Metal Anarchy

Old Man Gloom are streaming their new album “Seminar VIII: Light Of Meaning“ in full. That effort will officially be released tomorrow (May 22). This news comes after the group previously surprise released another new album, titled “Seminar IX: Darkness Of Being,” earlier this year.

Old Man Gloom commented:

“As you all are able to hear the full scoop of the newest Seminars, I thought I’d shed a pinch of light on two tracks in particular.

First, Final Defeat.
That one I know I’ve talked a little about, but that was a demo Caleb made for a Zozobra project we never got around to about 5 years ago. He recorded it on his iPad at home, and when he sent it, I sent an email simply saying “WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS COME FROM?”.

Unfortunately we never got around to working on it together, but I’m really grateful we put it on this album. Caleb’s family was kind enough to lend us the iPad to get all the individual tracks off it. We were pretty blown away to find a lot of weird ambient noise and even super distorted weird vocals.

All that stuff at the end is caleb. Of course Steve added vocals and some very contextually inspired lyrics, and Kurt made the recordings sound super beefy, but it’s mostly caleb at home, including of course the only appearance of his bass on the album.

It was really weird for me to record to it in the studio, simultaneously painfully feeling his absence, but joyfully basking in his presence. Emotional is an unbelievable understatement, but the result is something I hope you all can find a fraction of the value we all feel it has.

Steve’s addition of “time to shake our world, prepare to live” hit me like a ton of bricks twice, once when I heard it the first time, and again after the pandemic started. If I was the kinda guy to get word tattoos, I would get this on my damn face.

Second, True Volcano.
This was the original demo Caleb sent us for the song Volcano, on Christmas. It was just one guitar, to show us the arrangement. As you know, we took it from him and butchered it without him knowing.

On the way to rehearsals steve and I were listening to Caleb demos, and I played this one, and we just thought it might be cool to honor Caleb’s original vision for the song. Again, Kurt weaved his magic, Nate added some amazing vocals and lyrics, Aaron wove it into the Gloom fabric, and Steve channeled our man on bass. It, again, became something I couldn’t envision. A true Caleb banger.

Hope you all are finding the light of meaning, and I hope you’re not being bogged down by the darkness of being. I had no idea these titles would find such a prescient hold on our current lives.

Much love!!!“