Riff Analysis 030 - Primitive Man "My Will"
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- Опубликовано: 25 авг 2024
- EDIT: Caustic is not their first album! My bad!
www.calderhannan.com
www.patreon.com/metalmusictheory
Spotify playlist with all the songs I've talked about: open.spotify.c...
Videos where I talk about the "tempo matters" thing:
• Rhythmic Parallax in C...
• Riff Analysis 023 - Th...
• Riff Analysis 029 - Pu...
My bad, Caustic is not their first album!
Caustic is such an underrated album. thanx for this.
PM is the heaviest band. I listened to them for a year straight and now I listen to smooth jazz because 1 yr of that album heavier > 20 years of anything else.
Ok, so here's what I think: please don't stop making these videos. This is the best metal related content I've ever seen.
you have a very detailed way of explaining how a bunch of dudes who get drunk/high and dunk on whatever sounds heavy means
Even if a riff is made by trial and error there is still some music theoretical reason/explaination for why it works.
There are different kinds of heavy, different extreme examples for all the emotions expressed by music. When I think of what’s the most “furious” sounding music, I might say something like The Sawtooth Grin, or early Daughters. But when it comes to nearly objective “heaviness,” I agree that this is the heaviest fucking band. You can listen to Devourment’s most recent album and say “Ok, how can it get more heavy?” It sounds like they never move past fret 7, the kick is tuned so absurdly low that it doesn’t cut through the mix, it’s like all the high-end is just cut out of the EQ. I think what really distinguishes PM is their image. It gets heavier when the message is relevant. I listen to something like Abominable Putridity and I think it’s fun, it’s goofy, but it’s not emotionally resonating. Whereas Primitive Man is so heavy that it’s depressing. The music is not fun. The lyrics aren’t about aliens or gore. They’re not playing “characters” if you will. Something that takes bands to the next level for me is if I “believe” them to be reliable narrators of the content expressed by the music. Listening to something like Rings of Saturn or Carnifex; ok, the music is fun, I love it, but I know this isn’t really how the musicians “feel.” I can only be as immersed in the music in equal part to my suspension of belief. Primitive Man is devastatingly heavy, hurtfully bleak, and I really believe them. I think that’s what makes them so effective.
I also loved when you put the riff into a piano roll higher in register and let it play. It demonstrates an idea that I think about a lot when listening to music. You see videos along the lines of like “heavy riffs without distortion.” Maybe you’ve seen some memes that say “black metal is just surf rock with distortion.” And in a way, it’s true. The difference is the make-up applied to the face of the music. Reverb, distortion, delay, all the effects that can possibly be applied to the music drastically effect the music’s context. This is adjacent to what I said above. Musical context will make or break a song, even a band. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like that’s what you mean when you said to not think of the chords as chords, but rather just thinking of what they sound like. If you were to strip away all of the effects, distortion, the “musical make-up,” then you could think of the music in an entirely different way, it could be almost jazzy, like you said. But it is this musical context that materializes the purpose of the music.
"Primitive Man is devastatingly heavy, hurtfully bleak, and I really believe them. I think that’s what makes them so effective."...very well said.
@@Samplelord thank you. I’ve considered reviewing music but I try not to hate on music too much. After playing in a band, you realize that even the shittiest local bands are good, and have put in time and effort into their music. Thanks for being sweet
Great description.
@@theoppositeistrue Here is the thing....why not review music that you like and/or recommend? As a musician and listener I'm more interested in what a reviewer likes than dislikes. You have a way with words and a reviewer that does recommendations in place of condemnations would be a pretty novel thing these days.
This riff reminds me "Clouded" by Gorguts and the sensation when I heard for the first time. Was a complete reimagination of the meaning of "heaviness" that I had.
And about the post-script: for me, every video that you post I know a new band that blows me away. Is cool because this and because, as a musician too, I learn so many new concepts that I can apply to my music to make them more experimental, heavy and cool hahaha...
Cheers from Brazil (sorry for the errors, my English is pretty bad)
Thank you so much!
Pretty sure the musicians themselves weren't thinking about theory when constructing the riffs, but I am glad you were able to break it down for us.
It seems like you found a way in to talking about the importance of timbre/tone, especially in the case of very dissonant metal. A band like portal has very specific types of sound in mind, and it often involves the idea you were talking about at the 1:50-2:30 mark. The "murky" quality of most of their output seems to hinge on this idea.
Now we need that ULCERATE Analysis!!!!The Progressions Of The apocalypse ....To give It an idea try to Grabs what The hell happens in Their Masterpiece-CHASM OF FIRE and all the Progressions It has.very unpredictable ...yet like Primitive man and Deathspell driven by"emotion" !!!
3:34 the internal struggle is visible physically. I felt that.
edit after finishing this video: man, it's always good to hear some "deconstruction" from someone, who has wider musical background than myself. Your work on this channel is undeniably fundamental for metal listeners and musicians. And your thoughts do not sound "not so well-formed" - remember, we are not so educated xD so there is always something interesting that you can reveal in these videos, especially (!) about non-proggy stuff.
I want to listen to YOUR music if there is any, somewhere.
ruclips.net/video/PnIvR9A6J28/видео.html I'm flattered! Just put out an EP a couple months ago.
When I'm sharing music my other music-hungry buddies, I'll describe the mood it evokes over how it functionally accomplishes it, especially with metal. Not many people I know are into analytical deep-dives on things they don't know, so naturally, it's just not where we tend to start.
The first thing that comes to mind for that A/Ab chord is "that sounds broken", not "ah yes, a minor 9". Trying to make sense of what you're hearing is far from being inherently a bad thing but going back to basics and describing music in crude, human terms can do a lot with very little.
To actually tie it back to the questions you posed: speaking in terms of mood and other abstract concepts, like heaviness, helps the genuine understanding of the piece as a whole. You care more about what something actually does over how it works.
Agreed. It does “sound broken.” It almost becomes comically unforgiving. There’s nothing to hold onto. Ethan’s old band Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire, at least for me, can make me feel confident, or hyped up. PM does not extend a helping hand in any way, lol. It’s much less headbang and moreso head held in the hands.
Love these descriptions! And I need to get better about switching back and forth between, and integrating, the different modes (descriptive language vs. explaining nuts and bolts).
Judging by the depth you go into with this stuff, you clearly have a real passion for working on this material. Your inexperience explaining it hasn't stopped me from enjoying this video and I'm excited to see what comes next!
I am enjoying your quasi-intellectualism!!
Each one of your videos is a mindblowing experience, so much data and careful analysis to understand the intrincacies of not only extremely technical music but also bands that are impressive for how they sound and feel without being too technical in terms of speed and/or amount of notes played. I saw Primitive Man once live and it was a absolutely crushing experience
This is the exact type of content I've been looking for years now
My first thoughts when you say it becomes something other than chords is the idea of spectral music and music that focuses more on the texture of the sound. Steven Wilson has said that he doesn't want too much distortion because it turns into a texture, seeming to forget that some genres and even forms of composition are based on exploring that angle or just enjoying the ear candy of nice sizzling fuzzes. Heavy distortion can make certain notes oscillate in interesting ways when played together and when it's a really heavy fuzz it can even sound like square waves you'd think was being produced by a synthesizer. Primitive Man just uses amp distortion last time I checked, just like Thou, even though they achieve pretty fuzzy tones.
I think this was fucking awesome especially the piano part
Awesome video man. I love how you find a way of explaining fairly abstract concepts so that they make sense for music theory illiterates like me lmao. I am planning on getting into it and really start learning about that stuff, your Videos make everything that’s going on seem so interesting.
Slight issue, every video makes me want to buy an 8 string that I don’t have money for :P
Thanks for the weekly uploads, they seriously get me through the week!
Great video and concepts. Love the bit about major and "happy" intervals losing their common practice meaning when dealing with crushing downtuned music.
Don't you dare do anything BUT proggy music brother!
I had the exact same experience! Didn’t know them and I was BLOWN away. In awe.
Love the analysis (music theory)
of this type of music!
Great work here! It's funny, your postscript pre-empted a lot of my thoughts about this video, specifically that using traditional western music theory to breakdown heavy music will naturally lead to analyzing music that fits cleanly into those tools, while music like doom metal/black metal etc get left out in the cold. As a viewer I'd love to see you cover more of this stuff in part because I think it would be a useful step towards developing a theoretical framework for these styles, but I realize that might be asking for you to have a frustrating time haha.
Frustrating but definitely worthwhile! Will definitely keep working on them. Have to get rid of the idea that I'm not doing work unless I'm revealing secrets.
Such an amazing band! Really enjoyed the previous project clinging to the trees of a forest fire as well
dude, been so much waiting for a video about primitive man
I love this song, and this band, they ripp, at a slow pace
funnily enough, I had the exact same experience when I went to see them. I talked to the bassist and he was a lovely guy.
HOLY SHIT, I remember asking if you could do a Primitive Man video in one of your older videos and you actually made one and it totally got past me. But awesome video as always!
_Brilliant_ insights. This is very important work you are doing.
Bad ass sumac shirt! Primitive man is insanely sick live
Great video. Can't say I've seen someone attempt to break down this kind of ugly, slow, dissonant metal (like you said, you mostly, though inadvertedly deal with proggy stuff) that I love so much so I'm really here for it. I'd love to see you do a video on YOB, who, while being a doom metal band definitely do some stuff that is outside of the box. Or SubRosa.
Loved this video tbh!
I really like when people say music numbers at me, especially when those numbers communicate weird rhythms. I also really like the idea of trying to articulate concepts that our "theory language" is not currently equipped to articulate though, so I guess I will begrudgingly accept hearing you say fewer numbers at me in the future.
Shoegaze is another big genre interest of mine that might be worth delving into for this kind of topic, even if it pulls you away from metal a bit (although blackgaze and shoegazey post-metal exist, so I'm sure you can find something on-brand). Of course it's tempting there to just list the effect pedals being used for any given riff as a replacement for chord and time signature jargon, but it seems like a topic where there is often something much more difficult to communicate about what a riff is really doing, what is really sounds like and why it works that isn't clear just from saying "oh, they combined this fuzz, reverb and ring mod."
That's exactly the kind of question that I'm (and I think music theory more generally is) grappling with: like it's interesting to do the "studio archaeology" of finding out what equipment and settings led to what sounds, and there are people doing spectral analysis etc. to try to come up with more objective/universal ways of talking about timbre, and there are people doing psychoacoustics research to get at it from a different angle, and there's the "ecological" perspective of (very broad summary) trying to understand timbres as signifying something about their sources or about imagined sources (ie low rumbling bass sounds like an earthquake, for a crude example), but then somewhere in the middle of all that, or maybe somewhere else entirely, is how it feels to listen to these sounds, and what they mean to people.
Guitar go dang dang burrrr
Are you familiar at all with Jute Gyte? I'm sure I might not be the first to mention them in the comments on your vids, but since the guy behind Jute Gyte already explains a lot of what he does with his music on each of his albums on Bandcamp and that would presumably leave less room for other people to do videos analyzing much of his music, I mostly ask out of personal curiosity.
Yeah I'm a huge fan! Will do something on his stuff eventually. Still haven't figured out a good option for playing the full-on microtonal stuff-I think he either has custom guitars or manipulates stuff electronically, so there are some logistical hurdles to figure out before I can do any playing demos. And he does have those analytical blurbs, but I think even just translating those into a video and explaining all the terminology could be fun and useful. Also planning to start an analytical interview series and he's high on my list for people I want to talk to.
@@metalmusictheory5401 Pretty sure he uses a customized 24-TET guitar(frets just added between the regular frets) for the guitar parts. Remember seeing a picture of it a long time ago, somewhat surprisingly it was a strat with singe coils. Guessing you could play some of it simply by tuning some of your strings a quarter tone off or using several guitars, but maybe not the best solution.
Holy moly that Jackson is pretty!
Thank you!
Hey boss, I reckon you should keep making videos about bands you like, proggy or not. If they're not, then strawman the heck out of normal music theory because this is metal.
amazing sumac shirt!
As someone who knows very little music theory past powerchords and anything that doesn’t play clear notes with high gain or through fuzz, I find the idea of exploring terminology for when chords are no longer really discernible as chords interesting. I would think relying on the notes used to create them would be the solution but yknow idk. Cool vids
Yeah that's the tricky thing, is that saying what notes are in them is the hard part! We have names for any combination of notes, but in these sorts of chords it's a question of what "notes" should count-is it what they do with their fingers? Or what we hear when they play it with distortion? Which overtones do we stop counting? What if it's so muddy you don't really hear some of the lower notes they're actually playing?
You could apply set theory to some metal styles and it might be more useful than trying to think of it in terms of tonal theory.
Yeah I've done that a little (Tomb Mold video, Ephel Duath video, and then the Thantifaxath video has some NRT stuff), but there's a lot more to be done!
Ayyy shout out to strange matter(rip)
Great video! Interesting to hear your thoughts on the effect of distortion and harmonics on harmony. I've been really curious about that for a while, especially when it comes to intermodulation distortion and subharmonics in heavily distorted guitar chords. Haven't really found anything about it on the net though. Would be cool if you had anything to add to that subject if it's something you're interested in.
There are a few academic things about it! Jan Herbst has a few articles, and Esa Lilja has a book about it that's a very deep dive (though the book is a little hard to find-books.google.com/books/about/Theory_and_Analysis_of_Classic_Heavy_Met.html?id=mLH0SAAACAAJ). I haven't gotten to a point where I feel like I can say much about it, at least not in a form that would be very interesting (not going into a ton of sound physics details that in my experience don't have clear links to listening). But I still seem to keep bringing it up obliquely in these videos haha.
PLEASE MORE DOOM / SLUDGE VIDS PLEASE
You should do a video on a band called terry green, album untitled. Take your pick. Cool weird riffs, odd feels defiantly some math involved.
I'd love to hear a conversation between Calder and Adam Neely re:jazz and metal/chords, genre, metal how it all goes together or doesnt.
I'd love to talk to him too! I've had several near misses of meeting him in person here in nyc, someday I will!
@@metalmusictheory5401 Wow! I didn't expect a reply. His recent video series with Rob Scallon where they each play the others genre was interesting if hilarious. There's got to be a music nerd podcast out there that would kill to field that conversation. I really appreciate what you do so thanks for doing it and best of luck to you.
Amazing analysis! Primitive Man: sickest band ever and way more interesting than they sound. Do you listen to Vermin Womb also?
Just started and digging them!
Is there a name for that style of chart you use at like @1:15 or is that something you came up with? It seems super useful.
In general they're called Klumpenhouwer networks!
@@metalmusictheory5401 thanks bro!
If you haven't checked them out I highly recommend Hella as a non metal example of progressive glory. Biblical violence is the song to start at.
Already a fan!
I think maybe music theory is overvalued, and possibly a crutch for script writing and you should talk more about the artistic aspects of how compositions are put together like Andrea Stolpe does on her IG channel, but for metal instead of acoustic singer/songwriter stuff.
Also, I would personally pay you to do as much sumac as possible lmao
First Sumac vid is on the way!
Nice shirt! Any videos on Sumac coming up?
Yes!
HAHA YES THEY ARE THE GOOD BAND
7 or 8 string your using? And what tuning?
7 string tuned down a minor third
I think the first two notes from the first chord arent a perfect fifith rather than a minor sixth
So a Gb between the two Bbs? Maybe, though that would make an augmented triad (Gb-Bb-D) and I might need more convincing to hear that in the first chord. I wasn't actually playing a perfect fifth, but it's definitely there in the overtones (and they might play it with one).
@@metalmusictheory5401 my interpretation for that chord is B(natural to clash with the Bb on the bass) G and F(played incidentaly on an open string wich creates that perfect fifth relation with the Bb on tha bass) could be wrong tho
Also this kind of videos are grate dude keep it up
Absolutely DYING to see your take on this song, ruclips.net/video/YnIu7lp5mxE/видео.html specifically the section that begins at 2:50. Kayo Dot has long been known as a band of resilience, but that passage and this piece in general is one of their wildest.
Love Kayo Dot! Will get to them eventually
@@metalmusictheory5401 so glad to hear you're already familiar! I figured you probably had something from "Hubardo" queued up, but "Library Subterranean" is one of their most off-kilter