Transcription
Here's another much-requested video about one of my favorite of the mini-bands directly influenced by Meshuggah. May I humbly introduce Vildhjarta. [Music] If all of their music is great, but as always, I have to limit myself somehow if I'm going to finish this video in a week. So I'm going to talk about three short riffs that I like from the middle of "Langston," the second track from their *Thousands of Evils* EP, which will work as a cool introduction to some of the ways they've taken Meshuggah's basic ideas and ran with them.
Vildhjarta has plenty of riffs that are within the bounds of what Meshuggah might write, at least theoretically. I've got a whole long video about what that means, so go check that out if you want to learn some of those basics. But a lot of Vildhjarta's music is actually pretty different under the hood, even if on a zoomed-out level it's all still based on rhythmic, thought-out, unpredictable low guitar stuff over half-time metal backbeats. There are a few obvious differences, most of which are timbral: you get more clean guitar stuff in Vildhjarta's music. [Music] Occasional clean singing, Jennifer, more stuff going on in higher guitar registers. [Music] [Applause] And not really any solos.
Other stuff is less obvious, and that brings me to part one of this video. Vildhjarta is much less bound by regular 4/4 hypermeasures than Meshuggah is. That's kind of the whole thing with Meshuggah: is that they fit almost all of their riff sections into four, or eight, or sixteen, or thirty-two measures of 4/4. Vildhjarta doesn't stick as rigidly to this. For example, the first riff of the section I'm talking about today is basically two six-measure chunks. [Applause] [Music] And although it's a little ambiguous where to slice it, the second riff section doesn't last for sixteen measures. [Applause] And the third and final riff section I'm looking at today lasts for ten measures with a little half-measure upbeat tacked onto the beginning. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] So [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this means that maybe the whole "it's all in 4/4" argument is a little weaker for Vildhjarta than Meshuggah, and I think it means their music sounds a little more angular and maybe a little less predictable. They still generally have four-four backbeats throughout all this stuff, but not the larger four-four structures that Meshuggah sticks to.
Vildhjarta's music is also generally less cyclical than Meshuggah's. Where a ton of Meshuggah's riffs act more or less like conventional song sections—as in, you get a verse riff or two, a chorus riff, etc., and they come back a few times in a song—a lot of Vildhjarta's music, maybe most of it, is through-composed, which means riffs don't come back once they get left behind. Vildhjarta's music is also more linear within these riffs. The whole thing of Meshuggah's music is that they normally have short, asymmetrical patterns that get looped exactly against the drum backbeat. Vildhjarta does have some riffs that do this, but the more typical thing for them is to make subtle changes to the guitar pattern as it goes, both in pitch and rhythm. The first riff in this passage does this. In these diagrams, I'm going to use attack point analysis because I think it makes it easiest to see these sorts of patterns. Basically, in this example, when I have a one above the notes, it's an eighth note; a two is a quarter note; a three is a dotted quarter note; four is a half note, etc., and I'm assigning them based on how long it is until the next note shows up. So what we have in this riff is a rhythmic pattern that lasts for eighteen quarter notes; then we get six quarter notes into repeating it so that it fills out six measures of four-four; then we get the six-measure chunk again. This repetition is made less obvious by the fact that the pitches associated with these rhythms change, and there's one small change to the rhythmic pattern itself in the second chunk. [Applause] So all in all, it's a pretty abstract take on Meshuggah's basic style.
The third riff from this section does the same thing, but with a longer pattern that's harder to keep track of and that changes in length. It starts with a five-note upbeat-type thing, then starts the actual pattern, which lasts for thirty-two eighth notes. On the second cycle of this, though, the pitches are a little different, and there's a three-eighth-note tag added to the end. The third cycle is the same as the first, and the fourth cycle is cut off after twenty-one eighth notes, which, as I pointed out before, means that this whole thing lasts for ten measures of 12/8. Add this to the fact that these patterns phase against this unchanging 12/8 beat, and it makes for a very slippery riff. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] So [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the riff that comes between these two stretches this idea of riff repetition to the point of breaking. Here there are a few little ideas that show up a few times, but there doesn't seem to be any pattern, even a faltered one, controlling when they appear. [Applause] So Richard Wagner, a German opera composer with some influential thoughts about music and some really obnoxious thoughts about people, had this idea of "endless melody" in his operas, where there was the feeling that melodies were just constantly being spun out. I think part of the effect of Vildhjarta's linearity is something like endless melody. When I listen to their albums, I feel like I'm being dropped into an endless ocean with melody as far as the eye can see, and new riffs constantly popping up and being left behind.
The other interesting thing about the lack of repetition, or faltered repetition, is that it problematizes the idea that Vildhjarta's music is polymetric. I'm not alone in distrusting this word in the first place, but here it seems even less useful than usual because while we could say that the drums are still outlining a quadruple-meter backbeat, the guitars are definitely not outlining a stable counter-pattern. So basically, the two most common things that people say about Meshuggah's music—that it's polymetric and/or all in 4/4—make even less sense for Vildhjarta. Alright, if I look uncontrollably excited to you, that's because the last thing that Vildhjarta does a lot that isn't in Meshuggah's playbook is use tempo changes. This short bit of "Langston" alone has several, switching back and forth from beats around 75 bpm and 90 bpm several times. [Music] [Music] Myself, these tempo changes are interesting in terms of numbers. The tempo ratio is about four to five, so we can say that the quarter-note quintuplet gets the beat going one direction, and then the quarter note becomes the quintuplet going the other direction. This isn't super crazy as an idea—at least, Car Bomb does this a fair amount. [Music] But quintuplets don't actually show up anywhere in the music to prepare the tempo changes; they don't show up before the tempo actually changes. If the band is thinking of these quintuplets as a pivot duration, they're definitely not giving it away in how they play it. Because of this, I think these changes sound more like direct tempo changes—i.e., ones where it sounds like everyone just magically lands on a new tempo that's unrelated to the previous one. The effect can be pretty jarring and cool, as I think it is here. The last riff also changes from a simple subdivision (which is two notes per beat) to a compound subdivision with three eighth notes per beat. I've talked in other places, in my Car Bomb, Animals As Leaders video, about pulse-preserving tactus modulations. This is kind of the inverse of that, which—why not?—let's call it a "tactus-preserving pulse modulation." So basically, in these changes, the beat is saying the same; we're still headbanging; the symbols are doing the same thing; but now we have three subdivisions per beat instead of two. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Is the effect of these tempo modulations, which happen a few times, is that each riff gets its own distinct rhythmic world. I said in another video that I think tempo exploration is one of the major up-and-coming trends in progressive metal. I think this is another example of how that can sound, where instead of each riff just getting its own pattern or time signature or whatever, each of these riffs is also distinguished from what comes before by a change of tempo and/or subdivision. And combined with all the linearity and irregularity of the hypermeter that I thought about in the first part of this video, I think it makes this dense string of riffs sound super angular and kinetic. [Music] [Music] Laugh by myself. [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Foreign. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Thanks for watching. Please like, comment, and subscribe. And if that doesn't satisfy your craving for ways to support me making these videos, I also have a Patreon now and would be honored to receive your patronage. See ya.