Tuesday, December 23, 2008

78 Days After Death

78 Days After Death were a metalcore band from Salt Lake City in the early 2000's. They arose from the ashes of a band called Deadfall, and played a style of metalcore tinged with black metal. I feel fortunate to have been able to play a handful of shows with them both in Utah and Oregon (although they had to cancel on a couple of Portland and Boise shows). As far as I'm concerned, 78 Days After Death can be placed among some of the other legendary SLC bands like Insight, Clear, Lifeless and Triphammer.

The first 78 Days After Death recording appeared as a track on the Ascend From The Darkness comp on Dark Vision Records. I can't remember who ran that short lived label, but I'm inclined to say it was the drummer from Beneath The Ashes. A follow up release by 78 Days After Death was supposed to come out on this label as well, but it never materialized.

78 Days After Death - Skyfalls
Dark Vision Records [2000]

http://www.mediafire.com/?ejnnjiqzjon

Sometime in 2001 saw the Time Is Forgotten cd being self released by the band. Containing 8 tracks, it would end up being the largest output from 78 Days After Death. It was while they did a west coast tour in support of this cd that they first hooked up with my band, The Dead Unknown, for a show in Portland. Hardcore in Portland was at an all time low at this point in time, and turnout for the show was beyond dismal, but we all went out for some food after the show, and got to become fast friends.

78 Days After Death - Too Much Is Forgotten...
Self Released [2001]

http://www.mediafire.com/?ryjngz2hezm

A few months after playing a show together in Portland, I received an email from Billy 78 wanting to do a split 7" with The Dead Unknown. Both of our bands were adamantly against religion, and their idea was for our two bands to team up for an anti-religion themed 7". It's with this recording that I think The Dead Unknown finally started coming into our own, and the 78 Days After Death track also showed a much more intense direction. Billy and Clint were having a few setbacks with the covers, so the first 50 copies that came to me in Portland got their own limited PDX covers:
The Dead Unknown then packed 9 of us into a Suburban and made the 16 hour drive to SLC for the 7" release show. Salt Lake was going through another one of their venue lulls at the time, and the one place that would do shows charged a fortune, so we knew from the get go that we wouldn't be getting paid, but fuck it, we were young and just loved to get out of town. Like all of our shows in SLC, it was a lot of fun, and well worth the crazy drive for no pay. The drive home to Portland from that show is still infamous, because in the middle of nowhere, we decided to pull into a Denny's for some food and sleep, and at some point very early in the morning while we were all crammed into the Suburban, JD woke up and started freaking out; "Where are we? Why are we here? We should be on the road. We should be driving right now!" He then proceeded to attempt to get out of the Suburban, and in doing so, he farted right in Teddy's mouth. Holy shit, what a drive home.
Upon checking, there are still a few copies of this 7" available at
Very Distro
I ripped these mp3s from the master cd of the 7" a few years ago when Clint brought it to me on a Cherem tour. It was scratched to shit, but I got a clean rip off of it. After moving a few times, I can no longer find that cd, so here's the old 192kb rip, as opposed to a V0 rip.

78 Days After Death/The Dead Unknown split 7"
Shattered Silence Records [2002]

http://www.mediafire.com/?e40iyjmcnwt

The final recording from 78 Days After Death came in the form of 2 songs on the From The Mean Streets - Salt Lake City Hardcore comp. They had added a keyboard player at this point, but they used the keyboard in good taste, and at no point in time does the keyboard overpower any of the other intstruments. I never got to see them play at this stage of their time together, but I wish I had, because the song Wasted Flesh contains an awesome breakdown with the sweet lyrics of "You're just another junkie!".

78 Days After Death - Wasted Flesh & Untitled
xResolvex Records [2003]
http://www.mediafire.com/?j0kgmg32jny

78 Days After Death suffered from the same symptom that many bands do, seeing a revolving door of 2nd guitar players. Not too long after the songs for the aforementioned comp were recorded, the band broke up. Various reunion talks have floated around, but things seemed to get a little weird between the singer and the rest of the band. They almost did a reunion using the singer from Pushing Up Daisies, and even practiced with him once or twice. Billy and I also talked a few times about myself doing vocals for a reformed version of 78 Days After Death, but nothing ever materialized.
Billy also sang for Cherem and played guitar for Up River
Jake went onto play drums for Up River and Tamerlane

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

thank you so much for posting this...its really nice to hear stories about salt lake cities past bands. means allot.

Unknown said...

beautiful insight man. good job.
-mike/reflect

Unknown said...

The Ascend From Darkness comp was Joel from Embrace The End's label. I have another comp he put out and then Embrace the End got a little to serious and he sorta stopped the label.

Anonymous said...

DARK VISIONS WAS JOEL FROM EMBRACE THE END'S LABEL. I THINK ASIDE FROM THAT COMP CD, THE ONLY OTHER RELEASES WERE THE ETE CASSETTE DEMO AND THE FIRST ETE CD WHICH WAS PUT OUT IN COLLABORATION WITH DARK VISIONS AND BATTLE AX RECORDS (RYAN FROM SWORN VENGEANCE LABEL).

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