Blood (OSI Album) - Background

Background

On September 4, 2008, keyboardist and vocalist Kevin Moore posted a news update to the official Chroma Key website. In it, he stated that he had been working with guitarist Jim Matheos on a third OSI album "for several months now, slowly but surely." Moore later stated that with OSI, he and Matheos "usually play it by ear. We never really know if we're going to do another OSI, we never agree on it. I don't remember ever agreeing to start a new one, really. But Jim will send me an idea or something and we just start talking about it."

Blood was written and recorded in the same way as the first two OSI albums. Matheos and Moore worked together on the album long-distance, mainly by emailing each other files. Matheos would send Moore song ideas, "from just a guitar riff to elaborate, almost completed songs," Moore said. "Then I ask what I can do, and I mess around, complete a verse and add a chorus, do editing, add some vocals, and send it back to him."

Moore considered the writing of Blood to be harder compared to previous OSI albums. Previously, Matheos would send Moore guitar parts to work with, allowing Moore to "work with editing them, pitching them, and fucking about them different ways, and then programming drums and keyboards." When working on Blood, Matheos also provided programming, keyboard and drum parts. "If he sent me stuff that already had drums and keyboard parts, and it wasn't a complete idea, I had to figure out a way to elaborate on it without having that same equipment that he has there," Moore said. Overall, he considered the writing process to be "smoother because we got on a roll and we're more fluid together".

Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater played drums on Office of Strategic Influence and Free, but found the experience frustrating. Moore regarded Portnoy's contributions to the first two albums as "great", but he and Matheos decided to recruit a different drummer for Blood. "We were continuing to try to get new voices involved with the album", he explained. Matheos, a fan of Porcupine Tree, was in control of personnel on Blood and asked Porcupine Tree drummer Gavin Harrison to perform drums on the album. Harrison had a schedule gap in the fourth quarter of 2008, so agreed to work on the album. He never met Matheos and Moore, recording his drums parts in his recording studio in England and exchanging files with them over the Internet. Most songs were sent to Harrison with programmed drums. "For the most part, we usually told him to try to stay away from the programmed drums and come up with his own parts, and he did. So much of that is his taking it in a different direction," Moore said. "There was probably at least one song, maybe two, where we said 'We'd like you to keep closer to the programmed drums,' but he had a lot of say in what went on." Matheos and Moore were "very happy" with Harrison's work on Blood, and hoped to work with him on the fourth OSI album. Blood marked the first time Matheos played bass on an OSI album instead of recruiting an outside bassist.

Matheos asked Opeth vocalist and guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt to write lyrics and perform vocals on one track, which would become "Stockholm". Matheos and Moore sent him the track they wanted him to work on, and he sent back a rough mix of his vocals. "We were really happy with it," Moore said. "We didn't do any revisions or ask for any changes, like we were expecting to... It was a different approach than I would have taken, and that's what was refreshing about it. That's why we wanted to get somebody else to do some vocals on the album." Tim Bowness of No-Man wrote lyrics and performed vocals on "No Celebrations", a bonus track.