Red Mosquito

dimejinky99 wrote:Could be from that film soundtrack..out of the furnace?

Kevin Davis wrote:

stip wrote:Release Me's point is that the melodic underpinning of those early songs were stronger (i'll defer to people who know more about songwriting/construction to say whether or not that's true).

I don't know what kind of weight my opinion on the subject carries but for me it's pretty much the complete opposite, and is largely why the middle period remains so enjoyable to me while the early works become less and less interesting to me as time goes on. To me a lot of the early songs were very tuneless--Eddie would occasionally stumble across a compelling fragment but for the most part his melodies in those songs are in the same rambling, free-form language as the lyrics, which can lead to melodic brilliance if you're a master improviser, which Eddie is not. To my ears the melodies take on much more deliberate shapes around the time of ''Vitalogy,'' which not coincidentally is the first album where Eddie really takes the reins as the sole composer in the band. When he was composing vocal melodies over Stone's funk-rock riffs, he was pretty limited as to how he could employ chords and melody as cooperative songwriting devices (perhaps unsurprisingly, the most melodically accomplished song on ''Ten'' to my ears is ''Oceans,'' the music of which consists of a harmonically rich chord sequence as opposed to a single-note guitar riff repeated over and over). Starting around ''Vitalogy'' there is a lot more attention to the way harmonies within chords allow the vocal melodies to achieve different colors, different moods, presumably because the writing process is more malleable when you're the one in charge of both words and music and can bend and twist one as you feel it may suit the other. By the time they got back around to writing collaboratively again, Eddie's harmonic instincts (essentially, his understanding of the way certain melodies work as counterpoint to certain types of chords) were a lot stronger, and as a result he was composing tunes that to me felt a lot more like fully realized songs, as opposed to some of the early stuff which at times just seemed like riffs with vocals on top.

For my money songs like ''In Hiding'' and ''Parachutes'' represent the zenith of how Eddie was able to take another band member's arbitrary chord sequences and really make them into something truly musically compelling, in a compositional sense--like, if a jazz pianist were to perform unaccompanied versions of them, the bare bones of the compositions would hold up as something genuinely beautiful. Jeff and especially Stone both seem to me to really have had an inherent knack for this type of composition during this period--pretty much everything Stone wrote between ''Yield'' and ''Riot Act'' is full of clever, unexpected melodic and harmonic tensions, everything from the carnivalesque bridge in ''All Those Yesterdays'' to the after-hours melancholia of ''Fatal'' to the menacing dissonance of ''Rival.'' Matt's songs were rhythmic and mathematical as much as they were tuneful but I also think when you listen closely to them they possess a melodic density that is deliberate and consistent with the rest of material from those records.

For what it's worth, I don't necessarily equate ''catchy'' with ''melodic,'' though I concede they often correlate positively. The songs on ''Ten'' have big choruses with memorable, repeatable lines, and are sung with fervor; they are catchy. But take those superficial qualities away and I don't think any of those songs--''Alive,'' ''Jeremy,'' ''Even Flow''--offer anything that would stand up on strict melodic terms--i.e. as a combination of notes that really makes noteworthy use of the scale. There are many songs in the middle period which I would argue do just that.

BurtReynolds wrote:

stip wrote:with about 9 posts on topic

I didnt want to mention it, but yeah.

That's alright, the original topic isn't very interesting.

digster wrote:I think what KD is mentioning there goes back to the trouble I have comparing the first records and the most recent records in terms of melody, which Release Me seems to do. There was an inordinate amount of space given to Eddie on that first record; Stone, for example, absolutely composed the sparing chords of Black for a vocalist to fill in the blanks. As time went on (on Vitalogy but even on Vs.), the songs became much more tightly constructed, probably as they got more comfortable with each other as a band. Eventually, you've got something like LB, which is airtight melodically; I don't mean that it's good (or bad), but it's practically all sharp, clear melodies that fit in very structured songs. To be honesty, I'm not sure there's a PJ album farther apart melodically from LB than Ten. The latter couldn't feel more open in terms of melodies, while the former couldn't feel more closed.

stip wrote:coach, go vote in the REM tournament.

stip wrote:coach, go vote in the REM tournament.

Coach wrote:* Yet, I would still nominate Kevin Davis for MVP of PJ Chat, if there was such an award. KD could probably save the board.

Kevin Davis wrote:

Coach wrote:* Yet, I would still nominate Kevin Davis for MVP of PJ Chat, if there was such an award. KD could probably save the board.

Aw, thanks Coach. This takes away some of the sting of being told by Bloomsbury Publishing that they weren't going to let me write a book on Taylor Swift.

Anyway, I was thinking mainly the verses and pre-choruses of ''In Hiding''--I love the way the vocal melody intertwines with the guitar melody, all those suspended 4th chords picked out by Stone. Combined I think they add up to a beautiful composition, two perfectly cooperative parts that really make the most of their simplicity. I would agree that the chorus is an anticlimax of sorts, from a compositional standpoint, though when Eddie's voice was in better shape there was some power in that reaching.

E.H. Ruddock wrote:You just wanted to say juxtapose