Immortal?

In this episode of Follow The Signs I'll discuss the remaining four Immortal?-lyrics: Waiting For The Flood, Ghost In The Firewall, Climbing The Net and Friday's Dream. To discuss these four songs together is intentional; although all the Immortal?-lyrics are interconnected strongly, these four even more so; they’re a sort of unit within the album. The common thread that binds them together – it keeps recurring time and again – are the biblical elements that surface in these four songs. This is most apparent in Climbing The Net, but in the other three songs as well.

Waiting For The Flood seems to be written from the perspective of the controlling powers, the ‘evil’ that also features in Moviedrome. By the way, musically this song really reflects Clive’s fondness of Genesis’ A Trick Of The Tail, it reminds me a lot of Entangled - great! But back to the lyrics. The omnipresence of the controlling powers also portrayed in Moviedrome (see Moviedrome article), appears here as well: ‘Look for me in everything material (...) You’ll find me in the films and in the theatres/Through the minds of novelists and orators.’ The indoctrination and propaganda which serve to glorify the powers and their ideas appear too (‘There it is in black and white for you to shout out loud’). 

The road the powers offer, the so-called salvation (‘Part of someone's grand design of/Sainthood, childhood...; I live and breathe philosophy and spiritual escape’), is actually a fake and the powers are malicious (‘Slipping through our fingers...; But all those empty promises just sow more seeds of doubt/Let my vision smother you in heartache/It freezes like the venom of a rattle snake’). The road offered, attractive as it may seem, is the wrong one, it’s the road to ruin. The same theme as the one in Chosen and The Butterfly Man (see Take A Leap Of Faith article).

The masses follow the powers on this path and therefore mankind is headed for its downfall; it will be punished for its sins. It’s only a matter of time, it will happen inevitably: the flood will come. And this is the biblical element I referred to in the introduction; the Bible tells of the flood which washed over the world to pure it, to punish humanity for straying from the right path and to cleanse the world, leaving only Noah and his ark, to start over again. Just like in this episode of the Bible, nowadays mankind is following the wrong path, is degenerating, blinded by television and the Internet, and thus the flood will come again:

It really doesn’t matter now, the end will be the same
It really doesn’t matter how the world will rise again
There’s nothing you can do to stop the river flowing blood
The betting man has played and we’re just
Waiting for the flood
You followed me too far and it’s too late to turn around
You followed me too far to stop the world from being drowned
There’s nothing you can do to stop the river flowing blood
The betting man has played and we’re just 
Waiting for the flood

The ‘betting man’ who is mentioned is probably the evil power; it plays with the world and with mankind. This fits the opening line of the song: ‘Many times the world has been my playground.’ Thus, it’s not the first time this happens and the following verse underlines this:

You walked with me before, you know
We crossed this land before you know
You talked with me before, you know

This evil keeps recurring through time, taking different shapes, luring mankind again and again to opt for the wrong path. This battle between good and evil is one of the main themes of the Bible: the presence of the devil who’s always trying to tempt man to choose for evil. The evil thus might be the devil. Earlier, Clive indicated that this song can be seen both though God’s eyes and the devil’s...

Ghost In The Firewall is about an intruder who wants to be part of the system, Clive has indicated. The intruder seeks anonymity, the protection that comes with belonging to a group. He wants to lose himself in the crowd and he wants this at any cost:

Keep me on the inside
A part of the team
Keep me on the inside
I don’t care what that means
(…)
Keep me on the inside
Lost in the crowd
Keep me on the inside
Don’t try to force me out
(…)
Let me in
Let me fade away

Nevertheless, he is an intruder, he doesn’t belong to the group, he’s an outsider (‘a ghost in the Firewall’; ‘a virus in the system’). And thus the Internet-theme of Immortal? reappears. A firewall is of course a program designed to protect your computer from unwanted intruders that can enter via the net. But the song contains a biblical element as well:

Look for me here
My name is Legion
Look for me here
We are many – we are one

This refers to the Bible passage called ‘The Healing of a Demon-possessed Man’ (The New Testament, Mark 5). In this passage, Jesus encounters a man who is possessed by a legion of demons. When Jesus asks him his name, he answers: ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’ The intruder wants to be amongst humans, just like the demons have entered the man in the Bible passage. The demons resist being cast out; when Jesus says: ‘Come out of this man, you evil spirit!’, the man asks Jesus not to torture him and he begs Jesus again and again not to send him out of the area. In Ghost In The Firewall the intruder says ‘Don't try to force me out'.

The comparison between the intruder and the legion of demons put the intruder’s intentions in a different perspective. He doesn’t merely want to be part of the system and lose himself in the crowd, he probably wants to enter the system in order to sabotage it. An attempt to take over the world maybe? Whether the intruder succeeds remains open. In the Bible passage the demons move from the man into a herd of pigs and the pigs subsequently rush into a lake and drown...

Climbing The Net deals with the internet and in this song the theme of mankind choosing the wrong path and consequently being punished reappears. This time the story of the Tower of Babel is used as a metaphor. This tower was built with the intention of reaching heaven and God intervened by causing the builders to speak different languages so that they could not understand one another. The modern phenomenon of the Internet is compared to the building of this tower:

Got to build a tower
Need a better line of sight
We’re climbing up the net
We’re reaching for the sky
Got to keep on rising
Take a ray of burning light
We’re climbing up the net - through the sky

The Internet is portrayed as a form of megalomania like the construction of the Tower of Babel. Its proponents claim it will unite mankind, connect everyone:

Speaking in a single tongue
Think a single thought
Touching everyone
Reaching out – we’ve been here before

But in the end it may rather divide than unite man, just as the Tower of Babel caused man to speak different languages. The Internet has its drawbacks: it can easily be used to disperse dangerous ideas and information. Many occult sects and fanatical religious movements – I already mentioned them in my discussion of Chosen (Take A Leap Of Faith article) – often have the most beautifully designed web sites. Not everything that can be found online is necessarily true (‘The truth is the victim - it was dead from the start!’). The great accessibility of the Internet produces a lot of rubbish and less pleasant things.

The protagonist of Moviedrome, the outsider, who has his doubts about progress and is unwilling to give in to it, but who may not be able to escape, also appears in Climbing The Net. He hides and warns that things will go wrong:

I can see the other side
Keeping my head bowed down
I can see them all around
Dead staring eyes
Donning their Ascension Robes
Waiting for the time
Shouting down below
‘I told you once before - I told you so!’
(…)
Do I join in the race, keep my enemies near?
Am I forced to embrace this modern veneer?
Will I ever break free from this house of cards?
The truth is the victim it was dead from the start!

Thus, Climbing The Net combines most of the themes of Immortal?: religion, false beliefs, the internet and its drawbacks, the outsider, etc. The album has many recurring themes and the links between the songs are innumerable. Immortal? is definitely a ‘conceptual’ album!

And every concept album has its ‘epilogue song’ – on Immortal? it’s Friday’s Dream. According to Clive, the title of this song refers to ‘the belief that your dream, if it’s the same on Friday and Saturday night, will come true.’ The person who’s dreaming is probably the same person as the one in Moviedrome and Climbing The Net; the outsider. As I mentioned in the Moviedrome article, he wants to escape from what the world has become and dreaming is a form of escapism. It even says so literally in the lyric: ‘It’s a moment of escape.’ In his dreams he’s far away from the misery of the real world (‘It’s a world that’s far away/From the sound of people calling/’Free me from these chains’).

He thinks that mankind has taken the wrong path (see Moviedrome and Climbing The Net) and as we’ve seen in Waiting For The Flood, the result may be the coming of a flood to punish mankind and cleanse the world. In this sense, the recurring phrase ‘a shelter from the rain’ in Friday’s Dream is striking; the flood in the Bible was caused by heavy rainfall.

Maybe this person constitutes the new start for mankind, just as Noah and his flock did after the flood. Just like the ark, this dream he’s dreaming may be a means to weather the flood. Whether this works out depends on whether the belief that a dream will come true if it’s the same on Friday and Saturday night, is more than just mere superstition. If it’s true, it may be a new start. The song doesn’t give the answer, it ends with the person waking up and what he finds is left unsaid...

This concludes my discussion of the Immortal?-lyrics. Next is Clive’s turn to shed some light on it in the big Immortal?-lyrics interview!

By: Erik Beers