Argh! Seeing this thread resurface, I just realised I completely forgot to finish and post my response to Graham's comments - though Graham doesn't get let out of the RAH until the end of the week anyway, so if nobody tells him I should get away with it.
GrahamN said:
I have a few things to add, mainly about "Exit..."... the really disconcerting thing is the rhythm - the insistent guitar chords throughout on the off-beat, with only a low bass note on the first beat of each bar, and the meandering vocal line unsure whether it's on or off the beat. The absence of anything on the main beats confuses the ear into thinking that the guitar is actually playing on the beat and the vocal line is even more disturbed, continually anticipating the beat.
I must admit that your reading of the rhythm never really occurred to me. I'd agree that the guitar marking out the first, second and fourth beats (skipping the third) gives it a slightly uneasy kind of lilt (the "missing" third beat is filled in by the cymbal when it appears at 2' 35'' BTW ), but I've never really heard the "verse" rhythm as especially ambiguous - certainly not by the standards of Radiohead's really serious exercises in trick rhythm which I've mentioned above (namely
Pyramid Song from
Amnesiac and
Sail to the Moon from
Hail to the Thief).
GrahamN said:
a 6 bar intro...which was a bit unsettling in its own right - there were a couple of bars where it felt something should be happening but we're not quite sure what
Something of a Radiohead signature
- phrases are quite often just a little longer or shorter than you expect, part of their structural attention to detail and refusal to use musical cliches.
GrahamN said:
[Starting on "Breathe" at 1' 26''] we get what sounds like a 5-bar phrase consisting of 1 bar of 3/2, one of 4/4, then two of 5/4 and one of 4/4 - reflecting the panic in the words "breathe ...don't lose your nerve"
Yes, you're quite right - I should probably have picked up on this in the first place. I can only point to my get-out clause about not presenting a full analysis as a convenient excuse for interesting things I didn't spot
.
GrahamN said:
(and we've also moved into the dominant key here to reflect the contrast).
Not the dominant actually - it's slipped down a tone from B minor (well, the previous phrase finishes on a B major) to A minor, with the resultant darkening of the tonality.
GrahamN said:
I'm not at all sure I agree with you about the chord at "laugh" - didn't seem to be anything shocking about it to me at all. Haven't we just moved out of the minor tonic key into its relative major for this verse, with its mocking-cum-triumphant words? It seemed to sit quite naturally within a chord progression leading through it (I had to crosscheck againt your timings to find anything of note there)...The one point where I think the harmony is not pretty much dead obvious is at 3:10, where it turns from the expected to leads up to "now we are one".
I'd agree with you if it
had moved out to the relative (D) major, which would be rather a bland and anodyne progression comparatively speaking - but that chord has actually taken us from B minor up a tone (into C sharp major), which is rather an alarmingly remote key from anything we've heard so far and hence (to my ears at least) marks a considerable tightening of the thumbscrews, harmonically speaking.
AFAICT and FWIW, the whole sequence from 2' 50'' runs B minor - C sharp major - F sharp minor 7' ("spineless") - G major (at 3' 01'', "...laugh") - C major (3' 10'') - F sharp major 7' (the dominant 7th suspension you describe fittingly as "orgasmic" above, with the 7th in the vocal line on the word "choke") - then the crashing resolution onto B minor at 3' 21''. The whole sequence is rather unusual, with tritones and all sorts of other weird relations between the chords, but it works. (I'd need to check that sequence at a keyboard before I could swear it's right, so please don't quote me on it.
)
GrahamN said:
When that dies down, and the words move on to "we hope that you choke", we get back to echoes of the original line, and key, and we hear the off-beat guitar back again. As with all good recapitulations though it's coloured by what happened earlier....
As I originally said, a (slow) rondo of sorts.
On reflection it's perhaps surprising that we don't hear more pop songs in recognisable classical forms - the classical forms are of course only classical because they
work and are satisfying.
GrahamN said:
Re "Climbing...", did you notice that those two extra bars in the verses get balanced up by a foreshortened final phrase (only 6-bars) before the instrumental section, actually giving a 'conventional' 48-bar length for the vocal?
To be honest, I don't instinctively think in larger-scale structural terms like that - I could perhaps have told you that one phrase was longer and the other one shorter but I wouldn't have made any connection between the two. Interesting point though.
.
