Musical Formulae

Of all the two years that I've had an interest in DDR, I don't ever recall playing it so badly that I lost all capability of movement in my right foot. That happened yesterday after I'd tried some of the J-pop tracks that were new to me (they were great, incidentally*) down at the Bearcade. The machine there allows four songs instead of three, which caught me out as I made the third one as stressful as I could allow due to habit. I staggered off and pulled up a chair to watch two girls outclass me in every way possible.

"She's our teacher", a nearby Asian commented to me, as if classes in DDR were part of the normal course catalogue at the University of California. He then got up himself and proceeded to do four nine-footers in a row with no ill effects whatsoever. I limped off ready to try something less strenuous, like Tetris or Scrabble or something.

Afterwards I ventured on to Telegraph to attempt to find a T-shirt for my brother's birthday last week, but T-Shirt Orgy seemed to have replaced their selection of clever or retro-styled T-shirts with an array of black ones with "profound statements" on them that were typical of the level of wit and insightfulness of, for instance, Father Jack.

I did get a couple of new albums while I was in town, though. I had been looking in the wrong section of Rasputin before - they have a separate Metal section that I didn't know about, complete with red separator cards with black dripping lettering on them. The over-the-top imagery is strangely parallel to what I mentioned in the article a couple of entries ago... which, come to think of it, I should have got around to submitting to The Sinner by now. Anyway, I found Kamelot's "The Black Halo" and Sonata Arctica's "Reckoning Night" for $30 in total, about half the price I would have paid in Britain.

My music-buying record in America isn't exactly stellar - during the previous three times I've visited I've picked up Kotipelto's ghastly attempt at a solo album, "Coldness", and Kamelot's first two albums when Mark Vanderbilt was still "singing" with them. I haven't had the chance to listen to the two releases that I bought closely yet, but I can already tell that they're far better than those disasters.

Usually it takes a while for an album to grow on me before favourites emerge. I thought that the same would happen with Coldness, but it seems that Kotipelto has serious problems with the basic formula of his songs. A typical format would go something like this:

D.I.Y. General Metal
1. Introduction
2. Long Verse
3. Bridge 1
4. Short Chorus 1
5. Short Verse
6. Bridge 2
7. Short Chorus 2
8. Solo
9. C Section
10. Long Chorus
11. Ending

There are variations, of course, but most non-epic songs (unless they're written by Heavenly) can be fitted in to that basic template. Kotipelto, however, seemed to be using something like this:

D.I.Y. Kotipelto
1. Boring Riff
2. Long Verse
3. Bridge 1
4. Disappointing Chorus
5. Short Verse
6. Bridge 2
7. Grating Chorus
8. Random Notes
9. Bridge 3
10. Repetitive Chorus
11. Repetitive Boring Riff
12. Stop Without Warning

Early Kamelot, however, used something entirely different. Their actual song structures are very varied, but three steps unify them all.

D.I.Y. Kamelot (First Attempt)
1. Begin Promisingly
2. Get Vanderbilt to Start Screaming
3. Give Up

Fortunately, they later refined this down to two steps, which are more evident on the latest album than ever (a continuation of the conversion of Faust to a metal opera)...

D.I.Y. Kamelot (Revised Edition)
1. Be Really Pretentious
2. Become Dream Theater

But as long as they do it well, I'm not complaining. I'll have to listen again to gather how successful they've been.

*Accuracy not guaranteed.