If you checked out the last 10th anniversary release, lexlugersexmagik, I'm going to continue the story here...


In the summer of 2010, I released "lexlugersexmagik," was living in Cleveland Heights near Coventry, and got hired as a teacher. A few months before, I was playing with Jason Look's band, Prisoners, but had left soon after recording the first Prisoners LP, "Back in the USSA." If you've never heard that record, its super cheap on Discogs.

Some of the songs that ended up on "4th Horseman" were inspired by my time in Prisoners and Jason's writings. "lexlugersexmagik" was a bit of a hodge-podge, the cream of a very large crop of songs and experiments. Prisoners inspired me to put more focus on writing "actual" songs rather than improvising and experimenting and recording the results.

"4th Horseman" was supposed to be guitar-oriented too. Listening back, I don't think any songs have more than 3 parts (verse/chorus, maybe a bridge), but it does sound more like a "real band" to me. The biggest reason for this is probably because at least a few of the instrumental tracks weren't intended to be used for a DMS album at all, but rather for an entirely different project called SuperAmerica...


As my Prisoners sentence was winding down (my last show was spring 2010 at Now That's Class), I brainstormed other ways to continue playing music live. Reforming DMS with Sam and Jason wasn't really an option with both of them so busy with their own music and I didn't know all that many other musicians at the time.

The idea I came up with was to play guitar, backed by pre-recorded drums that I would somehow play through an amp, and have my friend Damen Camin sing. We had maybe 1 or 2 "practices" and called ourselves SuperAmerica, a reference to a gas station we used to frequent as middle schoolers.

We came up with song ideas and Damen programmed some drums on MixCraft, but like every other project Damen and I have attempted to do (whether it was a school project when we were kids or a movie script in our 20s or even revisiting the SuperAmerica recordings during the pandemic), none of it got finished. Damen ended up moving to LA around that time too, but even if he hadn't, I doubt we'd have ever finished a single song.

On a side note, Damen has made multiple art pieces for Double Murder Suicide/Double Moonsault over the years, including the cover of the album that came after this, Razor's Edge Suitcase (available via the Peanut Butter Records' Bandcamp page). I'm so happy to be able to share some of his work in the PDF book that comes with this download.



So, by 2011, I was sitting on 15-16 instrumentals, including some tracks that were intended to be interludes or background music for whatever the SuperAmerica project would've become. Two of those instrumentals became "Starrcade 87'" and "Starrcade 2011."

Because the plan had been for me to perform these songs live on guitar with Damen singing, I think "4th Horseman" has some of my best guitar playing. There are overdubs in specific places, but many songs originally featured just one guitar ("Heartbreak Kid," "Gonna Make You Say I Quit") played over a drum track. There's very little bass, if any. The bottom end you might hear is an electric guitar pitch-shifted as low as possible (on "Alligator Shoes," for example).

The guitars on "My Legends Contract" and "Beaten Up (Album Version)" are pitch-shifted too, but compared to "lexlugermagik," I used much fewer effects. There's less noise-for-noise's-sake going on. (Speaking of "Beaten Up," I've included the "Single Version" as a bonus track. Its the same recording only *without* the pitch-shifted guitar.) Doing an album where the production felt consistent was a challenge, but again, the Prisoners experience inspired me to at least try to record with some attention to levels and mics and whatnot. I don't have the patience or know-how to make a recording that sounds like what Mike McDonald did for us with "Back in the USSA," but "4th Horsemen" is kinda the closest I could get.


Thematically, I also wanted to tighten things up compared to the kitchen sink approach of the previous album. I went minimal and decided to focus on just one wrestler: Ric Flair, the best promo guy in the history of wrestling. I knew finding clips wouldn't be a problem and I envisioned using his words like guitar solos or drum fills to give the songs flair (pun intended).

"Fair To Flair" could be considered the "title track," but it actually predated every other song on the album and the live band - with Sam and Jason - played it as part of our sets in 2008. I'm guessing there was a band recording of it on the album that we lost when Sam's computer trashed (see the liner notes for "Sheer Hart Attack" for that story).

Lyrically, I didn't force myself to stick to a narrative of Flair's life. I went with what sounded good first, but it still came out fairly cohesive (at least to me). Along with being infinitely quotable, one of the good things about making an album about Ric Flair is that he's been involved in everything and has direct links to every era of wrestling, from the days of Harley Race to the post-Attitude Era of John Bradshaw Layfield (name-checked in "Ric Flair Retirement Song").

My favorite song on the album is "Alligator Shoes," which was called "Wolverine Jazz" in its instrumental demo form. I'm also proud of the wistful "My Legends Contract" and snappy "Make You Say I'm Quit."

When this album was released via a Mediafire link, it swiftly became the most downloaded album that I ever did, somewhere around 200 downloads. Maybe 300? I don't remember. I was glad that it actually went beyond the usual 30-40 people that usually heard these albums. Nobody reviewed the album, but I was at least able to get it mentioned on some of the bigger wrestling news sites of the day.

My take of "Crazy" by Aerosmith was recorded sometime around this point so I included it as an extra download too. Kinda bummed I never finished it with vocals and clips.



After this, the DMS project went dark for a half-decade, though there was at least a couple times I recorded pieces and parts that would eventually find their way onto "Razor's Edge Suitcase" in 2017.

My teaching job consumed most of my time, but I also began playing in Fan Fiction with my friends Dan Whiteley and Joe Vecchio, and our first drummer, Aaron. Within a few months of practice, we played our first show, in Columbus with Sega Genocide and Brat Curse. I think it was the summer of 2013, but could've been 2014.

Recording demos of non-DMS songs for Fan Fiction eventually led to recording Razor's Edge Suitcase, which came out in 2017, and then, years later, Strong Style. I think there'll be more too, hopefully one in 2022...15 years after the whole project started.

Thanks again for listening and spreading the word about Double Moonsault! Hope you enjoy revisiting the album or listening to it for the first time and checking out the book!