A Wolf Amongst Ravens by After the Burial

Album: Wolves Within (2013)

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After The Burial originally recorded this song for an EP but it never really happened so they eventually decided to use it to close their Wolves Within album. Guitarist Justin Lowe explained to Artist Direct: "That was recorded around the time we tracked the This Life Is All We Have EP. We didn't know what we would do with the track. Since it wasn't on the EP, we just started playing it live. We've been playing it live for about a year now. We weren't sure if it would make the album or not, but we were playing it live so much we were like, 'Yeah, let's throw it on there!' It doesn't really sound like the rest of the tracks on the record so we put it last, and we hoped it would be a good closer."
Lowe told Artist Direct the story of the song: "It was written, and we actually recorded it a couple of years ago," he said. " It's just coming out now. Trent (Hafdahl, guitar) had a demo for the song which had the intro. It was just played on a clean guitar, and it went into this riff he created with this low tuning. I had never heard anything like it before. He shot it over to me. I re-orchestrated the beginning intro from his clean guitar, and I actually incorporated the electronic instruments you hear in the beginning."
It was the first song that After The Burial did in the C-sharp tuning. "This was the first song we could showcase that tuning in," said Lowe. "We focused in on the groove element of the song. The sound of the C-sharp note is a sort of percussive sound. It's an abrasive tone. The song is really built around a percussive guitar sound that's all following the drums on pretty much the entire song. It's a cool style so we went for it, especially on the outro."

"We wanted the outro to have a little bit of a cinematic feel to it," Lowe continued. "We tried to get that across as much as possible. We took a little focus off the guitars and shifted it over to the melodic orchestration we have at the end. The guitars and drums are doing the same thing most of the time. I think it's pretty cool how it turned out. It's definitely got a darker feel. It's one of the darkest songs we've ever written. A lot of our stuff is pretty uplifting here and there. There was a darker feel, but it sounded cool so we went for it."

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