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 gets frosty as snow begins to fall…
1. Acid Washed – ‘Snows Melt’
I like the austerity of this – there are very few elements the song, and they are very short samples. After the initial four or five have been put into play new ones are introduced patiently and with a lot of control. The processing is also very interesting – the samples are the same nearly every time, but there are a few moments where pitch shifting or dynamic changes – like the big crescendo about four minutes in – are used to destabilize them in a striking way. I find it a little long for the amount of stuff in it by the end, but it is really pretty good.
2. Emmylou Harris – ‘Roses In The Snow’
A leap to hoe-down. Quite a long journey from the last song, and this really isn’t my thing. It keeps up a very consistent level of energy, and the banjo player certainly gets quite a workout – their solo, which seems to owe a little to jazz, is my favorite part. Really, though, it is a fairly typical example of a song that is defined by its genre rather than defining it.
3. Galaxie 500 – ‘Snowstorm’
This song seems stuck in first gear for a very long time to me, and the guitar has a strange back-of-the-beat feeling that isn’t slowing down but always make me think it is. The form of the song could be interesting, with the incredibly long instrumental sections – not least the whole last third of it – but there just isn’t enough going on to make it work. I can see the monotony is supposed to mirror the whited-outness of the snowstorm it is about, but it needs to make it a bit more unpredictable too, like, you know, no two snowflakes are the same..
4. Kings Of Leon – ‘Velvet Snow’
The vocals here are just fantastically strange and unmelodic. Great. There isn’t much else to the song – it is a very simple formal template, but the incredible oddness of the singing makes it really memorable. I also like the momentary appearance of some incongruously harmonious backing vocals near the end. I’m not sure I could take much more than two minutes of this but it is sort of fascinating as far as it goes.
Verdict
I think these songs are all about snow (of the December kind!). I didn’t know any of them, though. None of them really got me excited, but I was impressed with how the first one handled its samples, it felt very thoughtful and well-paced, and that will be my winner. I wanted to like the adventurousness of the third song, but I just found it far too drawn-out and in need of some changes in energy, and that’s my loser. I don’t think songs necessarily have to do a lot – the first one doesn’t – but if they are going to be very spare they need to be careful they do enough to keep one’s attention.
The Winner? Acid Washed – ‘Snows Melt’
