Video game metal: Last Chance to Reason - "Upload Complete"

Progressive metal has regularly recurring themes, among them alien invasions, space travel, the human condition, dystopia, and other science fiction-based alternate realities. But the band I'll be talking about in this blog post takes the alternate reality theme to a whole new level. Last Chance to Reason's second album, Level 2, takes place entirely inside a computer world where the protagonist is an artificial intelligence that learns of the "outside world" and tries to escape. The band teamed up with indie developer Tom Vine and pixel artist Francis Coulombe to actually release a demo for a Contra-like side-scrolling video game where you shoot your way through hordes of zombies in tandem with the songs on the album. It's phenomenally insane, awesome stuff.
[EDIT 9-3-13: Last Chance to Reason drummer Evan Sammons was kind enough to share his thoughts on the song and blog post! Check out what he wrote at the bottom of the page.]

 

The first song on the album is called "Upload Complete" and is one of my favorite progressive metal songs, with plenty of growled vocals, imaginative lyrics, and guitar and keyboard wizardry. I'll highlight some of the tastier drumming in the following paragraphs. I've included time stamps from the drums-only part of the drum cover I did (second video above) so it's easier to see what I'm talking about.

0:00 - 0:20

A primordial soup of computer code, a mire of binary 1's and 0's slowly turning. Frozen numbers and letters waiting for the rush of electricity to bring them to life.

0:21 - 0:54

A jolt of power sets the world in motion. I think the first part is 11/16 and the second is 16/16. 

0:55 - 1:10 (6:13 in drum cover)

This is one of my favorite examples of a polyrhythm. While the snare maintains 4/4 time, the ride and bass drum (and rest of the band) play 15/16. The result is that each measure, the bass drum inches closer to the snare hit. Before I explain the polyrhythm, here's a quick lesson on time signatures:

This is a simple beat in 4/4. The base drum marks the beginning of the measure and the snare marks the middle. The 'o' is hitting the ride cymbal, hi-hat, etc. (You also hit it when you hit the base or snare, but for simplicity I didn't include an 'o' there.)

 

This is 8/8. It's not longer than 4/4; the space between the notes in 4/4 is just filled with another hit on the ride or hi-hat. It's the difference between counting "1, 2, 3, 4" and "1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and..." To play 7/8, just delete the 8th column in the figure (or don't say the last 'and' if you're counting aloud). 

Here are four measures of 15/16. Each  measure is two rows in the diagram. As you can see, the measure doesn't last a full 16 counts and instead appears to shift backwards. However, it only looks like it's shifting backwards because our reference is 16/16 here. When you listen to 15/16, you notice that it doesn't last the full 16/16 and the next riff starts 1/16 early, but after that it sounds normal. 

What's fascinating about 0:55 in "Upload Complete" is that the drummer Evan shows how weird 15/16 can sound by keeping that 16/16 reference. In other words, he keeps 16/16 (or, more accurately: 4/4) with the snare while letting the rest of the drums play 15/16. The result is a dissociation between his snare and the rest of the drums, making it sound like the two are drifting apart. In the figure below, the snare is maintaining 4/4 by always playing on the 5th note out of 8. The 'drifting' feeling can be seen with how more and more ride cymbal notes are between the base and the snare, and meanwhile there's the 'creeping' feeling of the base drum getting closer and closer to the snare. When they merge, the band ends this cool section and moves onward.

If you're still sitting there scratching your head, the drummer Evan explains it in this tutorial video. For the guitarists, here's a video explaining what the guitars are doing. 

The shifting drums also creates a really cool effect with the keyboards, which alternate between accenting the downbeat vs. the upbeat depending on where in the riff the drums are. The vocals sound sterile, inhuman, green letters sliding through the black space of the command prompt. This is one of my favorite progressive metal riffs... the beginning of an album as the protagonist enters the computer realm, the soft clean vocals in the midst of heavily-distorted guitars in the background, all representing the eye of the storm before the scream at 1:11, a blunt return to grim reality. 

1:11 - 1:47

Back to the world of shifting lines of code. The lyrics here are:

Pixels form to violent limbs

I am born, the end begins

I stumble,

physics format to this operating system

1:48 - 2:08 (7:07 drums-only)

This type of riff, where the bass drums are doing a constant roll and the guitars follow every note, is a classic progressive metal riff (here are examples from Between the Buried and Me and Protest the Hero). The structure makes it really easy to add or remove notes, as exemplified here with the alternating 9/16 and 11/16. This section is a great way to develop the song, an unfurling, steps carrying us into a new element of the story. It also transitions perfectly into 1:56, which introduces elements of grandeur. The huge undead cyborg coming over the horizon in the picture above from the video game definitely fits this part well.

2:09 - 2:31

A pause, catching your breath. I love the "erase or you will be erased," a fitting alteration of 'kill or be killed.'

2:32 - 2:43 (7:52 drums-only) 

Stumbling, trying to move forward but continually being pushed backward, upside down, losing all sense of direction in a storm. The vocalist Mike is growling "Critical: file transfer required" here, and I envision the protagonist encountering a tremendous divide that can only be crossed by attaching to a portal that disassociates you into your  fundamental binary code. If we're going full nerd, you can envision the divide as a membrane transfer protein or a catabolic cellular process that breaks you down, and you can only hope you'll be put back together on the other side.

2:44 - 3:00

Orbs of light scan my surface like curious children

3:01 - 3:15

While recording the drum cover for this song, at this point I noticed my left drumstick felt weird... whenever I hit the snare, the stick reverberated instead of feeling solid. There was a long cut going down half the stick but I kept playing, hoping I'd make it through the song before it broke. Nope. With no other sticks in easy reach (which would be a nightmare while playing live), I decided to try playing the rest of the song with half a stick. In the picture on the right, you can see half the stick dangling from the half I'm holding when it broke. 

3:16 - 4:07

This line is missing from lyric websites I've checked, but I think it goes:

As this update activates,

my limbs grow

with its effect on me

 Erase

Followed by:

Erase or be erased

Execute.

Load.

Execute. 

The transition to the next riff at 4:05 is pretty well-done. Here we've got two competing ideas for the drums: a fill to mark the end of one section and the beginning of another, and accenting what the rest of the band is doing. Why not do both? The drummer Evan follows the military march-style rigid guitars on the snare while sneaking in hits on the toms. I'd link to the part of the drum cover where I play this, but I never quite got it (read: totally messed that part up) so let's just move on, shall we? 

Another awesome example of the drums doing two things at once is in "Telos" by Between the Buried and Me. At the beginning, the drummer Blake is also doing a military-style snare riff and accenting the guitars. In the second part (once the vocals come in), he switches to maintaining the military riff on the bass drums with his feet, freeing up his hands to create a beat and push the song forward. 

4:08 - 5:32 (9:28 in drums-only)

The bass drums at the first part (and the end of the previous section before the fill) follow a triplet galloping pattern, a R-L-R-R-L-R-R-L-R with the feet. The system update initiates, waves of changes cascading around the protagonist. As the guitar solo begins, the drums expand upon a part of the fill from before the chorus, which works surprisingly well as a normal riff. One thing I definitely appreciate about progressive metal is that even without vocals, the guitars and drums can still an interesting story, albeit abstractly. Throughout the solo, the guitars range from a gurgling stream growing in intensity, wind whistling across a canyon, tanks crushing cars as they drive through a city, royal grandeur, the almost comedic madness of a swarm of bees, footsteps of a Terminator bursting into a run, and the final static-tinged silence of the aftermath. 

If you liked what you heard, here's a song off their upcoming album Level 3.

All images taken from the "Upload Complete" music video belong to Prosthetic Records.
 
UPDATE 9-3-13:
Drummer Evan Sammons comments: "It's amazing to see so much thought put into interpreting this tune! Not only did you get deep with the musical theory aspect, but you did a great job describing the visuals the music evoked for you. Tons of your interpretation of the story is right on with ideas we were trying to communicate. Even cooler is the fact that we wrote this tune so long ago that reading your exposition reminds me of things I forgot about the song. My favorite bits are where you have ideas about the tune that are unique and new to me as well. Your interpretation the "Critical: File transfer required" lyric is beyond what we envisioned, especially as you go full-on Ray Kurzweil in describing a kind of singularity, or consciousness upload. I dig it and it totally fits with the whole idea of the album. Thanks for all the kind words and sharing your ideas. Keep slaying those drums!"