Tag: listening

Radiohead’s “The Bends”

Album cover for Radiohead's "The Bends"

I spent this week with Radiohead’s second album “The Bends” from 1995. This album came out when my senior year of high school was coming to a close. It seems like I heard the song “High and Dry” a bit, but I don’t recall being too aware of this album until the following year. Several of the songs, especially “Just” and “Fake Plastic Trees” became part of the regular soundtrack of my life. It wasn’t so much my choice, though I did love the song. Both Mtv and my friends played “Fake Plastic Trees” with some frequency. Somehow, I managed to not get to know much of this album until this week.

It’s funny how you don’t realize how “of its time” some recordings can be until you listen to them a couple decades later. This album is definitely within the 90s guitar alt-rock genre. Listening to this album made me really realize how influential the Pixies had been on the sound of 90s alternative. I found this especially noticeable in the way the bass is used in these songs. There will be louder sections with drums, guitars, bass, vocals, etc.. and then these will pull back for quieter sections with crispy bass guitar grooves. Anyway…

The song I most know from this album is undoubtedly “Fake Plastic Trees”. In the video, you’ll see singer Thom Yorke riding around the grocery store in the shopping cart. I guess this was just a thing in the 90s, as Jarvis Cocker did it the year before in Pulp’s video for “Common People.” I know there were others, but all I can remember now is an early publicity shot of Marilyn Manson.

Thom Yorke’s quietly strummed acoustic guitar opens the song. Yorke sings sonorously, wet with deep reverb. The lyrics deal with capitalism and artificiality in contemporary society and culture. A sense of humor runs through the lyrics, while they express an emotional mix of disillusionment, emptiness and longing.

A green plastic watering can
For a fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself

The first chorus repeats the line “It wears her out.” This gets modified to “It wears him out.” in the second chorus and finally “It wears me out” for the third and final verse. I like this use of the chorus as a refrain for verses, altered slightly to match the subject of the verse.

The personal turn the songs takes for the final verse, comes even more raw at the end. Yorke closes “Fake Plastic Trees” wistfully singing “If I could be who you wanted all the time.” This reminds me of the chorus “You’re so fuckin’ special; I wish I was special” in their song “Creep.” He gritted his teeth to sardonically deliver that line in the earlier song, spitting it out more as an insult. But in “Fake Plastic Trees” the line comes out as a painful apology for not being enough.

I came to really enjoy the song “Bones,” which follows “Fake Plastic Trees” on the album. It’s probably the most rock n’ roll track. I really like the use of deep tremolo on the overdriven guitar. With each strum in each verse, they drop the speed of the effect as the chord naturally fades out. They disable the effect for chorus. Still, I’ve found with the Rolling Stones and now Radiohead that I really enjoy guitars through tremolo and rotating speaker. It’s particularly exciting when the rhythm of the strumming is in a fight against the tremolo. This can be heard in “Bones” just before each chorus when they they have the speed up.

My favorite track on the album remains “Just.” The song opens with a particularly 90s acoustic guitar riff, much like we would hear later the same year from Oasis. This style of rhythmic strumming was heard a lot during the decade, probably coming from the Pixies and Boston by way of Nirvana.  Radiohead crafted an excellent song here, but what really gets me is the bridge starting halfway into the song. At about 2:28, we hear electric guitar draw the song back in with string noise through tremolo! I would argue that the bridge of “Just” unusually includes another chorus. This comes to a tense climax when Greenwood’s frantically picked ascending lead guitar peaks.. holding a distorted note threatened by impending feedback. The other instruments pull back giving a floating weightless feeling to the moment. Just before feedback overrides the note, Greenwood slides it back and mutes the guitar. A clean guitar brings back the beat of the song with staccato pronunciations. The the band slams us with one last chorus before closing the song by sudden cutting out.

To My Ear: First 50 Albums

I’ve now listened to fifty of the greatest albums of all time, devoting a full week to each. I revisited albums I’ve loved for years, spent time getting to know I only knew a little, and became acquainted with some that I’d never heard before. What did I think personally and what did I learn over all?

As a songwriter, I learned that there the basic standards of songwriting provide the basis for crafting good songs. Still, there are no hard-fast rules. As long as there’s something the listener can hang unto, rules and standards can be broken, ignored, or turned upside down.

Those basics of pop songwriting include the blocks of Verse, Chorus, Bridge and the common arrangements of those blocks (Intro-Verse-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus-Coda). There’s no shame in using this tried-and-true song structure or typical variations thereof.  It’s not too unlike the structures of plays, movies, novels, or even lectures; You can better engage the listener if the story you tell is built on a structure they know how to follow.

In this way, the structure becomes invisible to most listeners and deviations become visible. In this way, use of an uncommon song structure becomes a part of the narrative, and therefore should support the story in a meaningful way. It doesn’t have to, but it helps.

On chord progressions, I learned something similar.  The most common  progressions possess a lot of strength. That’s why they are so frequently used. They generally provide a good sense of movement and emotion or drive. Again, there’s no shame in using these. Some of the greatest songs from the greatest albums use some sort of I-IV-V chord progression with the exact song structure described above.

Still, I learned that using 7th chords can add tension or emotion to a song. In addition, some very good songs use some strange chord progressions. Borrowed chords particularly give an emotional change to a song without necessary using a full key-change. The further songs get from typical cadences (like V-I or IV-I), the more they can seem to drift along aimless. This can be used effectively as well.

Regarding lyrics, there are two main things I learned. Of course, these are not all I learned, but I think these are the most important for me at this point. First, I confirmed that narrative songwriting best captures my interest. It doesn’t necessarily have to a full tale, it could just be a vignette of somebody making a sandwich. But through these little stories, some sort of emotional conflict can be expressed. Also, the story need not be even coherent or concrete; rather, ambiguity can add a little mystery as well as more room for the listener to move in. I think this narrative element also relates to the concept of “show-don’t-tell” that was taught in writing classes. Don’t say “she is sad,” but rather show how she moves around slowly with her head down. Don’t tell the audience how to feel, let them empathize with the character.

Secondly, I learned to not be afraid of rhyme, but rather to expand my rhyming vocabulary. Bob Dylan in particular is a master of crafting rhymes. Sometimes he’ll use a typical rhyme, but more often his inventiveness allows the story to be told without drawing attention to the rhyme.

In addition to rhyming vocabulary, it’s good to study poetry and old ballads. As a songwriter, I’m writing words I write are meant to be sung with the accompaniment of music. While it is true that lyrics and poetry are not the same thing, there’s a strong relationship between them. And I think that many of these albums prove that a songwriter wielding the tools of the poet can craft better lyrics. This is not writing to sound poetic, but rather, getting a grasp of how poets use meter, rhyme schemes, line structure, stanzas, refrains, etc. And beyond those physical materials of poetry, how do they use things like narrative, visuals, symbolism, metaphors, and allusions.

First 50 Albums Ranked

So, having listened to fifty albums from a composite ranked list inevitably gives one the desire to give their own personal rankings. So, I did it. I point out that my intention was to mostly rank them based on how much I enjoyed and appreciated them. So, this is a very subjective list. That’s always true, but I’m consciously ignoring how great an album was beyond my own tastes. This is very difficult to do, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that important. Still.. if I ranked these same albums again in a month, the order would be a little different here and there.

  1. Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
  2. Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks
  3. Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St.
  4. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde
  5. Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet
  6. Beatles: Abbey Road
  7. Beatles: The Beatles (White Album)
  8. Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run
  9. Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed
  10. Beatles: Rubber Soul
  11. Van Morrison: Astral Weeks
  12. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited
  13. Patti Smith: Horses
  14. Prince and Revolution: Purple Rain
  15. Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
  16. Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland
  17. Smiths: The Queen is Dead
  18. Television: Marquee Moon
  19. Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You
  20. Doors: The Doors
  21. Radiohead: OK Computer
  22. Beatles: Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
  23. Stevie Wonder: Innervisions
  24. Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen
  25. Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon
  26. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
  27. Clash: London Calling
  28. David Bowie: Hunky Dory
  29. Sex Pistols: Nevermind the Bollocks
  30. Who: Who’s Next
  31. Johnny Cash: Live at Folsom Prison
  32. Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico
  33. Pixies: Doolittle
  34. Jimi Hendrix Experience: Are You Experienced
  35. David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
  36. Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV
  37. Joni Mitchell: Blue
  38. Beatles: Revolver
  39. Paul Simon: Graceland
  40. Michael Jackson: Thriller
  41. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme
  42. Ramones: Ramones
  43. Nirvana: Nevermind
  44. Prince: Sign O The Times
  45. Carole King: Tapestry
  46. Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation to Hold Us Back
  47. My Bloody Valentine: Loveless
  48. Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On
  49. Massive Attack: Blue Lines
  50. Radiohead: Kid A

The Rolling Stones’ “Beggars Banquet”

Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet album cover

This week, I’ve been listening to The Rolling Stones album “Beggars Banquet” from 1968. This is the third of their albums I’ve had for my weekly albums. “Exile on Main Street” and “Let It Bleed” each had their turn earlier this year. As I mentioned before, I chose the Beatles over the Stones when I was young. However, I feel for “Exile on Main Street” pretty hard when I was about 30 years old. There’s some tremendous cuts on “Beggars Banquet” as well. I’ve heard several of them over the  years, especially “Sympathy for the Devil.” But now some of the whole album has grown on me and some of these songs are now great favorites.

The famously controversial cover image of a bathroom wall, includes some graffiti that says, among other things “Bob Dylans Dream” with an arrow pointing to the toilet handle. I wonder if this is a joke on Dylan’s line “the pump don’t work, because the vandals took the handle” that closes his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Either way, the mention of Dylan is importantly telling; These Rolling Stones songs frequently offer snapshots of contemporary society and culture in a rather Dylan way. Also, musically the way they strum the acoustic guitar in some of these songs shows that they’ve been listening to some of this recordings.

“Jigsaw Puzzle” provides a more obvious example of Dylan’s influence on the Stones. Acoustic guitar strums repeats a V-IV-II-I chord progression four times for the verse, and then plays I-II-IV-V-V-IV-IV-V for each chorus. A bright slide-guitar manically slides up the neck mimicking the slide guitar in Dylan’s song “Highway 61 Revisited.”

I enjoy how they play these verses. All instruments except drums and bass rest during the first line, and then each guitar comes back in as the verse progresses to the chorus. This gives the feeling of rising intensity. In this way, also, they treat the chorus more as a refrain in the balladry tradition than as a rock n roll chorus. Though the lines incorporate some rhyme, they don’t follow a strict rhyme scheme as Dylan would; They frequently abandon rhyme altogether.

The lyrics paint short vignettes of characters walking about in the world of the song, as often seen in Dylan songs, especially “Desolation Row.”  There’s the story of so many things going on in the world: issues, conflicts, corruptions, etc.  These are vague passing references to the sociopolitical climate, like skimming newspaper headlines when you just want to read the comics. The speaker is cut-off from these other characters and their interactions with each other. He’s just “trying to do [his] jigsaw puzzle.” However, though they incorporate some rhyme, 

There’s a tramp sitting on my doorstep
Trying to waste his time
With his methylated sandwich
He’s a walking clothesline
And here comes the bishop’s daughter
On the other side
She looks a trifle jealous
She’s been an outcast all her life
Me, I’m waiting so patiently
Lying on the floor
I’m just trying to do my jigsaw puzzle
Before it rains anymore

The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” remains one of the most undeniable recordings of the 1960s. In addition to the amazing music and performance, the song features great lyrics about the evil running through history and culture. This week, I also watch the not-so-good documentary by Godard, “Sympathy for the Devil” which follows the band through the development of the song. I can’t recommend the movie, but it was neat to see them recording early versions of the song before they knew how they were going to play it.

The verses follow I-II-IV-I chord progression. The choruses rises up to V-I-V-I.  For the first verse, the piano plays chords on the first beat of each measure, along with the bass playing the root note. With the second verse, the bass picks up more of a driving shuffling rhythm, still mostly on the root note of each chord. With each verse, the piano gets more active with great rhythm-and-blues rhythms. This is all accompanied by layers of Latin rhythms played with a variety of hand percussion. 

After the second chorus, vocals repeating a “hoo-hoo” chant continue through the rest of the song. These backing vocals sing the tonic chord I throughout the verses. They change only for the chorus, rising up to the V chord along with the rest of the accompaniment. I’m not really sure why, but this chant contributes to the driving feel of the song.

A menacingly sharp electric guitar solo plays during after the third chorus. This overdubbed guitar sits right in front, fuzzed and bright. While it’s definitely a blues-inspired solo, it mixes held notes with staccato stops. With the lack of reverb or delay, the rests are hard and just as cutting as when the guitar plays notes. 

“Street Fighting Man” may be the song I played the most this week. It makes uses of the typical three rock chords, though the order is sort of flipped for the verses. Normally we’d see a I-IV progression, but instead these verses have IV-IV-IV-I, even though the intro gives us I-IV. The chorus changes key to the V of the original key for a I-I-I-V chord progression in the new key. These leads to a post-chorus that rather-floats on the II chord (V of the new key) of the original key to drop back to the original key.

The song opens with Keith banging out the chords on an acoustic guitar in one channel. He famously acquired the sound by recording the guitar on a portable tape cassette recorder.  The guitar was too loud for the little machine, overloading the mic input, the tape, or probably both. This serendipitously created a warmly distorted acoustic guitar. This is joined by a more cleanly recorded acoustic guitar in the left channel. There’s later some great subtle play back and forth between these two guitars.

The drums play a strong simple beat, emphasizing the 2nd and 4th beat like a march to accompany lines like the opening “Everywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet, boy.” The verse and choruses are rocking, hard, and driving. They create this force with double-tracked acoustic guitars, hard-driving drums, rolling piano, and a simple-yet-effective bass guitar line. The post-chorus adds contrast with sitar and syncopated melodic piano creating a floating feeling, as the song finds its way back to the tonic.

Well now, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock n’ roll band?
‘Cause in sleepy London town
There’s just no place for a street fighting man, no.

EDIT: Updated the embedded videos, as ABKCO records just posted some great lyric videos on youtube.

The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”

The Beatles' "Rubber Soul" album cover

I dedicated this week to listening to The Beatles‘ sixth album “Rubber Soul” from 1965. Of course, I’m well aware of the Beatles. My tastes, especially since a teenager, was for their later work from 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper” on. I thought I wasn’t quite so familiar with “Rubber Soul,” but some of my favorites are on this album as well. With so many great songs, it’s difficult to choose only a few songs to focus on.

One of the most noticeable things about “Rubber Soul” on a whole is the hard-panning. During this period, albums often saw both a mono and a stereo release. The mono mix was given more care and attention, often bands like the Beatles were present and involved in the mono mix. The stereo mix was considered by some to be unnecessary, a slight variation of the mono, or worse, a gimmicky trend. 

I’ve seen two main reasons given for the Beatles stereo mixes using hard panning (each track (instrument) is completely in the left, right, or center.) Limitations of the studio equipment provided the first reason. Up until the late-60s, mixing consoles had a three-position switch for panning: Left-Center-Right, or LCR.

Another reason came from concern of playback equipment and what might happen if the stereo record was played on mono equipment. This second reason lead to the Center position being avoided. One “Rubber Soul” everything is either Left or Right. So, if the two channels were summed together as mono, the mix levels would be preserved.  That separation ccan sound nice in a room with wells-spaced speakers; However, it’s a very strange feeling in headphones to have the center be a void and everything is right in one ear or the other.

The album’s second track “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” is a slower folk-rock song in ¾ time with Indian influence. Not only incorporate influence from music of India, it was also the first rock song to feature an actual sitar rather than just imitating the sound with guitars. George Harrison had a genuine interest in Indian music and culture, which had an influence on much of his work.

Lennon’s lyrics about a less-than-satisfying love affair perhaps don’t reflect any sort of connection to the Indian flavor. Though there is a sense of exotic strangeness to the girl’s house, which can be like being a stranger in a foreign land. Apparently the last verse is about burning her house down, but it’s so vague it’s difficult to say. Though, knowing that Lennon has used the phrase “Norwegian wood” to refer to cheap wood paneling helps a little.

And when I awoke I was alone

This bird had flown

So I lit a fire

Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?

The intro and verse probably have no real chord progression, but rather stay in the I chord continuously. At the very least a chord progression of I-v7-IV is implied by the melodic riffs. In this way, the accompaniment further imitates drones heard in Indian music. The sitar plays a riff in the left channel, which doubles the melodic portion of finger-picked acoustic guitar in the right channel. The same melody is almost completely followed by the vocal melody.

I have loved the Beatles “Nowhere Man” as long as I can remember, so definitely since I was a young child. It’s one of those songs that can be appreciated at any age. Gershon Kingsley recorded a great instrumental version of the song using Moog synthesizers that I have adored since first hearing it about 15 years ago. I love the sounds Kingsley has designed for the song, but I also really like the melody of this song. Again, the focus of most Beatles songs is the melody and the accompaniment supports that melody. 

The Beatles keep the instrumentation pretty simple on this track. In the left channel, we have drums, bass, acoustic and electric guitar. The acoustic guitar strums through a I-V-IV-I-ii-iv-I-I chord progression for the verses and iii-IV-iii-IV-iii-ii7-ii7-V7 for the chorus. I especially like that sound of the iii-IV-iii-IV part of the chorus. Still, though this is not a common chord progression, the acoustic guitar strumming pattern definitely is. The bass guitar, as I’ve noticed in several Beatles songs, plays the most interesting part of the accompaniment. McCartney gives the music a groovy counterpoint to the vocals. 

The electric guitar in the left channel mostly plays small melodic riffs during the short pause between verses. Another electric guitar in the right channel plays a solo after the first chorus. Backing vocals are also in the right channel, going ‘ahhhh, ahhhh, la la la’ during the choruses and doubling the lead vocal during verses.

I recognized during the week that one of my favorite tracks “I’m Looking Through You” sounds the most like a Monkees song, and I do love the Monkees. The bit after the chorus gets my attention. Right after they sing “I’m looking through, you’re not the same!” The organ and electric guitar pick up in energy getting a little louder and driving. The organ hits two chords along with the guitar and then guitar continues with a pattern of rapid notes. This interaction adds great energy to the song.

The percussion for the song consists mostly of Ringo tapping his fingers on a box of matches. There’s a few instances of tambourine, which seem to have perhaps been played in the background and picked up by another microphone. During the post-chorus sections, Ringo also plays a minimal but effective pattern on the drum kit. 

“Rubber Soul” deserves more praise among Beatles albums. I liked this album far more than “Revolver.” But, I also like “Abbey Road” more than “Sgt. Pepper“. Anyway, this was definitely another great album and one I’m glad I’ve gotten to know better. I’ll continue listening to this one for years, I’m sure.


Pixies’ “Doolittle”

Pixies' Doolittle album cover This week, I’ve been listening to the Pixies‘ 1989 album “Doolittle.” My introduction to this alt-rock guitar band probably came through Nirvana and the Breeders. You can definitely hear that Nirvana influence coming from songs like “Tame.” “Doolittle” was nearly a decade old by the time I heard it. Though I know a few of the songs, this week was really my first time getting to know the whole album.

This Pixies album album sounds very 90s, even though it came out before music that typifies the 90s. At the time, it must’ve seemed so strange and new. It’s still unusual today, but definitely sounds dated. Just strange that it sounds dated to a time after it came out. That’s how influential it was.

I fell in love with “Monkey Gone to Heaven” the first time I heard it, whenever that was. The unusual start of the song caught my attention. A series of ascending chords drive out of nowhere, drums begin, then a hit from the bass as if this song is going to rock. Then.. a pause and the vocals calming state “There was a guy.” Instead of rocking, the collected and slightly menacing voice, tells us a story like recalling a legendary news item: “An underwater guy who controlled the sea got killed by ten million pounds of slugs from New York and New Jersey.” That’s the first verse: Nonsense that seems to make sense. The chorus consists of the line “This monkey’s gone to heaven” repeated four times.

“Here Comes Your Man” provides a great example of something I noticed throughout the album. The guitars often play monophonic surf-rock inspired lines. There’s not so much strumming of full chords as usually found in rock music. The album also features a lot more clean, or at least less distorted, guitar than I would’ve expected. When guitars are distorted or fuzzed, they are mixed further back than the clean guitars, providing more of a pad than a heavy drive.

The nearly instrumental “La La Love You” songs also features a lot of surf-rock style lead guitar. Again, this track opens with some rockin’ drums and then takes a mellow turn. It borders on instrumental cheese and surf rock. I love the bright clean electric with dripping reverb sound. The bass rolls along uninterestingly, which is actually in contrast to most of the album where the bass carries much of the instrumentation. The lyrics aren’t much, but that’s really the point. “All I’m sayin’ pretty baby, La la love you, don’t mean maybe.” is repeated several times as the song ends. In a way this song seems to represent much of what the undercurrent of the album: It’s an angular love-affair with rock n roll; it attacks what it loves.

Television’s “Marquee Moon”

This week, I’ve been discovering Television’s debut LP “Marquee Moon” from 1977. Somehow, this band has managed to escape my notice until now. It’s a shame it took this weekly project for me to learn about them. This album immediately became one of my favorites. Television played post-punk when punk rock was in its infancy.

Proto-punk generally favors shorter straight-forward songs with little-to-know instrumental sections; Television goes off into more complicated song structures that display some influence from The Who. A few moments would vaguely remind me of The Who’s 1973 album “Quadraphenia” which is also one of my favorites.

The album opens with “See No Evil” introducing the sound of the album. We have drums and electric bass guitar in the center. There are three guitar: one purely rhythm guitar in the left channel, a rhythm-lead in the right channel, and the solo lead in the center. The clean rhythm-lead guitar runs through a series of melodic picked riffs. I especially like the arpeggios in the chorus that continue even as the other instruments rhythmically pause. of New York City rock-n-roll lead vocals of Tom Verlaine grab the listeners attention much like those of New York contemporary Patti Smith. Television has a similar sound as Patti’s band on “Horses” and I love that raw dirty-clean guitar sound.

I love all of the songs on this album, which made it difficult to only choose a few to discuss. I’m skipping over the epic title track “Marquee Moon” mostly because it’d be so much to tackle. It’s the song that first made me think of “Quadraphenia” with the end of the song reminding me a lot of “Reign O’er Me.”

“Guiding Light” really caught my attention. It stands out as being one of the slower songs, almost leaning towards a spiritual sound. The song starts with clean guitar arpeggios repeating a I-IV chord pattern. This is joined by bass and a piano beautifully accompanied by the echo of the room. The unusually long prechorus has two parts, the first in V-I chord progression and the second part II-IV. The chorus is a standard I-V progression, with the final I getting extra emphasis as a strong cadence. One thing I love about this song is the use of the natural room ambience and space between the instruments and notes. It’s a very natural sound.

The lyrics feature a nice mixture of poetic and straight-forward rock n roll. For example, I especially like the last two lines of the first verse of “Guiding Light”: “I hear the whispers I hear the shouts And though they never cry for help”. What does it mean? I’m not sure I could say. It’s not even really a complete sentence, but it feels. I saw the lyrics described as “impressionistic” and I’d say that’s correct, though I may be putting my own interpretation on what that person meant. You more feel the meaning of the lyrics than you could possibly getting out of them directly.

I fell in love with every song on this album. This one will get frequent listens from now on. I’m only disappointed it took me so long to actually hear it.

My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless”

This past seven days, I’ve been listening to My Bloody Valentine’s album “Loveless” from 1991. I devote each week to a different album considered great in order to improve my own craft as a songwriting musician. It also introduces me to a lot of great music. This week was an unusual challenge. At first, I thought the album was awful. By the end of the week, I thought it was mostly awful. The blame does not fall on the songwriting. In fact, I find it difficult to speak about the songwriting at all. The recording and production choices stand as a major hurdle for me. The way they play their instruments did not help either.

This album drowns the listener in a lush warm fuzzy wall of sound. The use of reverb, including the weird reverse-reverb, gives instruments like the guitar an expansive atmosphere of depth. Or at least they would, except the sound is often flattened by emphasizing the production layer. This album often reminded me of an old cassette tape deck I had. The worn out belt would cause the playback speed to rise and fall. Parts also reminded me of another tape recorder on which the head wasn’t aligned quite right. When used to record music on a tape that already had something on it, you would get a mix of the new audio, the previous audio, as well as a little bit of the opposite side in reverse. All of these oddities brought focus to the medium of tape, which is flat. Much of “Loveless” sounds two dimensional to me in the same way.

Guitarist and principal artist of My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields, has a fascination with the whammy bar. He strums the guitar while applying pressure to the bar. This creates an effect where the guitar frequently undulates in and out of tune. Pushing this through layers of reverb provides the listener with a feeling of seasickness. It sounds cool, except that he’s doing it too much.  As a child, I dug the syncopated way my Speak-N-Spell said “apostrophe.”  I pushed the apostrophe button over and over again; It brought me joy while annoying everyone around me.

The guitar, the effects on the guitar, dominate the album. For most songs, the guitars shove the other instruments to the back. Drum loops rotate behind the wash of fuzzy reverb. Hints of bass guitar come and go. Sometimes something that sounds like keyboard overloading a toy speaker pushes between the blanket of guitar.

The songs also have vocals. I’ve heard them washed out by reverb and pushed well-beneath everything else. This is not true with all songs, but it seems to be the preference. The vocals sing in a quietly disinterested way, as if they are provided more out of obligation than desire. This expresses a cautious layer of self-conscious cool.  It almost works, but I would push the vocals more forward, give them some presence. They do have melodies and probably even lyrics, if you can manage to hear them.

The start of Only Shallow misleadingly implies a guitar-driven alt-rock album. As mentioned earlier, the focus on the album is more production and creating atmospheres of noise. While it can be argued that these are integral to the songs, I feel that the songs became reasons to create noise. This leads to soundscapes enjoyable in small doses. They wear tiresome long as whole songs.

Frequently, I would get whiffs of Stereolab, one of my favorite bands. The second track Loomer reminded me of Stereolab’s album Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements like the song “Jenny Ondioline” which I love. My Bloody Valentine released “Loveless” two years before that Stereolab album. I may’ve liked My Bloody Valentine more if I’d heard them when I was in high school, instead of 25 years later.

“Here Knows When” provides a strong example of the elements I don’t like about this album. I suspect fans of the band love this song for the same reasons. Imagine alternately recording Cocteau Twins, Jesus and Mary Chain, Stereolab on a worn out cassette tape with a cheap recorded and then recorded the sound of a motorcycle race over it. I really feel like this started as a good song.

For me, When You Sleep stands out as the best track. the song brought “Degrassi High into my mind for reasons I can’t understand. The use of a melodic instrument between verses and choruses helps tremendously. Vocal samples of ‘ooo’ played like a warped mellotron interact musically with the apparent synth. They’ve layered male and female vocals in a way that successfully brings the vocals forward, almost. I still don’t know what most of the lyrics, but I like what I’ve caught. I suspect an expression of awkward teen crush and bubblegum. Then it goes on too long, over-compressed and lacking variation.

Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”

For the past week, I’ve been listening to Miles Davis’s 1959 album “Kind of Blue” for lessons I can learn as a songwriting musician. Though not my first time hearing the album, this week definitely served as an introduction. As the songs are all instrumentals, I have no lyrics to discuss. Yet, the music itself speaks in a different language than I’m accustomed.

This is instrumental jazz instead of the rock and pop that I usually listen to. Furthermore, it presents to me the unfamiliar concept of modal jazz. I avoid giving an explanation here for fear that I get it wrong. The article on Wikipedia gives a basic description. Modal jazz is challenging to me, because I’m accustomed to tonal music. In tonal music, the foundation of a song consists of chord progressions that travel from and return to the tonic chord. As I understand it, modal jazz utilizes modal changes instead of chord progressions. Hack Music Theory has a short video explaining Modes. With modal jazz, Miles Davis gave freedom to the melody by releasing it from constraints of chord progressions. I hope I’m getting this right.

Still, my familiarity with tonal music contributes to “All Blues” being the song I most enjoy. While the songs goes through mode changes, within each the song follows a 12 bar blues chord progression. “All Blue” probably fails to be a true example of modal jazz for this reason. The track is in 6/8 time with the emphasis on the first and fourth eight note. Secondary emphasis on the third and sixth give the rhythm a little hop. A gentle rumbling piano opens the track to be joined by horns. This gives an atmosphere of the train yard in twilight or early morning. The rhythmic hi-hat tapping emphasizes this feeling.

That brings me to how fascinating I find the percussion on this album. It’s almost completely based on the hi-hat. The cymbals are played with great expression to convey rhythm. In rock and pop, the hats are most often used to keep time while the kick and snare convey rhythm. The percussion on “Kind of Blue” gives the hats great importance. The drummer plays the other drums much less often than I’m used to. The snare provides occasional emphasis, to add some flavor or to occasionally signify a change. A brush slides across the surface, the rim is tapped, or light trills provide texture. This greater variety of sounds from the snare really gets my interest.

The opening track “So What” also grabbed my interest. The piano plays “buh-boop” followed by the bass “duh doodoo doodoo doodoo doo doo” introducing the foundation of the song. There’s 16 bars in one mode, then 8 in another, returning to 8 of the first mode. Once this is introduces, a splash of cymbal tells kicks off the real journey. Horns take turns soloing improvisational melodic lines over the rhythm section. As mentioned earlier, the cymbals provide the sense of rhythm. The bass gives a foundation for that rhythm. On the piano, chords are played but they are not the drive of the song. They more provide interesting emphasis and offsets to the rhythm. Sometimes, to my ear, the chords sound strangely wrong, but oddly appropriate. This cool music sounds alien to me. I don’t understand the language, but I can feel it.

I definitely need more than a week with this album to full appreciate it. Its cool smoky night-time feel really gets me. I’m looking forward to more from Miles Davis as well as some of the other musicians on this album. John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley played the saxophones and Bill Evans played the piano. I already know some of Coltrane’s work. I understand that Bill Evans was a major part of this album’s compositions.  Also Jimmy Cobb played the drums here. I feel that I can learn a lot from his use of drums for my own programming of drum machines. I can learn a lot from this album, especially in the way instruments are being used and interact with each other.  The concept of modal jazz presents a challenge to me which gives me a desire to further understand it.