Baring Teeth Present a Track-by-Track Breakdown of Transitive Savagery

This is our take on a grind song. Pure aggression, speed and intensity. Lyrically this song references “Abstracted Mind”: The story being told from the perspective of the populous and the followers.

This is first song we wrote for the new album. I remember we spent a lot of time on a transition between riffs. At about 1:31 in the song the drums start to set up the transition that happens at 1:48. Following that I’d say this is one of the stranger parts we’ve ever written. @ 1:51 the bass is counting in 9s and the guitar is in a 4/4 feel. Jason’s drums move between the two of us, accenting both. We wanted to add a different vibe to the end of this song. We ended up with a somber piano outro.
Lyrically this song is about a leader coming into power, dominating then losing his way and falling out of power.

Several of the riffs in this song came to be by Jason writing a drum part, Andrew writing a guitar part, then actually going back and creating a new drum part. In writing several of these drum ideas Jason referenced Tony Williams and Zack Hill as sources of inspiration. Kevin Ortega from Cognizant contributes the vocals at the end of the track. We felt his vocals really fit the doom feel on this part.

Lyrically this song is about substance-abuse and the ability of drugs to change one’s perception.

This is the only track on the record where we used an altered tuning. We tried to make this song as devastatingly heavy as possible but also dramatic. The end of this song has a hypnotic feel. We created this by experimenting with a counting sequence. The speed picking outro is in measures of 11.
Lyrically this song is about someone’s anger overpowering them and in a split moment doing something horrible. Then having to live with the consequences.

We approached this song with the idea of having extremely dense and heavy parts followed by tranquil parts. During the “tranquil” part we developed a call and response between the guitar and bass. At the end of the song we had an idea to introduce blast beats with soft dynamic and build from that to an explosion of dissonance. The end of this song may be the most nasty things we’ve ever written.

The lyrical theme for the song is centered around the idea that we live in so called civilized society and because of that institution people are allowed to act like monsters. Hiding behind titles and/or a social status they’re free of consequence.

This is the last song we wrote for the album. We played with the idea creating dynamics by the lack of activity on instruments, juxtaposed with denser more active parts. I feel like in this song we really focused on creating interesting melodies throughout, but it also contains one of the heaviest sections in the entire album.

This song lyrically follows the themes of “Transitive Savagery.” I tried to write about the disgusting reality of society.

This song was inspired by Scott Walker. We really tried to go out on a limb in writing this song. At the beginning of this song Kevin Ortega added some effected vocals to enhance the strange feel of this song. We also added some different instrumentation using a vibraphone and mellotron. The opening has a 5 over 2 feel which adds to the unusual nature of this song. The song builds to an explosion of activity at 2:54. We actually toyed with the idea of making this two separate songs. Lyrically in this song I explored several abstract ideas and attempted to match the feeling of the song musically.

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