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Colossus Kills was originally intended to be the first album to drop since Deconstruction, landing on the world 5 years later in 2018. That didn’t happen, mostly because I didn’t have the time to invest in it.
The irony of not having time to launch one album but instead launching 12 is not lost on me.
When I started Colossus Kills, Deconstruction, even 5 years later, was still rather fresh in my head and more music wasn’t really as big of a priority as other things, such as making sure life didn’t cave in on top of me.
But when have I ever let that stop me from making music?
I added this album to the 12 album lineup that came in out 2020, making it the 4th album in the set.
Colossus Kills features multiple songs that have a similar topic and origin. They come from the same vein Fighting, and each one works to hammer home the same point: I will not stop fighting. Until Time Dies has a set of verses that explain this idea perfectly:
The hook is a scratched version of a sample previously used in Deconstruction. I will be a success is a running theme through much of my current music, exposing a side that is clearly tired of failing. This is further echoed in Grand Scheme, a song that starts with an excerpt from motivational speaker Mel Robbins. She is essentially telling you that in order to be better, you need to get off of your ass and make it happen, no matter how terrifying that concept is.
The first words of the song, “In the grand scheme of things I am nothing, but I am everything to everyone who needs me to be something” was primarily aimed at my kids. I may not be anything to others but to them, I am a big deal. As a parent, you can’t just sit around on your ass being a useless shit, whining about how hard life is. You have to get up and stop feeling sorry for yourself because a better life isn’t going to just give itself to you. Your kids are counting on you and if you’re just sitting around not being the powerhouse kick ass world engine you could be, you straight up suck ass.
The annoyance of issues in life is obviously not something that is lost on me, as I have a history of complaining about it. The song Dear Life was one I wrote around the time Deconstruction came out but had never actually put down in the mic. It is a letter I wrote to vent my frustrations with life and how it has shaped me into the mental mess of a person I am today. Consider it a love letter to the universe.
A track that stands out among these is Watch Me, a song that puts the crosshairs on assholes in my life who have decided to rally against me. There are several people, from strangers to friends and even family members, all of whom seem to feel it would be better if I didn’t do better in life. They shit talk, try to run down my ideas and work, and even attempt to derail me in my pursuit of building a better life.
What they don’t really seem to notice is that none of their crap works. There is a pretty simple reason for this: it’s my life, not theirs, so why the hell would I give a shit what they have to say? This is a simple philosophy I’ve built my focus around to wall myself away from their nonsense and Watch Me is aimed at them.
The funny thing about this song is that as usual, people think it is purely about them just because I don’t name any specific person. Funny how that happens, when you say something that they think fits so squarely on themselves, then they get mad at you about it.
Side Note: Watch Me was eventually pulled from the album and moved to the unreleased album, Things I Failed to Say.
Deconstruction featured choruses from several different artists and in the case of Colossus Kills, only one appears and she hits it in three different places.
Ashley Apollodor is an amazingly talented vocalist who starts and finishes this album. Her voice brings in the intro with a powerful opening that follows Ed Boon’s notorious command, “Choose your destiny!” Halfway through the album, she appears again on the track Block the Writer. As great as that song is, she drives through big time on Crunch Time, a 7+ minute track that stands on top of Until Time Dies, Grand Scheme, and Watch Me.
OK, so Volatile almost knocked me out a couple of times. The alteration part in the third verse took many, many, many attempts to get it right. This was made much worse by me altering the verse to include more words. For some reason, I have a habit of doing this kind of thing to myself.
Volatile was done simply to be what I call a “bulldozer” track, but in this case, the bulldozer happens to have 12 Ferrari engines in it.
Other “bulldozers” include Blood and the title track Colossus Kills. These are a type of track I’ve produced frequently over the years, but I’ve noticed that tracks like How It’s Done also tend to pop in every now and then. Another that is in the pipe, Flamethrower, is like a blend of How It’s Done and Volatile, though it isn’t as fast as Volatile.
The vast majority of this album is produced by Anno Domini or producers within the Anno Domini camp. I was a member of the Inner Circle for years and have amassed so many instrumentals I’ll never use them all. That said, having hundreds of instrumentals at my disposal when kicking out 12 albums back to back was definitely useful.
Since I started making music a million years ago, I’ve had a habit of talking about things that not everyone will understand. I often drop odd references that go over the heads of most listeners, and I’m not unaware of this fact. A lot of it has to do with my very wide set of interests.
On Put A Sock In It, Hannah brings this up and starts complaining to me about how I’m constantly doing this and leaving everyone confused. She insists that I stop to gain a wider audience, while I, of course, decline to do so. We also touch on her existence here, but we’ll get more into that later.
On How It’s Done, I kicked out this verse:
This beat I’ll bomb it with raps
a sonic blast of a massive reactive rapidly corrosive mentally unstable madness
This is followed by a background vocal of someone saying exactly what everyone is thinking: What?!
Yeah, I get it. Sometimes I say things that are understood by no one except me. In some cases, I’ll listen again years later and not know what the hell I’m talking about.
So let’s talk about the track called Ruckus. Also known as the “This used to have a different instrumental but K-Rino murdered it” song.
I mentioned that I was a member of the Anno Domini Inner Circle. It seems that legendary rapper K-Rino was also a member of the Inner Circle. How do I know this? I’ll explain.
In 2016, K-Rino dropped 7 albums in a single day. No one in rap had ever done anything like that before. I’m not sure anyone in music anywhere had ever done anything like that before.
I noticed that a ton of the music on those albums used instrumentals you could get through the Inner Circle. One of those was his song Brain Reaction:
The thing about Brain Reaction is that I wrote Ruckus to that instrumental. It was recorded and ready to go. Then I heard K-Rino’s Brain Reaction. Dude just annihilated the instrumental to the point where I didn’t care what I recorded, there was no reason to even bother trying to use the beat.
I went through several instrumentals afterward before I finally stopped and left it on the one you hear on the album.
Also, while I’m on the subject, you may have noticed that I dropped 8 albums in one day. Those were the final 8 albums in the 12 for 2020. I only did that because my slow ass got very backed up by the end of the project. It was not intentional.
The way I began in music is not the way I have grown into. For years, I lived in my depression in such a way that I was not moving forward. It wasn’t until 2013’s Deconstruction when I started turning things around and echoing it out in my songs.
Colossus Kills pushed more of that change to the front with Crunch Time. With a great vocal by Ashley Appollodor against a beautiful instrumental, I throw down four verses that drive into unhappiness with how my life has become, and my unwillingness to let it continue down that path.
And it’s worth noting that this song was written well before A Year of Music was a thing. Since the days or writing and recording Crunch Time, I had put a lot of action behind my words and greatly improved my life. I have continued this fight and have no intentions of stopping.