From the album The Lines of History
Lyrics
Upon foundations crippled by frost
Stand generations enduring loss
With what was gathered, and what was lost
We will stay honest despite the cost
One ripple against a wake,
Once patterned, will replicate
We will not find it just to lose it again
With what was gathered, and what was lost
We will stay honest despite the cost
Lost
We will not find it just to lose it again
Notes
Axel (click to show)
Axel (click to hide)
Smallz’s bass makes this song. He bought this pedal that makes his distortion sound like something from another planet, I love it.
Of all the songs on this album, I think Portrait is the most old-school LKS of the bunch. Even though some of the songs were actually written back in the day, we’ve adapted them to sound like the newer stuff we’re writing. On the other hand, the heavy breakdown on this one is definitely something we have moved away from for the most part. I think it works well, though. This one is fun to play live.
Rug (click to show)
Rug (click to hide)
My role in the band is to beg for all of us to turn our amps up to be even louder, drink lots of Black Label, consider every band a failure in comparison to Oceansize in any musical discussion/argument, and to play pretty guitar melodies over progressions that may or may not actually be all that pretty. This song is a good example of my style of playing (we can drink beer and talk about how awesome Oceansize is over insanely loud amps later, though). This features another example of using tapping to turn couple of stock pentatonic phrases (the two endings of the verse melody lines), into melodies that ring out, which wouldn’t be possible if I’d play them like you would normally play those phrases. One songwriting/riff writing technique I’m also fond of is using the tail end of two melody lines, and using them as a loop to lay underneath a chord progression – it’s a trick we’ve used many times, and features prominently in another song on the album, The Common Face.
Additionally, it was nice for us to have a song where the bass drives the ship for a change. Failure does a really good job of that, and it’s something I’d like us to do more of. Despite the bass not having an overly complicated part in the verse or chorus, they are very, very important to the song. We’ve had practices where Smallz couldn’t make it and the chorus sounds pretty lame without the bass line in there…and it’s not just because his rig is monstrous and he is twice as loud as the rest of us, either.
