My listening over the last few days has consisted mostly of In Rainbows by Radiohead and Paradise Lost by Symphony x, and it’s got me thinking about change in music.

Generally, music has to change over time in some way. These two bands, from different genres, have quite different methods of achieving that change.

I’ve posted about Radiohead before, and mentioned that to begin with I wasn’t blown away by In Rainbows. Generally the reviews it has recieved have been pretty positive, however, and after paying it a bit more attention my opinion of it has grown considerably.

One thing that stands out about later Radiohead songs is the structure. Almost every song is built around the idea of gradual change, and movement towards a climax. Yes there’s very often a verse chorus thing going on, and the songs aren’t a million miles away from the normal pop song form, but very often the main point seems to be to get to that final third of the song where everything is different.

They achieve this in several ways.

Arpeggi/weird fishes

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e5Iqr0RLN0]

This builds up through the layering of arpeggios (who’da thunk it with a title like that?) reaching a glorious climax of complicated repeating patterns, that then suddenly drop away for line ‘I get eaten by the worms/and weird fishes’.

Nude

Another slow climax that peaks with the line ‘You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking’. The word ‘thinking’ a long, falsetto melisma followed by a pregnant pause, and then some wonderfully melodic ‘ooohs’.

Both these songs, and plenty of others, rely on the idea that the song should build and grow towards a climax. That climax is sometimes a single line, and sometimes a new, larger, different passage of music. This is often followed by a quiet coda that restates some of the opening.

Symphony X

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO-cpWpzxVA]

This is quite different from how the songs on Paradise Lost are structured. There’s a long tradition of using elements of classical music in heavy metal, particularly Baroque and Classical ideas. Symphony X do this more than most and have built a reputation as the ‘classical music’ prog metal band.

Whereas modern minimalist classical music, of the type that I’d guess has had some influence on Radiohead, is sometimes about gradual change from one soundscape to the other, a lot of pre-romantic classical music had more clearly defined sections. And that’s the case with Symphony X as well.

Rifftastic

The average Symphony X song is far from an ordinary verse-chorus affair. Heavy metal often extends the introduction and middle sections of the traditional pop song structure, and prog metal bands go even further, adding all sorts of different interludes and breaks.

On the whole what they don’t do is build up and layer loops in order to get towards a single climax point.

So?

So, there are two structural ideas you could think about using here. One, the idea of gradual change, building towards the ‘aah’ moment. The other is the idea of sticking to clearly defined riffs and sections. Music requires change, but will that change be sudden or gradual?

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