Royal Academy Reviews - Dinosaurs

Taking up residency as 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. Unaware of each song’s authors, Alex blindly merits the compositional qualities of the songs given to him by Clash, judging the best of the bunch by its perfunctory arrangement…

This month, we go all prehistoric, and link all our songs to dinosaurs!

This seems to be sitting on a strange line between musical adventure and tacky ’70s cock-rock… There are a few moments, especially a sudden introduction of wordless backing vocals and guitar in unison, that come as real shocks, but I wish they would go on longer - it touches on something and then backs away from it, returning to the main hook. I do find the amount of repetition here pretty remarkable, though - the entire first thirty seconds and last minute of the song are just the one line over and over again, and it nearly doesn’t get tired. I think more extended contrasts and surprises could have supported the repetition more, and made the whole thing more striking still.

Also a song that’s very much about repetition. The weird muzak chords of the beginning are a nice way to make the start of the song proper more surprising, although bringing them back again at the end is a bit of a shame - I kind of knew this would happen and was hoping it wouldn’t the whole way through the song. Sometimes it’s nice in all kinds of music for things to just happen and not have any consequences - like the moment I mentioned in the first song, which never comes back and is just a diversion. The two big contrasts here are provided by the introduction of the male voice and the changes in the texture that go with it, and they are well paced and keep my attention very well. All in all this has a nice balance to it and some interesting sounds - especially when the voice and electronics imitate each other.

This starts with an interestingly chaotic sort of feel, especially as the horn section isn’t at all in tune, which makes it rub against the guitars in a way that I really like. The contrasts here are really quite extreme, between the one-line chorus of the first half of the song and the quite free, sprawling instrumental that makes up most of the rest of it. Again, though, it’s a bit of a shame that after this really interesting swerve we come back to where we started for the ending; this is really a bit too tidy for such a messy and loose (these are compliments) song. The instrumental chorus is nice, and lets us know how things relate, so doing the same thing again with the voice for the end is a bit too much, and I think something new, or at least a change like a key change would make this even stronger.

My impression of this is dominated by its stopping and starting, the connections between things are extremely rough, I think deliberately, especially in terms of the lack a continuous beat, and it almost sounds to me like three or four different songs cut together. This could be really interesting if it felt like it added up to more than it does here - sometimes I have a feeling that the compositional decisions being made are more on the level of ‘distortion pedal off’/ ‘distortion pedal on’, than really thinking about how it feels to listen to the various riffs in order. There is a bit too much of a tendency to obvious hard rock cliché, and something that has quite a lot of potential doesn’t quite realise it here I feel.

The most interesting music here seems to be in the background, where the samples sometimes change - especially getting short and just stuck on the first couple of notes - with a lot of interest and subtlety. This is of course not really where our attention is supposed to be, and the rapping is mostly less engaging for me. The first twenty seconds or so are amazing, though, where it sort of feels like the song gets stuck on the starting line and then breaks away. The use of different rappers to tell each of the stories is a good way to give some contrast, but I would like to have seen this mirrored by the backing in some way - it needn’t be complex, just using different lengths of sample for each voice perhaps - but this would make the whole a bit more sophisticated.

The Verdict

All of these songs have very interesting moments, and are at least engaging with the issue of the balance between repetition and contrast that I think is really the key to musical form in any style. I think the third song is the most risky and successful in how it does that, although I’m still a bit disappointed by its ending. The fourth falls a bit flat for me, the contrasts aren’t really thought out and although there is definitely an attempt at a shape of some kind it all just seems a bit random. As for the theme, Google reveals it might have something to do with dinosaurs, but that would be cheating wouldn’t it...

THE WINNER? Brontosaurus Chorus - ‘Now We’re Making Out’