u?

I sat in the forest clearing
Surrounded by wood and leaf
A Raven watched my every move
I could feel my heartbeat Thundering
Deep within my veins

I set foot on foreign land
Held my brothers and sisters to me
And saw the same questions in them
Yet when I clasped their hands
I felt their Blood beneath mine
I had found my answer

[Lyrics: A.A. Nemtheanga]
[Music: MacUilliam and Primordial]

["The pantheon of old Gods in any language are man's natural relation to the elements. These Gods are human in every respect. The concept of the neverending Spiral is what binds us. We are bound by Blood and the Legacy of these Gods. This deep primal, animalistic connection and question binds us together..."]


2. The Gathering Wilderness

You say you know me
I'm the Poison in your veins

My Faith is not welcome here
I Break the young and the cold

There is a Darkness here
You cannot imagine you cannot fathom
It speaks to me in tongues
Can you hear it?

I've built my tower of song
From words as bitter splintered bone
Gnarled and wretched, spiteful and harsh
I've cursed the vermin, the vermin of the earth
I've wished pestilence upon the foul and weak
Not just men, but woman and children too
With a rusted blade across their throats

I've played the tyrant's hand
Against the rhyme and reason of fools
I've prayed to sickly children
In their blackened cities of Filth
You say you know me? Do you?
I'm the poison in your veins
My Faith it is not welcome here

The Wilderness is Gathering all its Children in...

[Lyrics: A.A. Nemtheanga]
[Music: MacAmlaigh and Primordial]

["The ghosts of our pasts are gathered at the borders of every nation waiting to reign a terrible wrath upon us. Men's Hearts are turning. Darker and darker as every day passes. Old Europe is changing, the world is changing. The Wilderness is Gathering its children in, there is terrible maelstrom Gathering. Can you see it? Do you know it? Where shall you stand."]


3. The Song Of The Tomb

From the north to the south
From the east to the west
All that waits for me is the grave
I have been where my brothers lay fallen
And my kind are as slaves

Bloodied yet unbowed
I sing a song of the tomb
Of the cold and heathen earth
Of the Gods that await me
I raise a glass in your name

For when the sun rise again
To our deaths like condemned men

This is the twilight of the ages
And no man shall stand

I sing a song of the tomb
Of the cold and heathen earth
With virgin voice to poisoned womb
I call to the shadowed kind
To men of myth, etched in stone
Whose songs are heard no more
The women of the barren lands
This is your time

[Lyrics: A.A. Nemtheanga]
[Music: MacUilliam and Primordial]

["Our myths are steeped in blood and tragedy and the grim acceptance of fate. The difference between these myths and the lessons they teach us and the modern day are virtually non existant. A man's life, decided by the warmongers, by the blade of a knife, a bullet from a gun or a bomb is no different from the warmongers and warriors of legend. We write our own legends today, here and now, yet always with blood."]


4. End Of All Times (The Martyr's Fire)

Is this all I've been left
Broken oaths and betrayals
The empty words and dead rhetoric
Of my sold and broken culture

And I said once before
That tune heals nothing
I feel like a wounded animal
In the dying throes

I am near to death
Yet with teeth bared
Heels dug in the dirt
And the graves rabid stare

Waiting for one last struggle
If I have one (desire)
Mark my words
And gather your thoughts

Well these might be my last days
Because I am about to eclipse my sun
Collapse my star
Snuff out my flame
And reach into the void

Well these might well be my last days
But maybe, just maybe
I'll take you down with me

[Lyrics: A.A. Nemtheanga]
[Music: MacUilliam, O'Floinn and Primordial]

["These are desperate times, the odds are stacked against us, surely the day will come when the wolf is let loose? When he wakes from his slumber and awakes the beast in man, and he shatters the bonds that bind him and makes one last stand... for all times."]


5. The Coffin Ships

Young hearts born with grief
Shall pay the penalty of truth
A season of stolen youth
Shall teach old hearts to break

It feels like I've been here before
Here to where the animals lay down to die
So we stood alone on a distant store
Our broken spirits in rags and tatters

Nerve and muscle, heart and brains
Lost to Ireland, lost in vain
Pause and you can almost hear
The sounds echo down through the ages
The creak of the burial cart
Here in humiliation and sorrow
Not mixed with indignation
One is driven to exclaim
Oh god, that bread should be so dear
And human flesh so cheap[*]

Young hearts are born with such grief
We have paid the penalty of truth
A season of our stolen youth
Shall teach our hearts to break

Lyrics: A.A. Nemtheanga
Music: MacUilliam and Primordial

[*Taken from a memorial to the dead at a mass grave in Skibereen, Co. Cork]

["Between the years 1845 and 1849 a famine ravaged Ireland and over 3 million people were lost to a combination of starvation and emigration I said once before the history of my land is a litany of tragedy and blood, these four years represent possibly the greatest tragedy the country has endured. It still hangs over Ireland and set the tone for Irish people to leave Ireland shores to the present day. The coffin ships themselves were what the ships that set sail for America in search of a new and better life were called. It's with this song we honour the memory of this great tragedy and those poor souls who lost their lives."]


6. Tragedy's Birth

The crippled oracle breathes his lungs like grit
His blackened hands, like maps of ungodly lands
Skin as leather, burnt by the sun
This world is not for him, this world is not for
You nor I

When the Gods were young the burden was less
It was not grief and it was not fear
Who cast the shadow upon our age?
Who has crippled the young and blinded their eyes?

He counts the hours, days and awful years
To when the children stare into the sun
The mountains crumble to the sea
And our civilisations turn to dust

They are turned to dust

So slumber watcher, till the spheres
Have turned ten and twenty thousand years
The crippled oracle breathes, his lungs like grit
This world is not for him, this world is not for
You nor I...

[Lyrics: A.A. Nemtheanga]
[Music: O'Floin, MacUilliam and Primordial]

["A black macabre dream of vast nightmare continents, shifting, heaving and seething, before the dawn of man."]


7. Cities Carved In Stone

I lost my self, in those streets
A passenger of foreign tongue
The sun sets, in the same language
And rises just the same

There was no grand design
To get to this point
No absolutes, no given truths
We were not carved in stone

She sent the sun to heal me
She sent the moon to guide me
And when the words failed me
So she lay beside me

Sometimes I get to thinking of the past
When I've had more than a drink or two
Who knows where the days go
And would you ever want them back

[Lyrics: A.A. Nemtheanga]
[Music: MacUilliam and Primordial]

["That feeling when you are in another city, another town, strange and new streets and you realise you are wholly alone. Not one person around you knows you and no one knows where you stand in this world. It is these moments travelling that make me think of the past more than ever..."]