In your Jesus Christ POLL: BADMOTORFINGER

Searching With My Good Eye Closed is a dark horse. Hope it gets more than a couple of votes:

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I feel like "Outshined" is not going to do that well.

whoops

You know an album kicks ass when every single track gets at least two votes.

I was always partial to the Devo cover on SOMMS.

"You know an album kicks ass when every single track gets at least two votes."

truth^

the song that starts out with "this is a pig"

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00004SPXP.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

The "See 'n' Say"! One of my favourite toys as a toddler

You should have photoshopped a picture of Cornell as the farmer

Loud Love poll?

forthcoming... been crazy frazzled with the working

POLL on Kevin's Mom: LOUDER THAN LOVE

woo

finally bought a copy of this on cd after only having a tape for years. it's held up well. I wish stuff like this had mainstream presence nowadays. so creative.

It's exhilirating to hear Cornell utter every verse lyric in "Outshined", with complete and utter conviction.

Funny thing was as a kid, I never really got the 'stoner' connection, but it's clearly there, perhaps moreso than on their later works....

I'm all about Mind Riot at the moment. I think I currently prefer this album to Superunkown - it's dirtier.

Heard this album for the first time in probably 20 years and thought it had aged quite terribly... until I got to side 2.

Searching With My Good Eye Closed -> Room A 1000 Years Wide -> Mind Riot is a killer run.

Sections of Mind Riot reminded me of a Sun City Girls' "Imam" (musically at least)... #seattle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coqxYzKaopc

Would have voted either 'Outshined' or 'Face Pollution'. Still love this album.

Outshined shouldn't have won. I probably would've gone with Mind Riot, the opening build up is genius.

I can't remember what I voted for. "Jesus Christ Pose" and "Face Pollution" are my favourites but I really think the whole album is amazing.

I just put on "Outshined" and remembered one of the things that made this band stand out. Even though I think of this as one of the more standard post-Zep songs, the verses are in 7, which many heavy rock/stoner rock/grunge bands would not even consider doing. Great verse/pre-chorus/two-part-chorus build-up too (and it's still not close to being my favourite!).

There's a great bit in 'Outshined' during the last "show me the power child", where they keep the "outshined! outshined!" rhythm going... puts a bit of an unexpected slant on that part of the song, IMO.

Wow, I just counted the second half of "Rusty Cage": 5 bars of 3 + 1 bar of 4!

I don't know if you'll agree with me on this, Sund4r, but I always felt there was something about Soundgarden's use of odd time signatures and time signature changes that felt incredibly natural. Like, sometimes when I hear pieces of music that utilise time signature changes, I get the impression that the time sig changes have been shoehorned in just for the sake of it, but with a lot of Soundgarden songs it just feels like the riffs actually came out that way without any planning. I'm sure there was some thought put into that stuff, of course, but with this band it just feels like a lot of their stuff was written naturally and just happened to be in an odd time sig or have time sig changes in it, whether they wrote them in consciously or not.

I remember reading an interview with Thayil in which he said half the time they weren't even aware they were using weird time sigs, they just thought it sounded cool.

Slaves and Bulldozers is the jam from this one. the part where he goes from shrilly screaming NOW I KNOW WHY YOU'VE BEEN SHAKING to pulling back into a more Robert Plant vocal in the chorus is just so awes.

I mean, I'm sure that Matt Cameron noticed when he wasn't playing in 4/4 with snare hits on 2 and 4 but I do agree that Soundgarden's time changes or asymmetrical metres flow in a really intuitive way. (I feel the same way about the Beatles' "Blackbird" and Rush's "Limelight", for example.) I get what Thayil meant: he was just trying to write heavy riffs and wasn't deliberately thinking "I want to do something in 7" or "I want to do something in 6-bar phrases with 5 bars of 3 and 1 bar of 4". Those were just the things he did intuitively to write good songs.

What disturbs me is that Wikipedia states that the second part of "Rusty Cage" is in 19/8. Might have to start doing some Wikipedia editing.

Well, 5x3+1x4=19, but I wouldn't notate it as 19/8. Christ.

Well, yeah, that's what I mean. Counting the whole phrase as a single bar of 19 (!) is pretty ridiculous.

That and it doesn't feel like a single bar of 19!

I think this is the record that has by far survived the grunge era the best for me. This and maybe Meantime.

Fixed it. I wonder if someone will change it back, arguing that they really feel the 19.

xpost

Reminds me of a story my mate told me - he was watching a band with the most amazing drummer who was pulling off all kinds of ultra-technical odd time sig shit. After the gig he asked him what the time signature was on one tune, and the drummer replied, "I always play in 1/1"

Wow, I just counted the second half of "Rusty Cage": 5 bars of 3 + 1 bar of 4!

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Tuesday, July 2, 2013 10:13 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hear it as three bars of three and two bars of five fwiw

I just played it a few times at low to moderate volume (since I'm at work). I can hear it your way, although right now, I think the guitars support my analysis. I usually try to avoid analysing asymmetrical metres if there's a simpler explanation tbh. I'll listen again at home when I can play it loud enough to hear the drums really clearly.

My problem with counting it as 5 bars of 3 is that then the fourth bar of "3" doesn't have a hit on the 1.

sorry I mean the fifth bar of "3"

so counting the 5's is the only way I can come up with to avoid an awkward bar with no downbeat

OK, I listened a few times on headphones now. Basically, as I suspected, the guitars and bass do what I said and the drums do what you said, which is what gives this section its rhythmic tension. (You're a drummer, right?) In the 5/4 measures of your analysis, you're hearing the snare hit on beat 3? If I were transcribing the guitar or bass part, I'd probably notate it like I said originally. If I were transcribing a full band arrangement, I might do it your way and write in syncopations in the guitar and bass parts to avoid having to notate shifting accents in the drum line.

In the 5/4 measures of your analysis, you're hearing the snare hit on beat 3?

Actually, no. I'm not that experienced with analysing/transcribing drum parts, tbh, but I'm not sure I'm hearing a consistent 5-beat pattern for 2 bars at the end of this phrase.

Basically, I'm hearing something closer to this in the drums:
Three bars of 3/4 with the hit on 1
2 bars of 3/4 with a hit (or accent) on the & of 2 (different from the previous beat but still a 3-beat pattern)
a bar of 4/4 with the hit/accent on 3 (non-standard but with the riff, this really does feel like a bar of 4 to me)

I'll be honest, though: the riff really feels like the predominant element here so it may be distracting me from what's really going on in the drums.

The drums and guitars are accenting the same beats pretty much all the time, so just assume I am focusing on the riff. There are three bars of three where the hits are like this:

1-2-AND-3 1-2-AND-3 1-2-AND-3

After that you could count a fourth bar of three with accents on all three downbeats (1 2 3), but then the problem is that makes the next bar accent on the "and" of 1 which is very awkward (no downbeat). So instead I'm thinking of that fourth bar as a bar of five. I agree that that makes the last bar of five not really feel like a bar of five. Maybe it makes more sense to think of it as 3 - 3 - 3 - 5 - 3 - 2

Oh, I can hear that.

'outshined' is the most recent good song to get played on rock radio

haha i love this time signature convo

i totally believe that thayil and some other members of the band were only dimly aware of what time signature they were playing in -- drummers kinda HAVE to think about that stuff but ime you can trick guitarists and bassists into playing in time signatures they would claim not to understand if you just let them find the groove.

I do remember an interview (I think Guitar magazine?) with Kim Thayil where he was actually saying that Chris was telling them how to count certain phrases.

NB Chris started out as a drummer and wrote a ton of the riffs

a remaster of this could rule so hard

just louderize the shit out of it make those matt cameron drums shake the ground

i'm thinking about how massive some of the riffs would sound. in particular, Outshined and Room a Thousand Years Wide.

feelin

that verse riff for "Holy Water" don't mess around