Clash?s in-house music boffin is Alex Hills, a composer and lecturer in the department of academic studies at London?s Royal Academy of Music. Here, he blindly reviews the compositional merits of four songs.
This issue, Alex hears four songs all relating to the movies...
1. Duran Duran - ?Girls On Film?
This is a song that?s all about its hyper-sanitized, clean ?80s production values, all steel and shoulder-pads. I really like the camera-clicking sample at the start. After that I don?t find the sounds reach the same level of imagination, and the structure doesn?t really do anything unexpected, although it is clever when the hyper-repetitive chorus gets a second commentating voice near the end.
2. David Bowie - ?Cracked Actor?
The sound world here is as far as we could possibly be from the previous song, a lovely big mess of feedback and disorganization, with a chord progression that keeps ascending upwards in weird and unexpected ways. In that sense at least, much more my thing. Again, though, after such a good beginning it doesn?t do all that much, and the guitar solo especially seems a bit of a redundant ?what shall we do now? sort of ending. It doesn?t outstay its welcome, though, which is always a good thing.
3. Beck - ?Hollywood Freaks?
This has many more elements than the either of the songs before, and is quite hard to keep track of structurally, which again is a good thing for me. There are new sounds and samples - the high baby noise after three minutes or so for instance - cropping up from nowhere. This makes it far more unpredictable and collage-like than a simple verse-chorus structure, although there are still elements of that present as well, for instance in the alternation between rapping and (sort of singing). Interesting.
4. Underworld - ?Always Loved A Film?
This is quite the opposite sort of structure, made up of extremely gradual build-ups rather than cutting between sections. I really think that - even more than the others - this kind of song is asking for a totally different kind of interaction with it than the structural analytical approach I take. Nonetheless it is interesting that about two-thirds of the way through - a very traditional place for a climax - there is a big cut and the rate of structural change in general speeds up massively for the last part of the song.
The Verdict
Having a structural sort of day today? A verse-chorus structure is always going to be inherently predictable, and many great songs don?t do little or nothing to challenge that. One of my favorite songs of the moment, ?The Murder Mystery?, by The Velvet Underground, an alternation of basically unchanging verses and choruses for six minutes, before going somewhere completely different - and very shocking for the last two minutes. The last song had some of that same sense of setting up one thing and then moving away from it - much less extremely - at the end, which is a good way to deal with such a slow moving form. Most successful in that, though, was the third, which had a great balance between repetition and new ideas and is my winner. Conversely, the first song gets too stuck and doesn?t do anything with all the potential the exciting beginning created, and that?s my loser.
THE WINNER?
Source: http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/royal-academy-reviews-films
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