Artist: Monuments
Song: "Regenerate"
Vocals: Clean, growled
The music video:
A drum cover I did (with a drums-only version at the end):
(Time stamps are from the music video.)
0:00 - 0:49
The song begins with a bass note fading into silence, the remnants of a conflict that played out in the previous song disappearing into the distance. An eerie guitar strikes clear notes whose spaces fill with echoes, the persistent beams of a lighthouse blurring as the fog rolls in, or the light from a torch struggling to fight the darkness of an enormous underground cavern. The bass and drums enter, setting the track in motion and beginning to build tension. The drums do this by first opening the hi-hat on the snare hits to accent those notes, and then gradually opening the hi-hat throughout the second half until it's fully open (and loud and noisy). Then, riding the crash cymbal and headbanging, of course.
0:50 - 1:17 (6:23 in drums-only version)
Chaos. The bass drums here are hard-hitting, a pattern that alternates between a short roll that ends on the left foot (if you start on the right) vs. a long roll that is three notes longer, ending on the right. It'll look like R-L-R-L --- R-L-R-L-R-L-R --- R-L-R-L-R-L-R --- R-L-R-L --- and so on. At the end of the measure, the bass pattern continues into the second measure, restarting the pattern. That last bit looks like R-L-R-L-|-R-L-R-L, where the | signifies the transition into the next measure (though it's continuous, with no audible break).1:18 - 1:44
Ascension into beings beyond the present form. The lyrics here:
Free from my bonds
No longer alone
Never born, will never die
No need for crowns
We wear the stars now
The drums are super fun to play at this part, with the left hand throwing in hits on the splash cymbals while the feet maintain another hard-hitting rhythm.
1:45 - 2:12
The build-up to one of my top three favorite progressive metal riffs. I love how elements are progressively added, continually building the intensity.
- 1:45 - Guitar: angry, electric; drums and bass setting the foundations. Calm vocals
- 1:52 - Background guitar: memories flitting to the forefront of consciousness before slowly disappearing back into the murky water
- 1:59 - Background guitar: the memories grow louder, more prominent
- 2:04 - Vocals: as he sings "And we all believe, knowing we belong," a guitar starts in the background, a bundle of electric thoughts tinged with longing and suppressed energy that continues to grow in intensity. It's the start of an idea, a seed, the thought that the way things are right now isn't necessarily how they should be.
2:13 - 2:39 That bundle of thoughts now shoots forth to the front of your mind, exploding fully expressed. Meanwhile, the background guitar introduced at 1:52 continues, memories of a face, the outlines of the jaw and the nose but the eyes still dark and unreachable, sliding to the front of your mind's eye but disappearing before you can get a close look, like a leaf in the wind. The vocals progressively build in urgency and emotion before the cathartic growl/shout at 2:30. I haven't been able to find the lyrics for this section anywhere (including the album booklet when you buy it on iTunes), but I think he's saying something between "the red leaves fall," and "the reach seems far." Side note: the bassist's giddy face in the background is a pretty funny contrast to the intensity of the vocalist growling at 2:35 and 2:38.
2:40 - 3:08 (8:13 in drums-only version)
Calming down from that enormous rush in the previous section. Seasons passing, the heat of summer giving way to autumn and winter. I envision villagers in a Lord of the Rings-esque world, their homes burnt down by ravenous orcs and the only direction to move is forward, to let time heal the anger and loss.
There are two ways to do the drum pattern in this section if you want to have a roll on the snare as well as keeping eighth notes for the rest of the band to stay on time. The first way is to use both hands on the snare (easy) and use your left foot to keep time on the hi-hat (fairly hard because you have to disassociate it from your right foot). The second way is to have one hand keeping time on the hi-hat or ride (easy) and to do the entire drum roll with one hand (easy if you've done marching band, hard if you haven't). I did neither... I used both hands for the snare roll. This is why I drum on the internet and not in front of thousands of screaming fans, unlike Luke Holland. (Side note: I'm looking away from the camera in this part because even with the riff dumbed down, I still had to concentrate quite a bit to get the accents right on this section).
3:09 - 3:35
Nothing's ever been this clear
No one needs to feel alone
And the change is set to seed
But we need to take this new form
Love is truly here
We just need to let it breathe
We have glimpsed a new aporia
In the moonlight of our gnosis
3:36 - 4:05
The apex of the song. I love the vocalist's extended growls here.
4:06 - 4:30 (9:39 in drums-only version)
A modified version of the drum beat from 1:18 (with more splash cymbals!). 4:16 is interesting because the drums do a fill to indicate the end of a measure, but then the end of the guitar riff follows a few seconds later, at 4:18, after which the whole band starts a new riff. This is probably a (cool) artifact of trying to fit riffs into clear-cut boxes of time signatures.
4:31 - 5:39
Outro. The drums alternate between a normal rhythm and a slightly delayed rhythm, where there's some space between the snare hits. When learning this song, I literally memorized it as "2 delayed, 1 normal, 1 normal to delayed, 1 delayed, 3 normal, 1 delayed." The drum cover at this section actually produces a cool effect: while previously my drums were nestled within the song (and Monuments' drummer's playing), the fade-out of song audio brings my drums to the front. This is cool because in YouTube drumming, it's extremely common (and I'm victim to this too) to hide your drums in the audio of the song, because then you can worry less about getting the song 100% correct as well as being perfectly synchronized with the band. Showing your actual playing is a bit of a statement that, yes, I really am playing the drums under all the music, which is one reason I always include a drums-only version of my covers. (Other reasons include that I love hearing the instrumental and drums-only versions of songs, and it's much easier to learn a song if you don't have to tune out the other instruments.) Another reason I think it's cool is that it's like you've become an audio engineer, able to adjust the volumes of different instruments.
Amazing song! I'm not as huge a fan of the rest of the album, but I'll be listening to this song for many years to come.
All images taken from the music video and Gnosis album artwork belong to Century Media.
No comments:
Post a Comment