Fela Kuti- Zombie
Personally, I have been a fan of Fela Kuti's work for a while. Politically charged and energetic, his music is timeless and almost timeless in its style. He is pretty much the father of pop Afrobeat.
Anyway.
The track starts off with a nearly six-minute long intro, entrancing the listener to the looping segments of guitar licks, jazzy brass, and African Esque percussion. It does its job well, as this is music not to be passively listened to. African roots are ever present in the song with its danceable rhythms that maintain an ever so slight variation so as not to become boring. The song can go on for nearly a half hour, and people will still be dancing. The ostinato guitars keep the rhythm together along with the drums, allowing the track to have a type of layering that most rock songs find difficult to maintain in my opinion, just because of the stigma that guitars always have to be the forefront of an ensemble.
The track eventually evolves into the main piece, introducing a vocalist singing in an African pidgin. There is a call and response with between the lead singer and the backing vocalists. The lyrical content is for the most part as repetitive as the main track. It makes it easy to listen to, and easy to follow some of the complex musicianship happening in the background. It also emphasizes the solo instruments when they start performing while giving them a rhythm and structure to follow.
I can walk away from this track feeling energized, and refreshed. It makes me want to get up and start dancing or even jamming myself. Seeing some Latin American/ Carribean festivals firsthand, it wouldn't hard to see why. Much like other Afrobeat/Carribean, the repetitive nature of the track enables the listener to become entranced in the sound of the music, and continue to dance and sing for hours if the body permits it.
Bjork- Pagan Poetry
The song instantly opens with a Leitmotif performed by a harp. It immediately is followed with the bassline and followed by Bjork's haunting vocals. The bassline remains mostly the same, while the harp continues to be the main motif throughout the song, carrying Bjork's melody over the whole track. The backup vocals serve to give a certain texture to fill the gaps in between the harp and Bjork, having a darkly beautiful effect. The rhythm is carried by the bassline and some subtle percussion underneath.
The song overall is beautifully produced and written. The dark tone carried through the track reminds me a lot of the production and composition techniques used in a lot of industrial music, and darker pop tracks that are usually written for movies. It isnt hard to see how much influence her music has on some of the artists in the industry currently: Adele, Pink, Lorde to name a few.
Radiohead- Idioteque
Whoa there!!!
We've got ourselves some Techno!1
Opening with some techno drum rhythms and syncopated synths, we are lead through a synthetic landscape, where we land on some vocals. Once again, we've got some layered vocals for the chorus sections of the song. For the most part, it's kept extremely simple... and I kind of like it that way. The simple synth chords and vocal dynamics go to show that you can make some decent sounding music while remaining minimalistic. Hell, the creepy soundscapes that fall underneath the drum machine speak for themselves. For the rest of it, it's just layered synths, drum instruments, and soundscapes that hold the song together. Vocals just give the song something for the normies to pay attention to IMO, as they only manage to provide melodic substance. The guy mumbles through the lyrics... which I'm sure is an artistic vocal choice, but not the best thing if you are primarily a lyricist. This is just me digressing.
Good track, would listen again. Plenty of things that I can adapt in my personal endeavours.
Led Zepplin- Whole Lotta Love
Oh baby. Turn up the volume. We're ringin in some of the classics.
Again. Similarly to Fela Kuti's music, we open with some repetitive guitar riffs. They aren't too diverse as to label an ostinato but provide plenty of texture and substance to carry the song forward on an extremely classic metal esque beat. Lyrics come in. After the drums come in... it gets pretty weird. You know, weird in a psychedelically entranced endearing way. A lot of effects and modulation appear while someone seems to be rubbing sandpaper across the neck of a beginners Stratocaster while screwing with the crossfade and audio direction on a soundboard. Gives it that sound that Tom Morello might have adopted early on in some of RAGM's tracks.
Captain Beefhart- Moonlight on Vermont
I remember listening to this track a few years back in Saigon... It was an early morning in Vietnam, actually pleasant for once. The night earlier was quiet, almost too quiet. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that there were no VC in sight...
Seriously, this is a song I can jam out too. It got that wailing blues sound that I really enjoy. I enjoy a lot of music, but the blues scale was the first one i picked up on guitar, so I have a certain affinity for it.
It got your average early rock influences, but the instruments match the raspy, almost angry vocals. The instrumentation doesn't heed nuances that a lot of classical music or jazz does. it instead takes an aggressively throwaway tone. Kind of like a screw you to everyone musically (especially aficionados of clean music). I don't care what everyone else thinks, I'm pretty depressed right now so I'm going to play my heart out.
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