Monday, December 10, 2012
See You Next Year?
I made a lot of progress this past week on the record, so I'm probably going to keep the blog shut down until the end of the year. I'll be back, I promise!
Monday, December 3, 2012
No Blog This Week
I'm coming up on a self-imposed deadline with the album I'm writing and need to redirect my focus this week. So 2005 will have to wait. Back next Monday!
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Song #321 of 9999 - The Gentle Art of Making Enemies by Faith No More
Song #321 of 9999
Title: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
Artist: Faith No More
Year: 1995
Album: King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime
Warning: This song has some bad words in it. You've been warned.
I really couldn't say goodbye to 1995 without sharing something from my favorite album of the year, Faith No More's King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime. Prior to recoding this record, Faith No More fired their original guitarist and replaced him with Mr. Bungle's Trey Spruance. Spruance's creative approach to harmony is a perfect fit for Mike Patton's schizophrenic vocal style and the results are pretty stellar. I was tempted to feature the very accessible funk-pop track "Evidence," but to be honest, I love this album for its very heavy and very sinister rockers.
"The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" has a chord progression and riffs that emphasize the semi-tone (1/2-step) and the tri-tone to achieve this dark quality. After the introduction, Patton sings over a bass line that slithers around F# (F#-------F---F#-G-F#------etc.). The section that follows (featuring the FNM fan-favorite line "Happy Birthday...Fucker") features a riff that also emphasizes the semi-tone (E-F-F#-A-F#-F-E), while the "chorus" gets its punch from descending whole steps (B-A-G) and the tri-tone (E-Bb). Of course, Patton is brilliant throughout, his vocal track more a theatrical presentation than a song. In the final moments, he grabs hold of the line "I never felt this much alive" and shakes it until its neck is broken. I'm jealous every time.
See you tomorrow in 2005.
Title: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
Artist: Faith No More
Year: 1995
Album: King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime
Warning: This song has some bad words in it. You've been warned.
I really couldn't say goodbye to 1995 without sharing something from my favorite album of the year, Faith No More's King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime. Prior to recoding this record, Faith No More fired their original guitarist and replaced him with Mr. Bungle's Trey Spruance. Spruance's creative approach to harmony is a perfect fit for Mike Patton's schizophrenic vocal style and the results are pretty stellar. I was tempted to feature the very accessible funk-pop track "Evidence," but to be honest, I love this album for its very heavy and very sinister rockers.
"The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" has a chord progression and riffs that emphasize the semi-tone (1/2-step) and the tri-tone to achieve this dark quality. After the introduction, Patton sings over a bass line that slithers around F# (F#-------F---F#-G-F#------etc.). The section that follows (featuring the FNM fan-favorite line "Happy Birthday...Fucker") features a riff that also emphasizes the semi-tone (E-F-F#-A-F#-F-E), while the "chorus" gets its punch from descending whole steps (B-A-G) and the tri-tone (E-Bb). Of course, Patton is brilliant throughout, his vocal track more a theatrical presentation than a song. In the final moments, he grabs hold of the line "I never felt this much alive" and shakes it until its neck is broken. I'm jealous every time.
See you tomorrow in 2005.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Songs #319 & #320 - Smashing Pumpkins
Songs #319 & #320 of 9999
Album: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
It's funny how a band's most ambitious work often signals the beginning of the end. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is monumental in scope. Too monumental for me as it turned out as I never had the patience to digest the entire album in one sitting. Not that I should have tried—Billy Corgan has described the two halves of the album as representing "night and day," so what business did I have trying to squeeze it into a measly two hours!? Corgan also said he wanted to "approach the album as if it were (the band's) last" and I don't think he realized how prescient he was being. (There were two more albums before the breakup but nothing as artistically or commercially successful as this.)
I chose two of the bigger hits for this post because I think they serve as appropriate bookends for the record and reveal some clues about the coming demise of Smashing Pumpkins. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" rocks as hard as anything on Gish or Siamese Dream even as it structured to resemble a pop song. The guitars are dense and dark, the dynamic changes extreme. Harmonically, the song is essentially pentatonic—you can play it on just the black keys of your piano (try it!). Outside of the instrumental break at 2:26, there's not a half-step interval to be found. But most of all, the song drips with skeevy nervous tension, the perfect accompaniment for the "rat in a cage" refrain.
And then there's "1979," which Billy Corgan has described as the "most personally important song" on the record. We hear electronic drums, looped samples, synthesizers (or guitars that sound like synthesizers) and it all sounds....happy. I don't know how much the other band members contributed to this song but this is the sound of an evolving artist in Corgan. Suddenly, there is an exploration of wide interval dissonances (like the persistent major 7th that opens the track and a more subtle 9th that comes later) and all the density of the early Pumpkins sound is replaced with airy spaces. For better or for worse, this isn't the sound of a band and it's likely the moment Billy Corgan became the sole permanent member of Smashing Pumpkins.
Title: Bullet With Butterfly Wings/1979
Artist: Smashing Pumpkins
Year: 1995Artist: Smashing Pumpkins
Album: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
It's funny how a band's most ambitious work often signals the beginning of the end. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is monumental in scope. Too monumental for me as it turned out as I never had the patience to digest the entire album in one sitting. Not that I should have tried—Billy Corgan has described the two halves of the album as representing "night and day," so what business did I have trying to squeeze it into a measly two hours!? Corgan also said he wanted to "approach the album as if it were (the band's) last" and I don't think he realized how prescient he was being. (There were two more albums before the breakup but nothing as artistically or commercially successful as this.)
I chose two of the bigger hits for this post because I think they serve as appropriate bookends for the record and reveal some clues about the coming demise of Smashing Pumpkins. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" rocks as hard as anything on Gish or Siamese Dream even as it structured to resemble a pop song. The guitars are dense and dark, the dynamic changes extreme. Harmonically, the song is essentially pentatonic—you can play it on just the black keys of your piano (try it!). Outside of the instrumental break at 2:26, there's not a half-step interval to be found. But most of all, the song drips with skeevy nervous tension, the perfect accompaniment for the "rat in a cage" refrain.
And then there's "1979," which Billy Corgan has described as the "most personally important song" on the record. We hear electronic drums, looped samples, synthesizers (or guitars that sound like synthesizers) and it all sounds....happy. I don't know how much the other band members contributed to this song but this is the sound of an evolving artist in Corgan. Suddenly, there is an exploration of wide interval dissonances (like the persistent major 7th that opens the track and a more subtle 9th that comes later) and all the density of the early Pumpkins sound is replaced with airy spaces. For better or for worse, this isn't the sound of a band and it's likely the moment Billy Corgan became the sole permanent member of Smashing Pumpkins.
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