Track By Tracks: Columbarium - Rivers Of Blood (2022)

1. RIVERS OF BLOOD:

The song ‘Rivers Of Blood’ is one of our oldest songs that will make it to our full album ‘The Morbidious One’, which we should release somewhere in May/June next year. The recording of that album is finished and Lander Cluyse from Hearse Studio will now start the production and mixing of it and will finally do the mastering for the album too. ‘Rivers Of Blood’ is also the title track of our ‘getting to know the band's-single that was officially released on the 23rd of May through Dust & Bones Records. If talking about the lyrics, you can find them easily in the lyric video that we had done by Ultra Organic Studio. The repetitive part of the lyrics came to be just out of nowhere at one of our rehearsals a few years ago. I added the verses later and it became our anti-drug song if you read well between the lines. Not that we want to preach ‘the good word’, definitely not, people have the right to do what they want in their own private environment, finally, you have to decide for yourself. See it more as the symbol of the snapped syringe that was at the back of a lot of Roadrunner records back in the late eighties and nineties, a kind of warning. The title of the song ‘Rivers Of Blood’ simply describes in three words the total misery you can find yourselves in if you are addicted to hard drugs, but even worse is that you can drag your whole family down with it and you cause utter sadness to parents, brothers, sisters and close friends you live with. The First verse describes the hopelessness you’re in when you’re addicted, being captured totally by it and not caring a bit for anyone around you anymore. The second verse describes the ‘Creatures of the Deep’ that drag you completely down in a hallucination state when tripping extremely. The third and last verse gives an alternative for living with dark feelings but using them the right way. That could be anything you can imagine, being creative with art or music eg., caring for the less fortunate and having your dark feelings turn around into something positive and creative for everyone. Koen, our keyboard & guitar player added some threatening keys at the beginning and halfway of the song that symbolizes the atmosphere of the song perfectly, I still love those parts a lot.

2. SAVE OUR CHILDREN:

The song is short, just under four minutes, because it was intended to be the B-side of the vinyl single for ‘Rivers Of Blood’, of which for the latter we were going to do an edited version specifically for vinyl, so we wrote that song on purpose to be that short. Unfortunately, we never released the single on vinyl so far for the simple reason that the delivery time for vinyl at the time is about eight months and that was too long to release the single. So, it ended as a tape and a digital release. I came up first with the words ‘Their Bleeding, So Frail, No Servants!’, which took me to write a song about decaying times and horrifying experiences our children sometimes are bearing. The two first verses describe the horrifying state child soldiers are in. They are lured into that position often by lies and deceit and meanwhile, they are simply canon meat and serve as living weapons of war. The third verse describes the digital era of the Westen World with modern technology as mirrors in the sky, it is a symbolic reflection. In the last verse, you hear the Preacher that we created that also appears on our full album to come. He claims to bury the bodies of the dead children which awakens a new wave of grief.