Take The Curse

Take The Curse
artwork from the vinyl edition
Studio album by Ramesses
Released	April 19 2010
Recorded	August 2008 at 7 Farms Studios in England
Genre	Doom Metal, Death/Doom, Black Metal
Length	53:43
Label	Ritual Productions
Producer	Ramesses
Ramesses chronology
Baptism of the Walking Dead (2009)	Take The Curse (2010)	Possessed By The Rise of Magik (2011)

Take The Curse is the second studio album by the English doom metal band Ramesses. Recorded in 2008 and suffering through various delays, Take The Curse would be released via Ritual Productions in April 2010. Three of the songs had been released prior as an EP entitled Baptism of the Walking Dead and both releases featured art from a conceptual piece called "Fucking Hell".

In an interview with Adam Richardson via The Aquarian, he would speak about the recording process and the delays:

“	"[on the delays and writing process] I think the band has grown mad! Take The Curse is over a year-and-a-half late coming out so you can imagine the frustration and fury for us. There were weeks on end when I couldn’t get hold of our engineer to finish the vokills or the mixes, etc. Things were getting ugly, but we managed to drag it out of the mire and finish the Beast off! Well worth it too. We are very happy with how The Curse turned out. Each song has a very deliberately different feel and production and remind me of short horror film scores, which is exactly what I wanted to achieve in terms of creepy and or suffocating atmosphere… yeah, very happy with the variety of nasty flavours on this album! Me and Tim put a lot of work into the mournful harmonies which pervade nearly every track—the way the vokills and guitars weave in and out of each other in varied ways like cosmic rays through the gaze of Anubis! I really like the mellower almost folky and certainly pagan sections of the record which shine through a lot more than other recordings we have made due to wildly different approach we took recording The Curse. As a sort of backlash to all things metal, we recorded the album with James Thompson—an expert in recording Cuban traditional music, usually in Cuba—never anything heavy—and in a studio that had never had a heavy band in it, as well as a plethora of unexpected bits of strange equipment and ancient paraphernalia! [on the recording location] We recorded The Curse in the country miles away from anywhere underneath a huge Tudor mansion with a monolithic historical vibe which we thrived on. We recorded the whole album plus (‘The Glorious Dead’ for the Unearthly Trance split 10” and ‘Baptism Of The Walking Dead’ U.S. 12” just to be released) and ‘Chrome Pineal’ (to be released soon) in just two days! We started doing outdoors—but had to abandon due to weather—we will be returning to this method of recording in the future. It was laying down the vokills and mixing that then took an eternity! Relations in the band were stretched to breaking points with the endless back and forth of mix versions to be signed off by each of us, as every track has a very different production and was approached individually, and me being stuck in the studio mixing, and it dragging on was soul destroying… and then not knowing how many days or weeks until the next session was gonna happen. Like ‘The Pit And The Pendulum’ it was! Suffice to say the sense of relief now it is finally out as it is meant to sound and look is quite immense. [On the artwork] I first saw Jake and Dinos’ breathtaking work in The White Cube gallery where they exhibited in relative darkness a mass of nerve jangling African styled carved heads and busts with a very haunting and voodoo look about them—on closer inspection the sculptures become even more menacing and harrowing when you realize they are all McDonalds characters… Sick. Then it was ‘If Hitler Had Been A Hippy How Happy Would We Be,’ which featured actual watercolours by the lunatic dictator himself which they had painted smiley faces and the like onto. However, when I beheld ‘Fucking Hell’ for the first time I nearly burst! It blew my mind then and it still does when I think about it—or look at our album cover! Its absolute grim beauty…"	”
	— Adam Richardson, The Aquarian

Ritual Productions would handle the CD while At War With False Noise would handle the initial vinyl release, limited to 500 copies (400 black, 100 clear). Ritual Productions would do their own vinyl issue in 2012 with a bonus 7" containing two live cuts recorded at the band's 2011 performance at Roadburn Festival.

Take The Curse would garner positive reception from several publications such as The Guardian, Nocturnal Cult and Sea of Tranquility among others.

Tracklist

• 1. Iron Crow (7:03)
• 2. Terrasaw (5:30)
• 3. Black Hash Mass (5:10)
• 4. Take The Curse (6:11)
• 5. Vinho Dos Mortos (2:36)
• 6. Baptism of The Walking Dead (7:12)
• 7. Another Skeleton (6:01)
• 8. Hand of Glory (4:07)
• 9. The Weakening (3:54)
• 10. Khali Mist (5:59)

Personnel

Ramesses

• Adam Richardson - Bass, Vocals (Blood and Spells)
• Mark Greening - Drums (Skull and Bones)
• Tim Bagshaw - Guitar (Flesh and Claws)

Other Personnel

• James Thompson - Engineer, Mixing
• Dan Gooday - Assistant Engineer
• Jake and Dinos Chapman - Artwork
• Christiane Richardson - Executive Producer
• Chris Blohm - Layout

External Links

• Discogs
• Bandcamp
• Article on Take The Curse