Category: epic

MIA – Jimmy (Kala, 2007)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

The drum machine percussion is solid, as it is on most MIA tracks – a nice bouncy bassline, breathy female vocals, and then, at :23 – the string sample! Each phrase is punctuaed by a little ‘pew!’ spacey sound effect, and in the middle you get to hear a neat little bloopy arpeggio sting that always reminds me somehow of Final Fantasy 8 music.

When you go Rwanda Congo
Take me on ya genocide tour
Take me on a truck to Darfur
Take me where you would go

Got static on ya satellite phone
Got to get you safe at home
Got to get you some where warm
So you get me all alone

As usual, the song’s simplicity is offset by its extreme catchiness – it’s easy to find yourself humming the chorus:

Time and time and time and time again
You keep pushing that button but I don’t know what your sayin
You hit me on AIM tryin’ flip me on some game
Are you coming are you going are you leaving are you staying

You told me that your busy
Your loving makes me crazy
I know that you hear me
Start acting like you want me

You told me that your busy
Your loving makes me crazy
I know you can hear me
Start acting like you want me

In short, the song is about trying to get ahold of a guy – but it’s the bouncey disco groove, the string sample, and the vocals that make it all worthwhile. It’s actually a cover of a bollywood musical number – here’s the original:

(and on a related note:)

MIA – Bucky Done Gun (Arular, 2005)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

MIA is quite an artist – her music is strikingly simply, yet unavoidably catchy. There are hooks that are just impossible to ignore.

Take for instance Bucky Done Gun, a song about child soldiers. Right off the bat, you get slapped hard with snappy snares, rumbling bass, and spunky female vocals – and then that iconic horn sample.

Bucky Done Gun
What you want
The Fire Done Burn
What you want
Bucky Done Gun
Get Crackin’ Get Get Crackin’

The breaks are repetitive – tom, tom, glitchy kick, snare, horns – but so satisfying! The cut up and remixed version at 1:53 really milks it to get the most out of the sample and sequence. It’s simple, short, but man – oh so very satisfying. Good for blasting when you’re stuck in traffic.

!!! – Myth Takes

written by

I’m trying something new – rather than pointing out particular songs that I like, I’m going to go through my music library. Hopefully this’ll give me an excuse to post a little more regularly, instead of only when I decide that any particular track is worthy of ‘favorite’ status. Also, this’ll probably result in me reviewing stuff that I don’t actually like – maybe even things that are better off being deleted from my collection.

Myth Takes always plays first by default on my car stereo, by merit of ‘!!!’ (pronounced as making a clicking sound three times in a row, e.g. ‘chk chk chk’) being the first artist name alphabetically. The titular first track is catchy, with percussion that’s precise enough to be attention-grabbing, but there’s enough grittiness that it blends well with the rest of the instrumentation. The low whispery vocals alternating with wide guitar solo lines build anticipation, even though you could argue that the payoff never comes on this track – it’s the next one where you get a climax.

‘All My Heroes Are Weirdos’ is arguably better in the first 20 seconds then in the entire rest of the song – the guitar gets a little too crazy, I think, and it makes it tough to listen to for very long – it’s nothing like the driving intro.

‘Must Be The Moon’ settles into a nice almost disco-y groove as soon as it starts, and holds onto the kick/snare/tambourine pattern throughout the rest of the track – and it’s good stuff. The vocals are interesting too – there’s just enough there to keep things interesting, but they know when to pull back and let the instruments have their turn. The electronic stuff that elbows its way in towards the end of the track is also much appreciated.

‘A New Name’ has some interest growly bass and what might be some bells, as well as occasionally cool  percussive elements, and a neat establishing guitar line, and sort of reminds me of Damon Albarn’s vocal stylings at some points.

I almost feel like ‘Heart Of Hearts’ is sort of a bridge song, I don’t want to say ‘filler’ because that sounds negative, but it just doesn’t work for me out of the context of the album – but within that context, its inclusion was fairly insightful, since it feels like it really ‘fits’ there between the first and second half.

‘Sweet Life’ isn’t all that exciting either, and I guess it kind of continues the ‘bridge’ section.

‘Yadnus’ on the other hand, starts out with a nice ragged synth lead, and one of my favorite percussion patterns – ‘Like It Or Not’ off of Confession On A Dance Floor by Madonna, for instance, sports the same 3/4 rhythm. Something about that sort of swaggering configuration always sounds really good to me. The rest of the song sort of swings around between staccato falsetto and guitar, then back to nice sparse guitar picks, and has a pretty neat finale ending.

‘Bend Over Beethoven’ is like 8 minutes, which is crazy, and it’s pretty standard !!! stuff – it does a good job of exploring all the possibilities that the song’s time affords it. I’ll bet it’d be fun to watch this song performed live.

Not a whole lot happens (apart from some interesting horns and synths) in ‘Break In Case Of Anything’, and I almost wonder if the song’s title is a reference to this track acting as a ‘break’ after the previous one.

‘Infinifold’ is the final track – and it fits in the last slot nicely. The eerie grungy guitar echoing around behind the piano and hushed vocals sound like an ending. Finally, things start to build back up at the end, about three and a half minutes into the song… but it never peaks again, it just fades out. A good way to end things.

 

It’s tough to pick my favorite song, but I’m gonna say that all three of the first tracks (Myth Takes, All My Heroes Are Weirdos, and Must Be The Moon) plus Yadnus are probably tied for first – Must Be The Moon might be slightly ahead, though, so here it is, for your listening pleasure:

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Rammstein – Zwitter (Mutter, 2001)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

I like Rammstein a lot, and there’ll probably me more tracks by them here eventually, but Zwitter is one of my favorites right off the top of my head.

Things start off nicely – guitar riff phased back, nice blippy little techno beat, serious rock drums, and then the same riff, this time front-and-center. “Zwitter, zwitter!” You get the idea.

Next, the first verse, over a momentarily placid version of the guitar, moved back to the back burner as a bassline. The guitar comes back during the second half of the verse, building back up the chorus, which we’ve already become familiar with.

The second verse features another higher synth line, which helps keep things fresh, while the lyrics grind onwards – but we’re coming to the best part of the song. It’s the transition that first happens at 1:47 – bam, we jump up to the bridge, higher vocals, a neat phased effect, and an overall epic ‘peak’.

Things drop back down, of course, for another verse, and then another chorus. There isn’t much more to the song musically.

However, there’s some interesting lyrics to be examined, in particular, the bridge. The song’s title and chorus line, ‘zwitter’ means ‘hermaphrodie’ in German, and here’s the bridge and (supposed) translation:

 

Eins für mich (One for me)
Eins für dich (One for you)
Gibt es nicht (Is there not one or ‘is not how it is‘)
Für mich (For me)

Eins für mich (One for me)
Eins für dich (One for you)
Eins und eins (One and one)
Das bin ich (That’s me)

I love how the words fit together in german – ‘me’ and ‘you’ rhyme, and a few other phonetic similarities (‘für’ and ‘for’, ‘mich’ and ‘me’, ‘es’ and ‘is’, ‘ich’ and ‘I’) make it almost possible to understand the words if you know the context.

And of course there’s the (roughly translated) line:

I am not even downhearted then
When one tells me “fuck yourself”

 

Yuki Kajiura – Key Of The Twilight (.hack//SIGN OST, 200)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

No, that’s not a glitch – .hack//SIGN is a pretty sweet anime series that revolves around a (fictional) MMO called The World. The art is well-done, and while the story tends to drag a little, and features surprisingly little action for being set in an online RPG, it consistently includes incredibly good music. This track, for instance.

First a little phased white noise, quickly joined by a catchy buzzy bassline, reflective acoustic guitar, and spacey vocal pads.

Come with me in the twilight of a summer night for awhile
Tell me of a story never ever told in the past

Take me back to the land
Where my yearnings were born
The key to open the door is in your hand
Now fly me there

I always imagine these words being spoken by a younger sibling to an older one – it’s a hot summer night, two boys are lying sprawled out on top of the sheets, savoring each slight breeze that floats through the window and offers momentary relief from the heat. One boy turns to the other, and begs him to tell the same stories, the old stories that they used to tell each other. “Come with my in the twilight of a summer night for awhile.”

This is powerful stuff, it seriously gives me shivers. Something about the instruments, and the clearly worded vocals – seriously evocative stuff. And then the strings break in – lilting, with an ethnic quality that I’m not able to pin down, a bit like western fiddle, a bit like an irish jig, which is almost like a ‘cue the montage’ moment – the older boy begins his story, conjuring a fantasy world of characters and conflict.

Fanatics find their heaven in never ending storming wind
Auguries of destruction be a lullaby for rebirth

Consolations, be there
In my dreamland to come
The key to open the door is in your hand
Now take me there

Is this epic or what? ‘Augury’ is a good word – it has to do with prophesy or folk-magic concerning birds, sometimes migratory patterns, sometimes ritual sacrifice. Storms are brewing, fanatics follow the birds looking for signs, and all of this will rebirth the world. Then, the listener’s repeated reflections on how powerful these stories are to him. Then, a declaration:

I believe in fantasies invisible to me
In the land of misery I’m searchin’ for the sign
To the door of mystery and dignity
I’m wandering down, and searchin’ down the secret sun

The door and the key are important images in the anime, but they’re vague enough references that they don’t stick out amongst the lyrics – I think of the bridge as jumping ahead to see the younger boy as a grown man, or perhaps teenager, now without the presence of his older sibling to guide him, making his way through the world while the stories flit on the edge of his consciousness, driving him to always look for signs of the fantasy world in the mundaneness of every day life. He can’t help thinking about that night, lying in bed, begging for just one more story:

Come with me in the twilight of a summer night for awhile
Tell me of a story never ever told in the past

Take me back to the land
Where my yearnings were born
The key to open the door is in your hand
Now take me there
To the land of twilight

Powerful stuff. It seriously give me shivers to listen to this song. The final ‘twilight’ is drawn out, and fades into an almost Enya-like outro.

Pendulum – Fasten Your Seatbelts Ft. The Freestylers (Hold Your Colour, 2005)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

The chords you hear in the opening minute or so are what you’re going to be hearing throughout. After a bit of reverby jammed up samples, a few vocals, and a dramatic “Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts,” you’re dropped right into the main groove – deep kicks, splashy snares, a brassy bassline supplemented by a barely audible sub line, and an incredibly catchy little hook. Punctuated by occasional “Sound Boy” and “Combination Style!” vocal samples, things continue forward – there’s a lot going on, all revolving around what we were initially introduced to. Occasionally things will break for a moment, or some piano will appear, but it’s mostly the same, until the break at 3:40.

Bleeps and bloops, plus a phased-out pad, and the ever-present “sound boy, you’re too young to be a soldier, combination style!” sample (I don’t know if that’s really what they’re saying, but it sounds like that.) At about 4:45 the song essentially comes full circle, kicking you right back to that head-bobbing hook.

There isn’t really much more to say about this, since it’s a little repetitive, but that little melody line is undeiably catchy – I’ve found myself whistling it several times since I ran across this album.

Speed Suit – Evidence (This Party Is A Time Machine, 2008)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

My friend Dan Beyer is a member of the duo known as ‘Speed Suit‘ (Nathanial Oester is the other player). After his first show in a basement somewhere in NE Portland, Dan hooked me up with a sweet bootleg CD of the tracks they performed. The second track is easily my favorite.

So compare the beginning to ‘Map of the Problematique‘ by Muse off of their album ‘Black Holes and Revelations’ – hot, totally danceable percussion right up front, an explosive stand-in for a splash cymbal, and then nearly the same grinding electric guitar sounding synth. The expertly-clipped drum samples and winding synth line drive the whole thing forward.

At 0:36 we get a short little ‘one two three four’ moment where the highhat counts us into the first verse: breathy vocals, the same punchy drums, and a great echoey synth on the off-beat.

show me some evidence, don’t give me lies
when left in the darkness we’re led by our hearts
and our hearts are so easily carried away

this isn’t a carousel ride this is life
so if youre feeling lucky and brave take the reigns

The coupling of the syncopated vocals with the kick at 0:50 doesn’t give us any time to catch our breath – it’s almost impossible to relax, because the song just keeps moving forward. The breathy sigh and vamps into the chorus at 1:10 is another bit of Muse-like sensability, while the break at 1:24 keeps things pretty solidly focused on the dancey percussion.

hey
is passion just a weakness
when were acting out on impulse

Another verse at 1:43, this time with an extra distorted synth lead atop the rest of the instruments, and a neat little bendy break at 1:58, which we didn’t get the first time around. I don’t even know what the lyrics are at this point, and I’m not really sure that it matters – enough words sneak through to give you a sort of general good feeling about things. Everything drops down for another great break at 2:14 – and back into the chorus again, and that Muse-esque bassline.

so take back the heresy unless you’ve got spite
meet me at dusk and we’ll settle this
lets bury the hatchet youre using as if its an axe

Short and sweet, things cut right off at 3:00. After talking to Dan and Nate, both Justice and Muse gave some  cues when they were hashing out the instrumentation for these tracks. If you’re into it, feel free to download and listen to the other Speed Suit tracks- I uploaded a .zip of the show for your listening pleasure. And if you’re interested in the group, check out Speed Suit on Myspace.

update july ’09 – check out Speed Suit’s website on thehinge.net for some sweet new tracks!

ATB – Mysterious Skies (No Silence, 2004)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Talk about formulaic – but this is a good formula. I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but this is early 2000′s trance – compare to Ian Van Dahl’s ‘Castles In The Sky’, released a few years earlier, or even ‘Days Go By’ by Dirty Vegas in 2002.

Stringy analogue synth lines introduce the track, giving us a sort of baseline, establishing a foundation that the rest of the song will build up from. Hints of trancey staccato synth blips filter through, delayed out to echo around amongst the sort of wash of trance pads, until it all gives way to exactly what we’re hoping for at 0:56 – a cymbal crash, four-by-four kicks, bass on the offbeat, hihat layered over top, and the persistent synth line. Things slow down for a bit at 1:54, because there’s only so much stereotypical trance you can take in one sitting, and the instrumentation acquires some nice dramatic piano, which it sweeps up into more bars of classic trance.

Things slow down again around 2:56, breaking down until we’re left with some quiet bass, the trance synth cutting back in, some splashy cymbals, and a nice breathy lead that flies over the rest of the instruments – this is the peak of the song, where all the elements that’ve been introduced are all playing together.

Naturally, the epic echoey piano is brought through again at the end, while everything else calms down, and then everything swims into a way phased-out pad that refers back to the previous track ‘Marrakech’ earlier on the album, and leads into the next one, ‘Collides With Beauty.’

It isn’t unique, it isn’t special, but it’s not bad either – if you like pictures of Jesus, you don’t care that the dozen or so in your collection all look nearly identical, even they’re created by different artists. You just like looking at that iconic depiction of Jesus. Same with this – if you like this particular brand of trance, then you like this track, and if you’re a DJ, you love it because it mixes so effortlessly into any of the others.

Enya – Caribbean blue (Shepherd Moons, 1991)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

This is one of my favorite Enya songs – as an artist, her music can be a little hit-or-miss for me. Sometimes it’s too ethereal for its own good, and loses its appeal in spaced-out vocals and ‘world music’ instrumentation. Caribbean Blue doesn’t have this problem.

The beginning is a great way to introduce a concept – brief orchestral strings, which fade away to trancey plucked arpeggios and nice bass swells. The beuty of the chord progression is made clear, along with the sort of flowing, lilting rythem of the song. The brief ‘ah’ vocal sting at :25 should make it abundantly clear to anyone listening that this is, in fact, an early Enya song. The swirling vocals immediatly afterwards give way to the enchanting lyrics:

So the world goes round and round
With all you ever knew,
They say the sky
High above
Is Caribbean blue.

More orchestral strings follow, along with more vocalizing, keeping things interesting but not varying much from the original music premise of the song. Next verse:

If every man says all he can,
If every man is true,
Do I believe the sky above
Is Caribbean blue?

More vocals, more orchestal strings, a little stronger this time, with more bass, intensifying things a little until the bridge at 1:58, carrying the song swirling onwards with higher notes, until the last verse comes around, this time transposed upwards a bit:

If all you told was turned to gold
If all you dreamed were new,
Imagine sky high above
In Caribbean blue.

By now we’ve heard all the song is going to give us – things roll onwards to the ending at 3:50, which is as brilliant a way to usher the track out as was the intro to usher it in – everything drops off, leaving a lone vocal pad, which briefly hints at a solo, before abruptly fading down to silence.

What’s the song about? To begin with, there are a few observations we can make about the ‘narrator’ – the fact that “they say the sky” is blue, and that its blueness is questioned in the next verse, and finally imagined in the last, suggests that wherever this song takes place, the colour of the sky is not readily ascertainable. Are they underground? Are they in space? Are they in a world that’s perpetually cloudy? When I think of the colour ‘caribbean blue’, I think of the deep endless ocean off the shore of a tropical island – impossibly deep dark blueness, accompnied by a fring of shallow green and sandy yellow. It sort of feels like a yearning for a lush vegetative island paradise – something the world in the song is possibly missing.

The phrase “so the world goes round and round” pretty explicitly refers to the passage of time – after all, that’s how our chronology works, revolutions of planetary bodies. “with all you ever knew” seems like another reference to time, and perhaps a sort of elder wisdom – a world in the future, where all the secrets of the past are contained somewhere on the planet? A planet which has lost its island paradise? The other lines seem to suggest that it’s possible for this paradise to be reclaimed: “If every man says all he can, if all he says is true… If all you told was turned to gold, if all you dreamed was true…” If the shattered world worked together, imagined progress, dealt honestly, and communicated… would the sky high above once again become caribbean blue?

Shiny Toy Guns – When Did This Storm Begin? (Season of Poison, 2008)

written by

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

The nearly minute-long intro for this track sort of makes sense to me – it’s like a bridge from the previous album ‘We Are Pilots’ to this next one. The staccato bass line is joined by occasional bursts of vocal samples and spacey synth sound effects until a short burst of kicks at 1:09 heralds the arrival of the Muse-esque male vocals: ”Call my name, answer me where I stand.”

In the background of this plea, trance pads warm up, until – boom! angry female vocals at 1:34!

Here’s a story of the way I wasn’t meant to be raised,
bright yellow sun that fades away to black and blue every place
There’s a bottle in the shape of your love for me

A little more reasonably, she continues: “Now the clouds are racing higher, blinding arrows away. There’s in darkness off the streets that my electricitay,” before getting angry again:

Gold ( or God?) shatters the sky,
this is the first day of the rest of our lives,
’cause no one really lives or dies.

You can’t help getting caught up in the epic 3/3/2 drum line, the heavy pads and guitar, and the reverbed vocals – the next few minutes go by quickly, droning requests to “call my name, where I stand” are interrupted only once more by the angry girl from before:

Every night you drink the money left to pay all the bills.
No room for us, but there’s another fucking bottle of pills.
Here’s your trophy on my face, it’s just an eye anyway..

Now the clouds are racing higher, blinding arrows away.
There’s in darkness off the streets that my elec-tricity

This will go no further, I swear it dies today.
Your nights will stay forever if you dare once more touch me.

The ‘plot’ is fairly familiar – a girl with an abusive alcoholic of a lover/father finally getting the balls to stand up for herself. But the lyrics go so well with the vocal style, and the whole thing works incredibly well as an introduction to Shiny Toy Gun’s new musical direction on their new album. The track ends with a school bell, but it’s only there to set up the next song. Unfortunately the majority of the other tracks don’t live up to the expectations that this one suggests, with the exception of ‘Ghost Town’, and possibly ‘Ricochet’, both of which are in the same vein.