullying, intimidation, fear, and no safety. There was no escape or control. I don't want to see that happen to others like my nephews or niece. I initially invoked the Hyena symbol in my lyrics after a nasty divorce that found my life savings gone and my kittens stolen. The invocation 'I'll be the Hyena. Unwelcome drifter.' came about. It is a willingness to rise up in the midst of total chaos. It is also a sacred connector between all of us who have faced trauma, abuse, gaslighting, or suicidal thoughts, saying 'I'm with you. You're not alone because we are the same and we share a pack.'" - Steve Moore
Currently trending on the Bandcamp Grunge, Hard Rock, and Heavy Metal charts, Post Death Soundtrack's Veil Lifter is getting heavy recognition. Part of this success is likely due to them currently being featured on the extremely popular Doomcharts.com as their 'Friday Freebie' pick. The band has their new album available for free/pay what you want on Bandcamp.
They also recently released their music video for the haunting "Tide Turns Red". Watch on Youtube.
Post Death Soundtrack's fourth full-length release Veil Lifter is a tempestuous, 10-track Molotov cocktail channeling doom, grunge, hardcore, and thrash into a crushing new record. Following the orchestrated industrial soundscapes of their third album, It Will Come Out of Nowhere, Jon Ireson and Stephen Moore have taken a sharp turn to an unruly organic live sound. This fresh 'doom grunge' approach is driven by those who first inspired them – Alice in Chains, Black Sabbath, Nirvana, and The Stooges, as well as artists who are redefining heavy music for a new age – Russian Circles, Windhand, Queens of the Stone Age and YOB. Sludgy riffs, hardcore fury, hypnotic grooves, and empyrean ambience work in union to conjure a singular affecting vision. Veil Lifter is a relentless charge throughout, capturing the unwelcome outsider mentality of a threatening pack of hyenas.
Thematically, Veil Lifter is provocative, incisive, and wholly uncensored. A rousing invocation of spiritual weaponry. A meditation on mental illness and its underlying prevalence throughout the collective psyche. A bold expression of terrifying realities and a prayer of sorts. 'Veil Lifter' is taken from an Eastern philosophy-inspired phrase, "lifting the veil of ignorance". The name points to the intrinsic beyond the countless external forms and ideas that mask it. Shamanic visions, shadowy dreamscapes, a scorched Earth, and a relentless drive for solace lead the protagonist to retreat to the icy waters underground before facing the mountain of renewal and unbecoming.
Steve: "Veil Lifter is very much the album I've always wanted to make. The album is intended, as all my work is, to be completely uncensored, unashamedly dark, raw emotionally, and therefore, cathartic and freeing. It was literally written from deep within the shadow during nearly impossible times. Isolation, depression, addiction, chaos, burned bridges, health failures, and strangely, perseverance and the resilience of the inner witness. So in many ways, it's an invocation of protection and spiritual weaponry at a time when it was greatly needed.
Much of it is written in heavy metaphor and dream language, as I've always felt it's more powerful to paint a picture rather than be overly direct. Ideas from Advaita, the Gita, Zen and philosopher's like Krishnamurti find their way into the concepts and lyricism here and there, but for the most part, this is a purely raw album intended to evoke deeply personal emotion, as it was written from a truly dangerous place..
Veil Lifter is dedicated to the memory of my hero and wonderful Father, Ted George Moore, who I know would be proud of what we've created."
Jon: "Steve had amassed a treasure trove of guitar parts that he would send me daily. A lot of slow dirges with some faster hardcore-inspired stuff mixed in. That inspired the new direction for this record. We knew it was going to be a pretty big change ditching all the electronic production stuff we had done on our other records but when you listen to a song like 'Bridge Burner' off of the last album, you can see the direction we were heading.
The bones of the songs came together very quickly, arranging all the drums, rhythm guitars and some of the bass in two crazy week-long bursts. The album really came to life once we started adding Steve's great vocal layers, added some fuzzy melodic bass lines to move the plot along, and the icing on the cake was bringing in Casey Lewis. He had worked with Steve on several projects before and his intensity, personality, and feel make the record really punch.
About visceral tracks like "Lowdown Animal", Moore adds “The hyena has become a kind of symbol for the band, With lions, tigers, and bears, you have a good idea of what to expect from their brute strength. But hyenas represent the outsider, the unwelcome drifter, the cursed sneak. We’ll sneak up, surround the mighty lion and take it down while laughing.”
Order the full album on Bandcamp. The album is currently FREE/pay what you want. Full lyrics are also available at Bandcamp.
Vancouver-based psychedelic doom grunge project Post Death Soundtrack crafts a dense electric symphony of heathen guitars, brazen bass, and a bubbling cauldron of vicious sounds. The score to the untamed plains of the subconscious. This lays the groundwork over which the inimitable Steve Moore showcases his crushing vocal performances. In each piece, he takes from his hall of faces to embody the essence of a theme, be it scathing fury or enlightened ambivalence. Balancing ferocity and serenity, surrealist absurdity and earworm familiarity.
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"Well, I certainly hope so, it seems like it is," laughed Blues Traveler bassist Ben Wilson as he discussed what the band has been up to and their preparations before they hit the road once again for a Summer tour. "The band has been quite active over the years through touring and we managed to continue to record some records. We've done two kinds of covers records, the first one was a blues record which actually got nominated for a Grammy which was pretty cool and the next one, we did some soul covers. That one wasn't quite as well received but it was sure fun to make. So, it's been really cool; you have this massive success for a decade or so and then you kind of dip below that cultural Gestalt line where you're just kind of bubbling below the surface and you can do just fine there even though you're not on the cover of "The Rolling Stone" and that's kind of what we've been doing. We've had a good run, it has been fantastic and these summer tours where we get together with these other kind of bands of similar eras with similar kinds of hits; we're very fortunate as kind of a neo-hippie jam band from that era that kind of bucked some of the trends that were going on at the time but we were lucky enough to have a couple of hits and that has allowed us to have kind of a different career than just the straight jam bands do; not that that wouldn't be awesome as well because obviously many of them are doing just fine but it's just a slightly different road but it has been wonderful. We didn't rehearse a whole lot because we've been playing together for 38 years but things are good and we're stoked for this upcoming tour."
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