I hate to beat a dead horse – but allow me to this time. In today’s edition of my Deep Music Criticism series I revisit the title track to Rush’s latest album, Clockwork Angels.

I’ve ranked it #6 on their all-time top 20 best Rush songs. When it comes to such an old and long-running band of musicians, with as prolific a recorded output as Rush – ranking their best work gets a bit silly – and individualistic. Its no surprise that most Rush fans responded to my list with puzzlement and a bit of good natured mockery.

Podcast:

Videocast:

But Clockwork Angels truly is something special, in particular among their later output after 2000. Rather than swing at the fences to describe every musical nook and cranny of the song that I find compelling, I’m going to focus on one single  compositional element that makes this song special. As I’ve said in prior reviews, its really those unexpected turns in a musical composition that make it interesting. This song has just the right amount of them to please, surprise and keep the fan coming back for repeated listens.

Harmonic Tension

An instrumental, stop-time rendering of the song’s chorus starts off the song, after a bit of hollywood-style atmospherics. Given that the chorus is pretty epic in structure and drama, its a great compositional choice.

What is so striking about this section, and the later full band repetitions of it (with voice) is the tense harmony. The first chord is pure dissonance:

The song’s key is B Major. Its not uncommon for a rock song to harp around the sub-tonic (flatted note, A, below the tonic – which is B in this case). Going back and forth then between A and B is pretty formulaic for a rock tune. But here we have delicious twist #1 – a 1st inversion sub-tonic chord – the A Major/C# chord.

As you see from the B chord in the above example, a typical “triad” or basic chord looks like a neatly stacked set of thirds – either all spaces or all lines on the staff.

But when you take the low note of the chord (the root) and flip it up an octave, leaving the 3rd note in the bass, you get this new dissonance between the two outside notes. Here’s that A Major chord again, first in the “root position” then in the  1st inversion:

Compound the dissonance of this 1st inversion chord with a dramatic build-up like in Clockwork Angels, as well as a sound mix that prominently features the bass instrument (Geddy Lee’s bass guitar), and you get AWESOMENESS.

My friends – this is composition. All intentional, informed by technique and based on tradition, but mixed with a surprise. There’s nothing at all revolutionary about 1st inversion triads – they’ve been around in western music since the 12th century. But when you’re dealing in the fairly rigid world of popular rock music, applying a little lesson from tradition to your song can bring interest that otherwise wouldn’t be there.

I’m taking a new tack here – reviewing a cover song. Only because it shows what I’ve often said about pop acts these days: the songs (many of them, anyway) are well-written but HORRIBLY produced. Harmonically, melodically, lyrically – good pop songwriters these days are talented and working in the great tradition of Tin Pan Alley etc. 3-4 minutes of clever and carefully polished a songwriting is routinely coming at me over the radio. But the problem is the sonic pallete the producers choose these days, which is horrible.

Podcast:

By “horrible production” I mean hiddeous sonic choices – especially percussion. The most horrible, fake drum kit samples and other faux-percussive sound effects form the rhythmic staple these days for pop songs. Terrible stuff. The closest thing you get in most pop tracks is a real live guitar, but usually only the vocal track is performed by an actual human, and that is more frequently auto-tuned to death than not. Production is in terrible shape. Record labels apparently have zero faith in the listening public to be shoveling such stuff.

I’ve chosen Tim Hewitt’s karaoke remake of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” to prove a point – that great musicians performing good songs on their instruments is AWESOME. It also proves that these “cheesy” pop songs we hard-core rock/metal guys and gals ridicule really aren’t cheesy or lame. Its their production that’s lame.

Djent

I’ve discussed Djent before, but to summarize again, its a underground little niche of the metal scene that most people say started in bedroom recording studios in the early 00s. These wanna-be web forum trolls who also could shred pretty well started posting instrumental tracks of progressive metal with highly syncopated, groove-focused riffs, most typically performed on the low strings of extended instruments like 7 and 8-string guitars.

Tim Hewitt is in this tradition – a lonely, non-descript lad from the UK posting his Katy Perry tracks anonymously to Soundcloud.

Two of the signature moves in djent, beside the syncopated bass lines, are:

Wide pitch bends in the low strings (cause its much easier to do on the looser-strung bass strings of an 8-string guitar)

Wide interval leaps in the riffs

Tim Hewitt makes both of these moves in his cover of Teenage Dream. The bend occurs leading into the first verse, after the intro (to dramatic effect). The wide leaps are the core of the verse accompaniment. He harps on the tonic major seventh, which is not only wide but strikingly dissonant. It sets the tone for a seriously fucked up cover.

Groove

There’s no denying that the great appeal of Djent is the ability to lay down the nastiest, syncopated groove. Locking the kick drum with a syncopated guitar riff will produce an infectious, almost dancable groove if done right. Tim does this in the bridge section. It makes you want to bang a head, bang a rang, and do a gay twirl – all at once.

Epic Texture

Tim’s treatment of the chorus is aiming at one thing: epicness. He layers on the rhythm guitars very thickly, with harmonized finger-tapping figures in the left channel, thick strumming to fill the entire frequency spectrum in the right channel. Frequent fan feedback for this section on soundcloud is “chill down spine”. Tim delivers on his aim.

Great track – I do encourage you to listen to all of Tim’s Katy Perry covers, which are all awesome

Sorry folks – I’m just on a Zappa jag lately. I’m eating my own dogfood – fans are constantly comparing me to Zappa so I feel like I need to study his music in earnest to get the connection myself. I’m still convinced that my aesthetic and point of view is different than Frank’s, and I never was especially inspired by his musical ideas. Sure I have common threads in my music – jazz and fusion etc – but I admired and listened to the same artists Frank listened to. I didn’t absorb the influence second hand through him.

Anyway, today’s track is my new favorite of his – My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama. I first heard the song in a live performance released on the live compilation album Strictly Commercial. The song was cool enough, but it wasn’t until I heard the original studio version last week during a spelunk into his catalog to define my Top 10 Frank Zappa Songs List that I feel in total love with the song. The studio version is a truly masterful little rock composition.

I’m also debuting this song criticism series as a video and podcast. Trying to spread through other media. Here’s the video:

And here’s the podcast:

Swing

This is the first thing I love about this song – the perfect and subtle rhythmic swing. Swing is a jazz concept that inherits from classical music, and certain folk music (especially negro spirituals, early blues etc.). The idea is to take a duple subdivision of the beat and instead twist it just a little to imply a triplet subdivision of the beat, like this:

In the rehearsal sessions for My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama, I’m sure Frank was very specific in insisting the band play with a light swing:

You can hear it in the drums – nearly every fill is triplet-based.

You can hear it in Frank’s vocals – the verse but especially the chorus, where the lead-in phrase “GUI-tar” just naturally forms that same “taaa-ta” rhythm as in the swing eighth note above.

You hear it in the horns most of all – sax players know how to swing. They starve if they don’t. Ian Underwood and the boys play their lines with bounce, and Frank wrote them with that in mind. Plenty of syncopation, plenty of swing.

Harmony

The progression here is just cool as can be. It starts with a tension between a pedal bass centered on the sub-tonic – that note one whole step below the tonic which is, aside from the blue note (aka tritone), the most important in blues, rock and pop music. During this section, the horns are playing a stacked fifth without any thrids. The tension builds.

The bridge section starts the harmony moving a bit, up to the IV chord (aka subdominant), while the horns add extended notes above the rhythm section (which? I’m not sure). Next comes the V chord (aka dominant), with the horns waffling around this again with some extended harmony that ends in the last beat before the chorus begins – a very strangely dissonant chord that must be a bastard between the dominant and some other kind. Again – I’m not sure and would need to look up the score to be confirm.

Texture and Sections

Sandwiched in between the verse-bridge-chorus main body of the song are three diverse and interesting little interludes:

A dissonant and nearly atonal contrapuntal duet between synth and a flute or whistle of some kind, accompanied by horns.

A ~15 second straight-rhythm, staccato sax solo in an almost stiff and stilted style (can you say alliteration??), in a pure minor key. The harmony is similarly stilted – stick on the minor tonic of whatever key Frank had modulated to here (surely different than the original, but I can’t spot exactly how far away we’ve gotten by this point in the song).

Then a ~20 second space of major-key lightness that features a Frank solo on, of all instruments, an acoustic guitar. Its unusual for him, but is just a[...]

In my quest to comprehend and appreciate the prog-metal warhorse of a band Dream Theater, I’ve been listening to their classic concept album Scenes from a Memory – also known by its more verbose title: Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory.

So far…meh. But read on.

There was a time in my life when I was a bit enthralled with concept albums. Rush’s 2112 was and still is endearing and brings back memories to when I first awakened to adventurous rock music. Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime was a smaller obsession a bit later. In a sense, every well-programmed and sequenced album of music should carry a concept and theme from start to finish, whether that be mood, musical element (like tempo, tonality), or whatever. But for an album to truly qualify as “concept”, there has to be a programmatic story – usually sung as lyrics, ala opera.

Unfortunately, in “Scenes” Dream Theater yet again sounds to me like extended fits of shredding and riffage, all strung together in rigid sections and sub-sections that have absolutely zero transition from one to the next. Its the kind of stuff any skilled performer comes up when noodling on their instrument for 30 seconds. This band simply does that noodling…ahem…composition together as a team, playing in unison or coordinated counterpoint, and they call each 5-10 minute span of time doing this a “prog-metal song”.

Cheesy similac synthesized versions of truly classic keyboards (hammond organ, Steinway grand) is another one of the annoying timbral problems I have with the band – and with Scenes from a Memory in particular. For example: track #6 Scene Four – Beyond This Life has the most horrid-sounding fake brass keyboard solo midway through. Its a shame too – the melodic line and accompanying guitar/bass ostinato is actually very slick and unexpected – very chromatic, with extended jazz chords. Jordan Rudess plays a nice “outside” solo. Its just that horrible synth sound kind of ruins it. The guitar+synth marimba solo that ends this section, on the other hand, is awesome and is straight out of the Frank Zappa playbook. Take a listen:

Don’t mistake me for a Dream Theater Hater – I’ve positively reviewed their song Forsaken on this blog. In bits and pieces, I do indeed get a thrill out of a Dream Theater song, but I think their genesis at Berklee College as a true “musician’s band” – or eclectic virtuoso’s jam band – forever dooms most of their efforts to a somewhat sterile kind of exercise or work-out music:

Every song has to feature a John Petrucci shred section

Every song has to feature a Jordan Rudess classical interlude section

Every song has to feature a polyrhythmic spasm from Mike Portnoy (or whoever took over for him)

Unfortunately for me, Scenes from a Memory has fewer of the thrilling moments and too many of the formulaic stretches to make it a fun listen more than once or twice.

Here’s the podcast version of this article:

Here’s the video cast version:

Presto – Rush’s 13th studio album – was the first album they released after I became a fan when I was 14, in 1988. I remember it was released right before Christmas 1989. I bought it the morning that my Dad and I were to travel up to Vermont with a friend of his and his son to their ski condo on Okemo mountain. I persuaded the adults to pop the cassette in the player, to eat up the first hour of that 3 hour car ride. I remember how, by the time the player turned over Side B and was about to start the entire album over again, Rich (Dad’s friend) said in a mildly annoyed tone “Can we give it a rest now?” Rush is not for everyone…

It may be this special personal connection I have with this album – and the specific time in my life when I was just beginning to take music seriously –  that makes it my favorite album by the band. If I was paying attention to rock in 1981 when Moving Pictures was released, I’m sure that would the the one to stick with me. But regardless, Presto is my favorite.

And my favorite track on the album has always been the title track, Presto.

Arrangement & Orchestration

Geddy Lee has said that Presto was intended to be “a singer’s album”. There are no extended instrumentals or “filler” sequences on the album, and every song seems more welded to the lyrics and lyrical message than any other Rush album. The vocal treatment in the mix also conveys this – not overly compressed but forward, bathed but not drenched in echo and reverb. Geddy’s voice was never stronger and yet refined than it was on this album. His early 1970s performances were pure higher-pitched Robert Plant – powerful but a bit shrill. Geddy’s voice on this album is awesome: pitch-steady, emotional, just the right touch of vibrato, and still powerful.

This album also features more ambient acoustic guitar than any other Rush album, although the guitar sound is heavily altered through chorus and reverb effects. Presto (the song) displays this prominently, with solo voice+acoustic sections contrasted with full-on rock in the 2nd-half verses that feature only acoustic guitar, bass and drums.

Subtle Climax

I visualize this song’s textural ebbs and flows as a line that begins mid-height on a page, dips down slightly, then gently and gradually bobs up and down – but steadily up – to reach a climax of normal-volume and energy rock by the time the coda section arrives at around 4:00. In fact, its that coda that is the most thrilling and beautiful part of the song. Its one of those song sections that makes you want the thing to never end. Its exactly the kind of feeling I was going for in the coda to my song “Saint Martha“. What’s so special here is how they used the chorus section which, prior to this last iteration, was always performed with sparse and halting instrumentation and irregular (read: non-4-on-floor) beat pattern in the drums.

But this last go-round in the chorus, Neil Peart lifts up this lullaby of a section into a Keith Moon-like, swinging ensemble rock. In fact, this last minute or so of the song really has me believing what the guys in the band have said for decades: that The Who are their biggest heroes and influence.

Here’s the videocast and podcast version of this: