Track By Tracks: DIONIZE - Lighthouse (2024)

1. God Damn:

The opening track of the album is a bad-tempered, slow-riffing headbanger - deliberate, sleazy, and brutish. Musically speaking, it’s all sludge and groove, with brooding melodies and a chaotic outro. Lyrically, it’s an open letter of hate mail - addressed to no one in particular but invites the listener to consider who in their life springs to mind when they hear the reproachful lyrics.

2. Wolf At The Dog Park:

This song starts off as a heavy, riff-packed sludge metal anthem and transcends into psychedelic melodies and wolf howls. The lyrics are about being an outcast, feeling lonely in a crowd, and searching for another soul like yours. The first half of the song focuses on the sins of wrath and pride, while the latter part is a melodic section dealing with emotions of isolation and despair, ending with a flicker of hope.

3. Lighthouse:

The title track of the album is a faster-paced, thrash and groove metal-influenced song. Released in 2023 it was the first single of the album, packed with crushing riffs, technical drums, symphonic melodies, and a discordant keyboard solo. The lyrics are about isolation, insanity, and cabin fever, inspired by the 2019 film The Lighthouse.

4. Mesa Black:

Mesa Black is 7 and a half minutes of heavy doom riffs, facing melting solos and hypnotic polyrhythms. It is the longest and most progressive song on the album. The lyrics take the listener deep down into the subterranean world of secret underground science/military bases. Those who grew up playing the 1998 video game Half-Life may be able to spot the multiple references to the game within the lyrics.

5. Shaman’s Vine:

This immersive, almost-wordless story finds the listener suddenly waking up from a hazy, stoner metal swampland into an ancient, ayahuasca-fuelled shamanic ceremony, somewhere in the Amazon jungle. The listener goes through the ritual, and after gaining the spiritual understanding their soul was trying to find, the listener's consciousness is jerked back into the monotonous haze of the material world. No time had passed, there had been no physical journey, and the listener was left wondering if they had just briefly fallen asleep, or briefly woken up.

6. Drunken Hunting:

Drunken Hunting is the fastest and shortest song on the album. It's a quick change of pace for the album, a purely instrumental track inspired by punk and thrash, infused with sludge metal and dosed with Dionize's signature polyrhythms and timing changes.

7. Draconian:

The last heavy song on the album, Draconian, is a satirical exposé on the conspiracy of Reptilians or "Lizard People" who bring terror and corruption to the world, according to certain theories. Although written from the die-hard conspiracist point-of-view, the real villains in the lyrics are the so-called 'elites', the modern-day aristocracy, anti-human globalists, and anyone who abuses a position of power for financial gain. Draconian is a call for revolution.

8. If An Axe Is An Arm:

The closing track, If An Axe Is An Arm, is a cover of a song by New Zealand experimental band This Kind Of Punishment, originally released in 1983. The band's Singer/multi-instrumentalist Peter Jefferies was a music teacher and songwriting mentor to Adam 'Dionize' Farr in high school, and the two are still friends all these years later. Peter taught Adam how to play drums, helped him develop his songwriting skills, encouraged him to question authority and inspired him as a musician and audio engineer.